Jamie Foxx used to be thought of mostly as a comedian. Then came his turn in Collateral, in which he reduced a silvery-haired Tom Cruise to his foil. Now we have him in what is surely going to win him an Oscar for best actor — Ray, Taylor Hackford’s biopic of Ray Charles.
Foxx seems a shoo-in for the Oscar because, firstly, the Academy can never resist a portrayal of a disabled person, and Ray Charles was of course blind. Second, the Academy always loves a showbiz story. Third, it adores a tale of triumph over adversity, and in Charles’s case it will be able to relish his march to fame despite (or driven by) his blindness as well as his eventual victory over his 17-year heroin addiction.
The film is carefully structured to give us that sense of victory. It does not trawl all the way to the end of Charles’s long career, but moves towards the big moment in which he goes cold turkey and kicks the drug. In a way, this is not so much a biopic of Ray Charles as it is the biopic of Ray Charles’s heroin habit.
Either way, director Hackford, whose name has sometimes seemed all too appropriate (think An Officer and a Gentleman) gives us a solid, if conventional, movie with many of the clichés of the genre. Often, you can see just what’s coming. Oh, the highs and lows! And the further highs and lows! But Ray never loses its focus on Foxx as Charles, while also giving him a goodly number of strong supporting performances to bounce off.
We first see the adult Charles auditioning for a white country band, and it’s a telling vignette. He seems so helpless — he’s blind, he’s being led by the hand into a room of hostile honkies. But the moment he sits down at the piano, all that is forgotten. We see, soon after that, how Charles wasn’t above a bit of sly trickery to avoid racial restrictions.
We are made to understand, as well, how Charles’s revolutionary style (fusing many of the then-separate strands of American popular music) came into being. At first he wants to be a Nat King Cole clone, and it takes a while until he finds his own, unique voice. And when he does — wow! It’s the voice of the real Charles on the soundtrack, but Foxx has played the piano since childhood, so those are his hands on the keys. None of those fancy shots that try to conceal the gap between the fingers on the piano and the face above it.
The music is the driving force of the movie: Hackford uses it to tell the story, appropriately enough, often cutting between the performance and other events in Charles’s life. This works beautifully: in this context, it doesn’t feel like the cheap montage-sequence-as-music-video option so beloved of bad directors, and of course it is appropriate. Charles’s life was driven by music.
It’s the music that makes it, that and Foxx’s superb, totally convincing impersonation of Charles. In many ways, he is the movie. He transcends its clichés and its often overly obvious approach. Naturally, Foxx couldn’t appear in the flashbacks to Charles’s childhood, and they are the weakest part of the film.
Hackford and scriptwriter James L White clearly wanted to show where the young Charles came from, and how he went blind, and they were probably also under the impression that a flashback to a traumatic childhood goes a long way in giving a character depth. Unfortunately, though, one then feels a little short-changed on the issues of Charles’s adult life; the flashbacks provide a too-simplistic explanation for Charles’s demons. Maybe that’s why he’s a junkie, you think, but is that why he’s unfaithful to his wife?
These flashbacks are also grotesquely overplayed: Sharon Warren as Charles’s mother is so jerky and staring you’d have thought she was losing her sight. Or perhaps her mind. The flashbacks are given a bright colouring at odds with the rest of the movie’s mahogany tones, and you can just feel tragedy approaching with heavy tread. You wince to know you are about to get your emotional strings yanked — hard.
Thank heavens we can soon get back to Foxx and to the music — especially to the performance scenes, where the sheer power and joy come rushing at you off the screen.