Just another standard biopicture

Rating: 5/10 (19 November 2008)

I was kind of hoping that this film would be a bit better than some of the standard issue biopictures of musicians that we've seen over the years. Ray Charles was a great musician who had an interesting life story, after all. 2 of the film's producers were also the producers of "La Bamba", the excellent biopicture about rocker Richie Valens. Best of all, the film-makers followed the tradition established by "The Jolson Story" of using the original performer's voice (something that would have helped "Walk the Line" perhaps).
Alas, it was not to be. The script itself is primarily to blame, as it seems fundamentally confused about how realistic it wants to be. Some scenes feel so dry and are directed in such a distant way as to feel almost documentary. But other scenes hold forth with the sentimentality that we've come to expect from these epics; for example my girlfriend and I both laughed out loud when Ray Charles and his singer/girlfriend get in a fight and then the film cuts to them doing a ridiculously impassioned version of "Hit the Road, Jack." Jamie Foxx's performance was excellent and it was easy to forget while watching the film that it wasn't the real Ray Charles Robinson who we were watching. The supporting cast is fine but unexceptional. I found that I preferred the early parts of the film that explored his life before he was a superstar. The flashbacks to his childhood are very excessive, at least in the extended version I saw. Although the extended version does have a scene that I think is my favorite in the whole film, with Fox and Warwick Davis smoking a joint consoling each other about the pitfalls in the business and sharing their feelings of joy in performance itself.
If I knew someone who was a teenager or whatever and had no idea who Ray Charles was, I would recommend the film to them as a good introduction. I think the way that the scene of the "Chitlin' Circuit" was very well represented and would give them something of a history lesson, and the music is all excellent. But I would assume that other Ray Charles fans like myself (I saw the Genius on one of his last tours, at the Marin Center in CA) would find it somewhat unnecessary and perhaps excessive.