There were several moments during Sunday's viewing of
Ray when the cinematic façade disappeared, and I was quite simply watching Ray Charles. Even after reading all the Oscar hype, I was surprised that
Jamie Foxx captured the essence of the man’s highly stylized mannerisms and voice without resorting to mimicry and exaggeration. Ray is an entertaining movie, thanks largely to Jamie Foxx’s performance and Ray Charles’ triumphs, but both were worthy of a much better film.
Taylor Hackford, the writer and director of Ray, only seems capable of drawing characters with capital letters. In Against All Odds, James Woods’ villain is BAD. Russell Crowe is BRAVE in Proof of Life. With his latest effort, Hackford tries to demonstrate that Ray is TALENTED, but TROUBLED. The resulting movie-of-the-week character arc, replete with ham-fisted tragedy and pop psychology motivations, fails to put any meaningful context around Ray Charles or his awe-inspiring music.
The biggest flaw with the movie is that Hackford never convincingly develops Ray as a person. And it’s not as if there is any shortage of opportunities; Ray is continually bounding between gigs, women, and record companies on his road from the poorest of sharecropper beginnings to the pinnacle of LA indulgence. Throw drug addiction, racism, and disability into the mix, and you have a screenwriter’s wet dream of adversity-laden
Horatio Alger bootstrap-pulling just waiting to be told. Unfortunately, the film lacks either the insight or the guts to allow any personal growth (beyond getting laid) to take place on camera.
Instead, we’re forced to settle for more all-caps character development. RAY SEES HIS BROTHER DIE … RAY GOES BLIND … RAY PLAYS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC ... RAY SHOOTS UP. These events are used as building blocks rather than a tapestry as the film bounces back and forth between the confused child and the affable adult prodigy. Hackford clumsily follows every tragic flashback with pained retrospection so no one can be in doubt as to their importance, but provides no tangible continuity with Ray's behavior. We’re quickly whisked along to another hit single or Important Moment until the next contrived emotional outburst requires a ready-mix dose of angst. Whatever ghosts truly haunted Ray Charles, their meager cinematic counterparts fail to create any palpable relationship between the pain in Ray's life, his music, or his addiction.
And anyone who's seen
Trainspotting will find Ray's addiction and detox painfully superficial. The tragic brilliance of
Danny Boyle’s film is that it understands the paradox of addiction; unquenchable joy and euphoria lead to destruction, while redemption is uncertain except for the terror and pain it extracts. Since Ray’s life follows a uniformly upward trajectory while his addiction deepens, the story requires a strong personal component to convey the unbearable need for heroin. But in Hackford’s sugar-coated version of addiction, Ray’s syringe minds its manners like Laura Bush and only speaks up when asked, making a few special guest appearances during marital squabbles, arrests and re-hab. One minute Ray is wallowing in a heroin addled-high, the next he's making R&B hits! It reduces Ray's illness to a contrivance rather than an ongoing battle, and facilitates a feelgood ending rather than a triumph.
Perhaps these criticisms are rooted in the man himself. Anyone who overcomes Ray’s litany of setbacks to reach the stratosphere of success with a smile on his face must be very good at suppressing demons. Or is that person merely a shallow savant, unconcerned with addiction, infidelity, or mortality? Hackford’s mis-handling of the emotional element left me with more questions than answers, and Ray would have been a better movie if it had explained his music rather than fumble with his mistakes.
After all, music is the heart of both the movie and its subject. Each individual performance is gripping simply because the music is brilliant, and Hackford is at his best capturing these dynamics. Between Ray and
Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n Roll, he clearly knows how to capture the energy and spontaneity of live musical performances. But strung together, Ray's diverse portfolio and chameleon transitions through Gospel, R&B, Pop, and Country come across as the capricious diversions of a mad musical genius. On more than one occasion, Ray tells shocked onlookers that his bold new musical direction is a natural part of him. Those revelations fall flat, because the film has wasted so many frames on Ray’s TROUBLES that it neglects to show any of Ray’s musical development, save for an early piano lesson.
The tragedy of this movie is that it fails to make me care about Ray Charles the same way
The Commitments made me care about a pack of no-name Irish wannabes. Hackford tells me that Ray loves music, but
Alan Parker showed the power of R&B to turn hopelessness into happiness. Given the depths of Ray’s beginnings and the heights of his success, it is nearly inexplicable that this movie didn’t address the role of music in his personal salvation.
Ultimately, Ray is reminiscent of
Ali as a gorgeous film with excellent performances undercut by a heavy-handed script. The greatest failing of both biopics is that they peer behind the veil of greatness without understanding their subjects well enough to know what to expose. The result is an interesting, if disappointing, retelling of an iconic story rather than an exploration of what made these men, warts and all, inspiring examples of the American Dream.
