This may not be a long review [Author's Note: It turned out plenty long], which pains me to say as a man for whom prolixity is as second nature as breathing. However, even as a semi-retired film critic (and a semi-functional television critic), I look out at the well of critical opinion and have to take a stand, just so that an opposing voice is out there.
My thesis is quite simple: "Ray" is a marvelously acted movie, giving Curtis Armstrong his best part since the glory days of "Moonlighting" (if not "Revenge of the Nerds"), Kerry Washington the role that ought to make this stunning talent a star and -- need it even be said? -- Jamie Foxx a part that seems predetermined to give him not only an Oscar nomination, but that darned shiny trophy as well. "Ray" is spiffy looking and if there's anything more pleasant than sitting in a movie theatre listening to the music of Ray Charles of 150 minutes it would be, well, watching a good movie for that length of time. For all of the good things about "Ray", it is a badly written, clumsily structured, horribly edited piece of filmmaking. It is that all-too-frequent of phenomena -- a great performance buried in an awful movie where the masterful acting somehow convinces critics that the movie itself is good. Television and film critics refer often to "donut" movies or shows, where everything on the periphery is fantastic, but the main character is a cypher and the product suffers. "Ray", like "Monster" last winter, is a "donut hole" movie. I love what's at the center, but I'm not fooled into believing that something isn't missing.
We all know the basic story: Ray Charles Robinson (Foxx) goes blind as a young boy, but goes on to become a piano playing genius, blending gospel and R&B and country, while also becoming a uniquely powerful figure in the entertainment industry.
Heck, we all know more complicated story as well: In addition to becoming a recording superstar, Charles battled drug addiction, was a notorious womanizer and was banned from performing in Georgia after refusing to play at a Jim Crow venue. We also know that after becoming a Pepsi pitchman and a subject of some self-parody, Charles died this summer at the age of 73.
Director Taylor Hackford and James L. White are credited with the script of "Ray" and neither man has a produced screenwriting credit previously and it shows. The movie begins with Charles as an unknown piano man playing backup on the Chitlins circuit and follows his life until he conquers drug addition. Along the way, he marries the love of his life Della Bea (Washington), records a lot of hit records, makes a lot of money, has a number of affairs, does a lot of drugs, alienates a lot of people close to him and plays a lot of concerts. Rather than giving the film any kind of structuring device, Hackford and White rely on a very simple laundry list formula. The movie goes concert-personal travail, concert-personal travail, concert-personal travail, concert-personal travail for an inexcusable two-and-a-half hours. The reason why writers use structuring devices like flashbacks in biopics is to prevent a scenario where the passage of time has to be constantly delineated with a date at the bottom of the screen or with repeated use of newspaper headlines. Hackford uses both to make the passage of time clear, but he needn't have. I felt every single year passing. There are occasionally flashbacks to the roots of Charles' blindness and to the psychological problems stemming from the accidental death of his younger brother, but again, Hackford and White doesn't have any logic as to when they go back to those crucial moments for Young Ray. Sometimes every other scene is a flashback to his youth on the red clay in Florida, but sometimes full hours can pass without flashbacks. Sometimes there are narrative reasons for Hackford to slip back in time, but other times Hackford just seems to have been plugging the footage in in the editing room.
It's a bit funny how badly Hackford and White botch the most crucial public moments of Charles' life. Just as you're thinking that it's interesting how the filmmakers have avoided the convention of making white folks into faceless villains like in the hideously bad "The Hurricane" (another perfect example of a "donut hole" movie), Charles gets busted for drugs in Indianapolis and suddenly the white cops become vindictive slave masters persecuting poor Ray because they don't like his "jungle music," as the all-white media falls upon him like vultures on carrion. Then there's the silly scene where Ray is apolitical and about to play a segregated Georgia venue until one person in the otherwise silent protesting crowd tells him not to and he's all, "Um, OK. Sure. I guess I won't play," even though Quincy Jones (Lorenz Tate in a randomly occurring and fairly stupid cameo) told him the same thing two shots earlier. Finally, I was rolling with laughter when, after countless warnings that his fans wouldn't tolerate his use of country music, a hostile crowd is turned from anger to love with the flick of a light switch. I look forward to Hackford's "Dylan" in which Bob Dylan tells the crowd that the Newport Folk Festival to "Shhh!" and they decide that electric guitar isn't bad after all. Similarly, any kind of discomfort with Charles' appropriation of gospel is eliminated in a single silly scene in which two lone nutjobs interrupt a performance to protest, one member of Charles' band leaves and the music goes on. These should be fantastically dramatic moments, but Hackford wastes them.
