Ray: Powerful yet Lacks Direction

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2005)

If there was any film this year I should have connected with it was this one; a biopic of one of the most influential musicians of the past half-century. Yet, I left the theater rather disappointed. The film mostly concerns itself with Ray's inner demons, which alone would have been a good film, mostly associated with the death of his brother and his Heroin addiction, however the film ventures into so many other uncompleted topics (his affairs, the controversy of his music, his part in the civil rights movement, racism, the treatment of blind people, parenting) that the film unwinds into a troubled mess. While Fox does such a pitch perfect job of being Ray Charles that it's scary, Sharon Warren, who plays his strong mother, really gives the strongest performance in the film. The technical aspects of the film are near flawless, though some of the 1940's like elliptical editing to show his road tours was questionable, and the last 10 minutes seems like it was put together in a half-hour. The ending doesn't resolve much if anything, and we're left to find out what happened through the de-facto post script. This film could have been great, and while it's commendable that it shows the bad sides as much as the good (one of the best faces of addiction I've seen in film), its lack of a theme is what this film lacks desperately.