Movie Reviews
In the beginning, Ray Charles Robinson is a sixteen-year-old looking for work. He tells a bus driver that he�s got a job waiting for him in Seattle. When the driver says he couldn�t possibly take care of a black, blind teenager, Ray informs him that he lost his sight at Normandy during the war. The bus driver thinks for a moment, then allows him to board the bus and drives him to Seattle. He�s in and out of different clubs for a long time, but the same old guys seem to always be playing with him. Eventually those same old guys become Ray�s full-time band and management.
Meanwhile, Ray learns the tricks of the business: the way people can swindle you out of your own money (easily done on a blind person), how relationships can become garbage, and how some things that should never have become important are often the only things you have. He�s introduced to marijuana and heroin, which become all-too-familiar to the ones he loves the most. He also finds false refuge in the confines of womanizing and fornicating. All of this � his wife later says � was nothing compared to his music. His music is what keeps him going.
Now this is some kind of film as I have never seen before. �Ray� garners some of the best performances of the entire year. Jamie Foxx is quite simply Ray Charles � in person. Never before has an actor so embodied the person he or she was playing. Never has someone picked up every last trait, every last tick, every last pet peeve as much or as well as Foxx has here. He looks, talks, walks, sings, and plays the piano like the real Ray Charles. He even stutters at the beginning of his sentences like Charles did. It�s all very uncanny.
Hackford�s direction is explosive and tasteful; a kind of movement that works extremely fluidly with the cinematography. He is not afraid to tell every detail of Charles� struggle in full force, with every kind of imagery imaginable. Even more admirable though is the structure that Hackford uses to tell the story. Before the film proceeds on to a part of his life that we don�t understand, Hackford backtracks to when he was a child. We begin to understand that every good thing Ray ever learned, he learned from his mother. The flashbacks are especially effective.
By the end of it all, �Ray� understands the meaning of heartbreak and of true love. It has a profound respect for both, and yet never exploits either. When the hard times are over we get a scene that is surprisingly sentimental. Up until that point everything had been grim. But you know what? With a movie as hard hitting as this, a little sentimentality is greatly appreciated. *** �