Ray
comes as close to Greek tragedy as a movie biography of a phenomenally
successful pop icon is ever likely to get.
The ancient Greeks spent entire
days
watching tales of exceptional individuals brought low by their own
tragic flaws
and the force of events. In tracing the
career of singer Ray Charles from his roots through a string of hits
that
defined modern music, Taylor Hackford’s film shows both Charles’s
enormous talent
and charisma and his chief flaw, an addiction to heroin that almost
brought it
all crashing down in the mid-’60’s.
And like those classical plays,
it
is long – just over two and a half hours – but never drags. There’s just too much going on, and it
doesn’t hurt that the film has a killer soundtrack. The juxtaposition
of
specific songs with scenes from the singer’s personal life show how the
music
emerges out of the life and ensures the smooth integration of music and
drama.
Jamie
Foxx becomes so completely absorbed into his character that we forget
he is an
actor; it feels like we are getting the real Ray Charles.
The physical resemblance alone is uncanny;
still pictures of Foxx as Charles and Charles himself from the same
period are
practically indistinguishable, and Foxx accurately portrays the
well-known facial
expressions and movements of the singer. But
the emotional identification of actor and character is
also
enormously powerful, sustaining early buzz that has Foxx as an Oscar
contender
for this role.
The story begins in 1949, as
the 19-year-old blind man leaves north Florida
for a gig in Seattle. Frequent flashbacks to his 1930’s childhood
intercut
scenes of his musical career, establishing the psychological roots for
the
adult star’s strengths and weaknesses.
The
strength derives from his mother, played with ferocious intensity by
Sharon
Warren in her first film appearance. As
a poor single mother in the Jim Crow south, Aretha Robinson refuses to
be taken
advantage of and instills in her son the determination to control his
own
affairs. Warren captures the mix of steely
determination and pained love of a mother watching her son descend into
blindness and trying to prepare him for life in the world without her.
The
flashbacks also set up the film’s central psychodrama, frequently
returning to
the horrific image of Ray’s younger brother’s accidental drowning, for
which he
blames himself. Before the adult Ray can
live up to his mother’s admonition never to become a cripple, he must
deal with
this memory.
The
evolving issue of civil rights and racial discrimination, inevitably
implicated
in the life of a black man of Charles’s generation, is here given due
importance without overshadowing his private demons.
As he sets off for Seattle,
he is relegated to the back of the
bus, behind a barrier labeled “Negroes only”; his early success comes
on the
“chitlin’ circuit of black clubs. As his work gains crossover
popularity, the
predominantly black audiences and juke joints where Charles began are
replaced
by up-scale white audiences and venues. But
when he is busted for heroin, the Indiana prosecutor castigates his
“jungle
music” for corrupting white youth – he cannot be allowed to forget who
he is.
Still, he resists becoming
active in the movement. When his friend
Quincy Jones declines on principle to join him on a tour of the
segregated
South, Charles says, “That’s where the money is.” Even confronted with
protesters at a segregated venue in Georgia, Ray initially
declines to
respond to their concerns, saying “We all got to play Jim Crow here.” He changes his mind when the bigoted promoter
makes one comment too many disparaging the black protestors, and
Charles backs out of
the gig, resulting in his being banned from performing in Georgia until
1979*.
Ultimately, though, it is not the
social ills of racism but the private demon smack that almost destroys
Charles’s career. He came so close to
losing it all; that he was able to overcome the addiction makes this
cinematic monument
to the man and his music that much more poignant.