"Taylor Hackford...has never been a storyteller..."

Rating: Null/10 (13 November 2004)

Taylor Hackford, director of The Devil's Advocate, has never been a storyteller. The scripts he directs are slapped together out of dusty formulas in which a two-year-old could predict what happens in the end. Yet they are always directed with such flabbergasting and elegant grandeur that they seem fresh and alive to the most skeptical movie audiences. Don't get me wrong, Ray, a new movie about singer/musician Ray Charles, is decently written by James L. White, who gives the a few somewhat new elements and portrays Charles with admirable depth and accuracy (without trying to make us forget about the illegal drugs and the marital infidelities), but the story is basically your typical 'rags to riches'/'rise and fall' tale. However, it's a firecracker. The scenes onstage are intense; the scenes offstage are powerful. Hackford cleverly refuses to foreshadow Ray's fall; he has had his rise and we know that the fall will come soon but we simply must sit uncomfortably in our seats, watching Ray walk into his next luxurious mansion (Hackford has a love of majestic sets), terrified that it will all go wrong soon. We see Hackford acknowledging the formulaic plot like he did in The Devil's Advocate, only here it is done with a great director's cunning. I'm sure, by now, you're wondering who plays Ray (if you've been living under a rock). It is Jamie Foxx and he is superb, playing the role with charm and tactful ambiguity. He knows when his character should add some depth and when he should knock us off our feat. We love his smile and his fitfully waving arms, but we feel that there is something empty inside. And Hackford and Foxx work together in the end, to show us where this emptiness comes from and to ask whether or not it really is emptiness. I'd see the movie just for the scenes on stage that are so kinetic that those who are unfamiliar with Charles' music start to love it within (literally) seconds. Of course, some of the credit must go to Mr. Charles himself.