The film also takes a very particularly "Hollywood" perspective on authorship and the creative process. Charles constantly appears to be creating classic songs on the fly even though students of the music know perfectly well that several of the songs that seem to just magically fly from Charles' brain were either written in collaboration with other men or were just written by other people entirely. Nobody would dare question Ray Charles' credentials as a genius, but his brilliance is occasionally hilariously overstated. Also, just in case you can't figure things out, Ray and the supporting character are constantly given lines of dialogue explaining exactly what is significant about everything that Ray is attempting to do.
There's also something unsettling about the fact that the film ends (MINOR SPOILER) after Ray checks out of rehab. It's almost as if the filmmakers acknowledge that Ray's music came out of his personal demons and that once those demons were conquered, Charles could just become, as one character accuses him of being, the Black Liberace, a showman, not an artist. You almost expect the closing text to read "After Ray Charles beat drug addiction, he sold millions of albums and held thousands of sold-out concerts, but his greatest achievement was the cheesiest cover of 'America the Beautiful' ever recorded." I'm not sure if that's really the case, but that's certainly how the film presents it. The implication is also that every single bad thing that Ray did (and he seems to have abused just about everybody who loved him) was the fault of a single childhood trauma and that he became a saint after a little therapy. Every one of Charles' misdeeds is safely positioned in the past so as not to in any way tarnish our image of Ray and the Raylettes singing about Diet Pepsi. Thank Heavens for that.
Charles' death, I'm convinced, gave Hackford carte blanche to run with his over-long director's cut. Seriously, on what basis can Taylor Hackford have final cut built into his contract? He made "An Officer and a Gentleman" more than 20 years ago and since then the best of his films ("Delores Claiborne" and the guilty pleasure "The Devil's Advocate") have been badly edited, over-long messes and every movie he's made has underperformed at the box office. I think that the period of reverence after Charles' death prevented Universal from demanding that Hackford come in with a two-hour cut of this movie. The first hour in particular could have had at least 20 minutes trimmed without any loss of narrative momentum. Additionally, Universal could have forced Hackford to do, say, two days of reshooting so that Ray's stint in rehab in the film's final act could have been used as a structuring device.
Even though it looks on the surface like a warts-and-all biopic, Hackford's pristine and sterile directing touch prevents the movie from getting any deeper than an HBO original movie which, beyond Foxx's performance, is really what this is. From the costumes to the cars to the juke joints to the recording studios, every part of the movie is glossy and skin-deep. There are all of the requisite and fetishized close-ups of Foxx's flying fingers on the keyboard and all the gauze medium shots of pretty backup singers in immaculate gowns. Hackford never gets into the music so much as he gets into Foxx's rendition of the music. The camera never seems free to get into the spirit of these performances, because Foxx's performance is the only one that seems to matter. It's his show, but sometimes that's to the detriment of the overall atmosphere.
Foxx has been adequately praised and anointed with holy oils in the press that I hardly need to go into details about why he's so good. Here's the simple fact: Just as 95% of all African-American comics have a stock Bill Cosby impression (usually involving Jello Pudding or Picture Pages), nearly ever African-American comic also has a stock impression of both Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles and, let's get real, the impression tend to blend together. The huge smile, the wild head gyrations and the far off voices are nearly interchangeable and it takes a rare genius like, say, Eddie Murphy to do an impression of one of the other that is unique. Now in the trailer for "Ray", the marketing people have mostly decided to accentuate the moments of Foxx's performance in which he's doing an impersonation or an impression, rather than actually playing a character. Sometimes Foxx simply can't hold back and he cackles and tosses his head and you sense that he's just doing the Ray Charles gag he's been doing his whole life with friends. Moments in the trailer like his flirtations with women and the "I'm gonna make it do what it do" scene are perilously close to parody. Thankfully, those moments are the exception and not the rule as Foxx goes deeper than the script has any right to expect him to.
