Ray

Rating: 5/10 (22 March 2020)

As a huge fan of Ray Charles' music from a young age, a biopic of one of the greatest musical icons of the 20th century was an enticing prospect. Ray is the product of fifteen years of effort from director Taylor Hackford to bring the blind singer's life story to the big screen, facing down rejection from studios wary of biopics and even more so, as Hackford himself said, 'black biopics'. The money was eventually found & Hackford realised his vision, signed off on by Charles himself after reading the script in braille & indeed approving personally of Jamie Foxx in the lead role following a jamming session whereby he forced Foxx to keep up with him free forming to Thelonious Monk! Ray therefore is visibly a passion project, filled with smoky Deep South locales, gorgeous music & a truly fantastic lead performance... but it's a fractured, baggy piece of work as a whole, despite being enjoyable with flashes of greatness.
A major difficulty is how hard it becomes to warm to Charles himself, because he's not the greatest of men - a serial womaniser, even after marrying & having children, not to mention twenty years addicted to heroin he unashamedly continued taking; Foxx plays him often quite cold & brittle behind the outward charm, which radiates the most in quiet moments with Kerry Washington's put upon wife Della & when he's at the piano, belting out his fusion of gospel, blues & country that thrills the burgeoning counter-culture generation of the 50's & 60's while offending righteous church goers who consider his lyrics pure blasphemy. Hackford is honest to his subject but kind, flashbacks to his impoverished youth giving Ray the tragedy of a younger brother who drowned before glaucoma took his sight, after which he lost a mother he's partly driven so deeply to succeed for as penance for his own guilt at not doing enough to save him. Foxx too is a pure revelation, and thoroughly deserved his Academy Award as Ray - he becomes immersed in the role, nailing all of the singer's physical ticks, verbal mannerisms & intonations, and crucially the effects of the heroin addiction on his persona; it's a bravura performance, likely to stand amongst the finest in Foxx's career.
The ultimate problem with Ray, one Taylor Hackford can't reconcile, is a problem frequent biopics run into - it falls into losing emotional resonance a little as it strives to tick off stages in Charles' path to stardom & later racial acceptance, feeling bloated & episodic at times in the bargain--though it does pick up in the last hour--nor indeed does the script equal Jamie Foxx's performance in particular, falling too often into melodrama. It's worth watching for his turn, of course, and the master recordings of Charles' wonderful music the director employs - it's just such a shame Ray Charles himself died before he could see a finished cut, only hearing an early rough cut in which he remarked "That's it. That's the truth. I'm happy". We can at least be grateful for that, especially that he could live with a life story exposing a deeply flawed man who had an extraordinary talent.