The artist with millions of records... and a few to settle...

Rating: 9/10 (10 March 2017)

Taylor Hackford's "Ray" covers all the usual ingredients of the musical biopic: the miserable childhood, the 'revelation', the rise to success and its deal of collateral damages from addictions to marital troubles, mental breakdowns, business stuff and so on and so forth, the whole thing wrapped up in frenetic headline-driven editing and a terrific soundtrack. "Ray" features the whole package and yet it works. It works because music has that little edge over the other genres when they bend with the biography picture: the singer is never the same, the music too. And when the central figure happens to be one of the most beloved and iconic singers of the last century, you've already won the emotional involvement of the average movie lover.
I'm not generally stingy on superlatives but "Ray" is one of the greatest music-movie of all time because it met with the most hit-or-miss requirement: the casting. Jamie Foxx doesn't play nor does he impersonate Ray Charles, he IS Ray Charles, apart from the singing voice (that could only belong to Ray), he's got the looks, the mimics, it strikes how Foxx played Ray Charles to the core, to the tiniest details such as shoulders contraction, that smile you never can tell when it's genuine, defensive or nervous, that stuttering, it is really digging very deeply and I was impressed by the level of dedication that allowed Foxx to channel Ray. Foxx was a singer and even a piano player, maybe the hardest part was over, but playing a piano without seeing and making it feel genuine and believable needed training, patience and one hell of a dedication.
I could go on and on about the acting, Foxx' Oscar was overdue and his work was of a magnitude that matched Ray's legacy. You need believable acting to believe in the miracle that allowed a blind man to become a music legend, and not make it as the usual story of the man overcoming the handicap but rather using it as a defining part of him, for better or worse. Blindness heightened Ray's other perceptions, such as hearing, feeling, touching. Maybe that extra-sensitivity forged his capability to hear the pulses of the human soul like no one, to touch the hearts of people or make them pound to the tempo of his own spirit, to believe that the gospel could mix with rhythm and blues, pioneering the soul music while venturing in so many various styles, you can't really classify Ray Charles. He was blind maybe, but he could see what we couldn't, and there's no magical 'John Coffey' behind it, it's just the school of life, and a mother who taught him everything the hard way.
The screenplay makes no secret that it is Ray Charles' blindness that transcended him while being his heaviest burden. Charles became blind after a traumatic childhood episode, having witnessed his brother drowning without even trying to save him, frozen by fear. The vision was so upsetting that his eyes couldn't sustain it, but his mother who raised him in poverty taught him to never let anyone believe he was crippled. Charles' strength was that he didn't see himself as a colored man in racist America but as a blind man surrounded by color-blind wolves. That's an insight people with vision don't get, Charles learned from the start not to trust anyone. He wants success, he wants money, he's not just some 'artist' and that's what I like about the film, it doesn't sugarcoat the image of the singer, he went to the best offer and could leave or fire his 'friends'. Ray meant business.
But there's a catch, Ray was also a troubled man who lived in the dark and couldn't lead his way to success without a few ethical shortcuts. He married a good woman Della Bea (Kerry Washington) who gave him children but she knew he couldn't be the man of one woman. Charles was addicted to women like heroin and the film mostly focuses with his romances with Mary Ann Fisher and Margie Hendricks (Regina King) and you can see that his vices were always making up for that darkness, lusting for pleasures that can do without vision, getting high or feeling a body, or something in his body. Charles doesn't lie to himself, he believes in God but has some records to settle with him and only near the end that he comes to term after his rehab, so the film can conclude.
Indeed, there's not much room for heavy dramatization after the 60's, except for the rehabilitation in Georgia, the state he had in his mind, inspiring its very anthem. At the end, "Ray" is the portrait of a musical genius who happened to be a womanizer, a drug-addict, a businessman, and all these facets of his personality that we explore through the film allow us to understand the price of success, you can't just get to the top with millions of fans without disappointing a few who love you. And you can't sing the Gospels without flirting with the Devil because letting all the repressed feelings explodes is the best way to put "art" in cathartic. And while the trope of a banal situation ending up inspiring a hit song is very familiar, in the case of "Hit the Road Jack" and "What'd I say", you're so entertained by the music that you accept these artistic licenses.
And speaking of the songs, I just can't resist to that opening theme of "Night time is the Right Time" that fuses that perfect mix of sleaziness, sensuality and a little something that prepares you to feel a song before dancing to it. Ray Charles was blind, he was in perpetual night time but, as the song say, that night time was the right time to reinvent music.