Ray is a movie that very well shows what makes a biopic good

Rating: 7/10 (9 December 2012)

Ray Charles Robinson is regarded today as one of the greatest musicians to hit a stage. Despite being blind from his childhood, he beat the odds, and was able to go from some kid from a small town in south Florida who learned how to play the piano, to the world stage, regarded as an innovative genius who took the musical industry by storm. And despite a rather overly exaggerated view of Ray Charles' life story, the efforts of Jamie Foxx perfectly portray the genius of Ray Charles, saving an otherwise mediocre movie.
The Story begins in Seattle where Ray Charles comes to find his new life as a Jazz musician, and joins a band with Raised on a sharecropping plantation in Northern Florida, Ray Charles Robinson went blind at the age of seven, shortly after witnessing his younger brother drown. Inspired by a fiercely independent mother who insisted he make his own way in the world often saying ", Ray Charles found his calling and his gift behind a piano keyboard. Touring across the chitlin circuit, the soulful singer gained a reputation and then exploded with worldwide fame when he pioneered incorporating gospel, country, jazz, and orchestral influences into his inimitable style. In addition to the inspirational stories of his success, the movies also shows Ray Charles' struggle through his drug problems as well, as well as dealing with the demons of his past.
Ray is a movie about a true performer, detailing his life, his accomplishments, his struggles, and most of all, his genius. The actor, Jamie Foxx, willed himself to become Charles. Foxx didn't merely master Charles's stop-start verbal and physical tics (his teasing, naughty-boy "oh-uh, oh-uh" hesitations). The actor—who plays piano and performs marvelous lip- synching—demonstrates the way Charles could dismantle any song, phrase by phrase, and then reconstruct it, set to a new rhythm and resurge it with a fresh urgency and movement. Foxx understands, on an intellectual and a gut level, how Charles's achievement in synthesizing gospel, R&B, and early rock and roll created a style that, contrary to what was said in so many of the obituaries that covered Charles's death in June at the age of 73, wasn't "influential," because that implies a method that can be mimicked or built-upon. What Charles did is indisputably unique: No one before or after him has ever sounded like him, and Foxx knows this, profoundly, in a way his director, unfortunately, does not.
Taylor Hackford's far fetched idea of all of Ray Charles' hits coming from significant events in his life is a little off base. He falls prey to a tendency that appears in many docudramas to overdramatize everything in the movie .Charles is elated by love for his newly pregnant wife, Della Bea Robinson, and then writes "Hallelujah, I Love Her So." Charles, at one point, needs to extend a song during a short set to meet his contractual obligations and he improvises the famous call-and-response coda attached to "What'd I Say" on the spot. Even if some of his hits were inspired in this manner, it's just not believable that they all were.
Ray Charles' life is quite well analogous to this movie. He lived the majority of his life surrounded by darkness and bleakness, as he so eloquently mentions as he takes his first hit of heroin in the movie, but despite the surrounding darkness, Charles, like Foxx does for this movie, provides a bright star in the darkness that shines through the murky surroundings.