"Ray"

Jamie Foxx rocks the house as the late, great Ray Charles. Can this one movie make America seem beautiful again?

By Charles Taylor

Oct 29, 2004 | All of the conventions of the showbiz bio are in place in "Ray": the early tragedy that both spurs and haunts the hero; the chance meetings that, as in Dickens, later prove fortuitous; the exhilaration and shock that the hero's unique talents provoke; the personal turmoil that, in the genre, is always attendant upon professional success; the downward spiral that, in this case at least, presages redemption; even the montage of neon signs sliding across the screen to denote new cities, new clubs.

And yet any viewers who look at "Ray" and see only clichés are declaring themselves hopelessly lost to the real achievement of this picture, which is nothing less than a statement of faith in the inclusiveness of American culture. A movie bio of Ray Charles must be equal to the bigness of the man and the bigness of his vision of American music, and that's the crucial test that "Ray" passes. Ray Charles would not have been able to even imagine encompassing so much of the music he loved if he did not believe that a blind black man could make a place for himself in the America of the '40s and '50s, could transcend the barriers that defined what that place was.

The rock-solid confidence that made Charles' achievement possible is what underlies Jamie Foxx's magnificent performance. The same confidence is visible on the faces we see in the black clubs Ray plays. Killingly sharp in their dresses and suits, availing themselves of the sophisticated night-life pleasures that once belonged only to whites, these people are separate (for now) but certainly anyone's equal in glamour, sexiness and hipness. Theirs are faces that, as Stanley Crouch wrote of the African-American faces in the work of Pittsburgh photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris, "speak of something so far the other side of alienation that all narrow images of these people -- or any people -- are called to the carpet."

The work that director Taylor Hackford does in "Ray" reveals its own confidence and ambition. Hackford's career has been marked by his wish to revive the well-crafted studio style of the '40s and '50s, but with a few exceptions ("Dolores Claiborne," some of "Everybody's All-American") it hasn't clicked. Here his work feels caught up in the joy of responding to the most challenging subject he has ever tackled. This is conventional filmmaking, but at its best, as in the miraculous scene where the young Ray (played by the remarkable child actor C.J. Sanders) first uses his sense of hearing to find his way around the shack he shares with his mother, the film has the direct, overwhelming emotion that brings us to the movies, and the peculiarly American-movie lyricism that is a marriage of commercial savvy and the instincts of craft.

It is exactly the old-fashioned quality of "Ray" that makes it so remarkable. Almost all of the most-praised American pictures this year have been catered to small segments of the audience. That's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's the only way good work can get done. But this year, there has been something equally depressing about a good movie like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" as about a bad one like "Sideways," and that is the preciousness they both share. They communicate no belief in movies as a communal experience, not even the regret of people who want to work that way but, by temperament, can't.

"Ray" has been made on the faith that a mass audience exists for something other than car crashes and adolescent japes. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman has given the film a rich, shadowed, dusky look. In the flashbacks to rural Florida, the red dirt and green grass are especially vivid. We're seeing Ray's childhood home as it has intensified in his memories of sight.

There are flaws and minor letdowns throughout: scenes that betray a crudity of approach; characters who aren't given their due; the showy cold-turkey where Ray kicks heroin; the sentimentality of the "redemption" scene; the cheap, rushed feeling of the closing montage covering the final decades of Charles' career. The faults are not invisible when you're watching the movie, but lingering on them is nitpicking. What "Ray" does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.

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