Art Of Darkness

Rating: 7/10 (29 June 2007)

"Ray" the movie, like Ray Charles the man, overcomes seemingly impossible odds. Jamie Foxx playing Ray? That's like casting Chevy Chase as Abe Lincoln. Sentimental flashback sequences every 15 minutes? Check. Sudden songbursts out of a 1930s Busby Berkeley production. Why not?
Yet because of and not despite those elements, "Ray" works quite well, playing to the legend rather than the reality of Ray Charles' incredible life yet allowing for both vitality and complexity. If director Taylor Hackford can't avoid his standard pitfall of a dodgy script, at least his talent for marrying music and glitz is on fine display, and in Foxx he finds his best lead performance since Ray Sharkey in "The Idolmaker."
"You have any idea how it feels to go blind and still be afraid of the dark?" Foxx as Charles cries out. "And every day, you stand and pray just for a little light, and you don't get nothing."
Well, he did get a few gold records, thanks to an incredible talent not only to make compelling R&B music, but to refashion the face of pop by effortlessly crossing over into jazz, country, and especially gospel. Ray Charles' blindness gave him a perspective sighted people missed, on how music is music regardless of boundaries. At its best, "Ray" allows you to visualize this as we see many of his best-loved songs mimed brilliantly by Foxx to Charles' vocal tracks, both period recordings and performances especially for the film cut just before Charles' death.
That Foxx won the Oscar for Best Actor in 2005 is no shock. He not only looks the part, but emulates Charles so well you get confused when photos of the real Ray run with the end credits. The way Foxx dominates every scene from first to last is like seeing George C. Scott in "Patton" or Laurence Olivier in "Richard III", an acting clinic from someone known previously as a sketch comic.
That "Ray" was nominated for Best Picture is more of a surprise, at least to me. I liked it more than the film that did win that year's Oscar, but it's overlong and more than a tad manipulative. The bus that drove Ray 3,000 miles has scarcely pulled off the curb in Seattle when Ray makes the acquaintance of a hustling street musician named Quincy Jones. Exposition disguised as conversation abounds. There's a long, trite bit of fakery about Charles being banned in Georgia for refusing to play in a segregated venue, and another showing him confronted about mixing gospel and blues.
But as long as the camera stays on Foxx, something brilliant is happening all the time. Hackford and his team do their part, too, with amazing simulated performance footage that gets across just how gut-wrenching, and even criminal, this now golden-oldie-circuit music was in its time. There are terrific supporting performances, too, like Clifton Powell as Ray's conscientious right-hand Jeff Brown, Wendell Pierce as a gruff road manager, and Curtis Armstrong (Booger from "Revenge Of The Nerds"!) as an effectively low-key Ahmet Ertegun, signing Ray to Atlantic Records.
One standout moment featuring C.J. Sanders as the young boy Ray going blind and Sharon Warren as his mother dares you not to blubber as her tough love is rewarded with a cricket's chirrup.
At two-and-a-half hours, this film is too long and tries to cover too much ground. Yet some of the deleted scenes in the DVD should have stayed, like Ray dressing down a trumpeter in mid-show. Whatever its flaws, "Ray" is highly entertaining, visually exciting, and worth watching just to witness an actor at the peak of his art, playing a musician at the peak of his.