Decent, but certainly has its flaws

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 2004)

Jamie Foxx plays Ray Charles in this biopic and along with Collateral, it's his one-two punch, knocking his way into dramatic roles. With Ray, since he worked with the man himself it's difficult to determine whether he's creating something here or doing an excellent job of interpreting. And that's really the age old question of acting, is it a creative art or an interpretive art. If it's in interpretive then Foxx does a good job playing the man, because he mimics his voice, pronunciations, movements, and mannerisms down to a T. It doesn't hurt much either that when wearing a pair of sunglasses he looks exactly like him to. Surely he'll get an Oscar nomination out of this one and the film might to. It can be argue that he should get one, but not that the film should get one.
The movie has its ups and downs, but feels too rushed and gives an equal amount of attention to the 17 year span it covers from 1948-1965. Meaning there are certain things that could have been given more focus (the music itself) and there are other things that were given too much (the soap opera, connect the dots, marriage and affair, juggling the two women). One thing I do like is how the film showed his foray into heroine as a gradual thing taking place throughout most of the film instead of having a big dramatic revelation that he's been doing it all along, but only now are we shown it. I also appreciate the old time film transitions such as the closing and opening of the iris. It's a decent film, but it's not what a movie about Ray Charles should be. It's more like a conventional drawn out VH1 behind the music episode than it is about the music and the man themselves.
There were too many things going on at once and much of the film was unfortunately dedicated to the business side of his career going from one record company to another. Perhaps the worst thing about the movie was that his blindness was everybit as much of a character as he was. The fact Ray Charles was blind is the backbone of the entire film and everything completely revolves around that condition of his. Ray could be used more appropriately as a source of motivation for blind people than it can be used as a good example of a biopic. Ray should tell the story of a great musician who happened to be blind instead of a story of a blind man who became a great musician. Leaving the film I can't hardly tell you any more about the man's music and how he changed that world than before I went into it. Grade: B-