It's never easy to encapsulate a real person's life within the confines of a feature film, and the biopic, Ray, doesn't do more than an average job of dramatizing the life of musical legend Ray Charles. Yet, in the predictable biopic arc, Taylor Hackford's film has some wonderful elements, and functions well as a love letter to the musical genius with whom Hackford worked for 15 years to get this story to the screen.
Undoubtedly the best thing about the film is Jamie Foxx's lead performance as Charles. Foxx's transformation from genial comedic actor to accomplished dramatic leading man over the course of only a handful of roles has been astonishing, and with this role he's nearly a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination. He really embodies Charles, capturing not only his look but also his mannerisms, speech patterns and even his way of playing music. It's almost hard to believe Foxx is lip-syncing to Charles' actual voice, that's how complete his transformation is.
At times it's almost too complete, as, like Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, Foxx creates such a perfect approximation of Charles that he doesn't bring anything fresh to the table. There's a difference between the great performance of an actor who creates a character and the great performance of an actor who meticulously re-creates a real person; Foxx's performance is nearly all re-creation.
It's flawless, though, and it makes it easy to care about Charles as we watch him take the first tentative steps in his music career, playing in jazz clubs in Seattle in the 1940s after taking a bus all the way from his home in North Florida. Hackford and co-writer James L. White hit all the expected beats: the early struggles, the discovery by Atlantic Records, the big hits, the heroin addiction, the womanizing, the racism, and finally, the redemption and happy ending. The film ties up neatly that which by definition cannot be tied up neatly, the complex life of a human being. While it may simplify and gloss over many details of Charles' life, the only way to create a successful biopic is to pick out a few elements to focus upon, and Hackford does that, spending much of his time on Charles' drug addiction and constantly returning to the tragic death of Charles' brother, George, which the singer witnessed at age 5, before he went blind.
Hackford overemphasizes the impact of the event, dramatizing it in heavy-handed flashbacks that suggest Charles was not only haunted by it but also at times having hallucinatory flashbacks to it—the kind of device that takes you out of the story's realism. It's not hard to predict the film will end with Charles both coming to terms with George's death and defeating his heroin addiction, but that's clearly not the end of his travails, as Hackford stops in 1964, some 40 years before Charles' death, filling in the gaps with a few title cards and a brief epilogue set in 1979.
Aside from the heroin and his brother's death, the most important factor in Charles's life as Hackford sees it is his wife Della Bea (an excellent Kerry Washington), a gospel singer who stands by Charles even as he seduces other woman (most notably Regina King as backup singer Margie Hendricks) and neglects his family as he sinks into drug addiction. Like most Hollywood biopics, Ray focuses on the redeeming power of a supportive spouse, and Della Bea is portrayed as the force behind all of Charles' best decisions. In reality, Charles divorced Della Bea in 1976, although they remained close.
That massaging of reality is to be expected, but it's what holds Ray back from being anything more than a standard entry in its genre. It's worth watching, though, for Foxx's mesmerizing performance and the presence of some of the greatest genre-busting music ever created in America.