Foxx, of course, breaks loose in the performance scenes, as he comes to life in a way that steps beyond our basic expectations. Even though it's slightly jarring when Ray Charles' recorded voice pours out of Foxx's mouth, there's enough embodiment that the distraction passes quickly. There's going to be an interesting dilemma for Oscar voters if they have to choose between Kevin Spacey's performance as Bobby Darin in "Beyond the Sea" and Foxx's performance here. Spacey, who has a very pleasant and rich singing voice, sounds virtually nothing like Bobby Darin, but he decided to do his own versions of Darin's songs. Foxx, who also has a perfectly admirable voice, only does his own singing on one or two early snippets, which are enough to let us know that if he wanted to, he could totally pull it off, but the producers, wisely, chose to go with the originals. My question, though: How much of the magic of Foxx's performance comes from our love for Charles' voice and the unique twist he put on popular music. I'm just sayin... Music critics go to concerts and mock people like Britney Spears for going out, putting on a good show and basically lip synching. Foxx is going to get an Oscar for doing the same here. Yes. I know. That's an apples and oranges comparison. But just as Foxx gets great mileage out of chronicling Charles' descent into drug addiction, I'd love to see a film of Britney lip synching to her own music and chronicling her own descent into trailer trash oblivion.
One way or the other, it will be nearly impossible for Foxx to lose the Oscar, particularly given that Ray has been relatively successful at the box office. The Academy loves to reward comic actors for going straight and it loves to reward up-and-coming hotshots for stepping outside of their comfort zones and it loves to reward anybody who plays a character with a disability. Throw in the chance to give a trophy to an African-American actor who isn't Denzel Washington (Lou Gossett Jr. where are you now?) and the temptation will just be too great. Throw in the fact that it's a great performance and how could you begrudge Foxx? The film is one showcase moment after another and Foxx commands the screen, which shouldn't be at all surprising anymore, given the actor's strong dramatic work in "Collateral" (a much better movie than "Ray" and perhaps a better Foxx performance) and "Ali" (a similarly plagued biopic in which poor editing judgments hamper a strong lead performance).
Of the supporting actors, I particularly enjoyed Armstrong, nearly unrecognizable, as Atlantic exec Ahmet Ertegun, particularly the character's joy and nervousness in unveiling his own composition, "Mess Around." I don't know if it's a big enough part for an Oscar nomination, but I wouldn't mind seeing that.
Washington, Regina King (as one of Charles' mistresses) and Sharon Warren (as Mamma Robinson) certainly have enough showy scenes for Oscar consideration. In fact, all three women spend entirely too much of their time wringing hands and shrieking. Just thinking back on their work is exhausting to me, even if they're all very good. A better script might have given them more to do.
Fine work is also turned in by Harry Lennix, Bokeem Woodbine, Terrence Dashon Howard, David Krumholtz and a beard-less Richard Schiff, though none of those actors have much to do.
It's the single-mindness of focus that ultimate dooms "Ray". The film tries to provide truckloads of evidence to support an argument that Ray Charles was a tortured genius, rather than just accepting that fact from the get-go and trying to make a great movie about that tortured genius. I didn't need to be convinced about the man. I needed to be convinced about the movie. As hard as Jamie Foxx works, I was only convinced by his performance and not the movie around it.
This is a 2.5 star movie, but I'm rounding down so that readers will know where to look for a contrasting opinion. Oh and did I say at the beginning that this was gonna be a short review? Ooops. Guess I lied.
Jamie Foxx (Collateral) stars as the one-of-a-kind innovator of soul who overcame impossible odds to become a music legend. Ray is the triumphant and ...More at Buy.com
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