Taylor Hackford (2004)

I didn’t see Ray on its original release.  Sally and I once started watching it on television but switched off at quite an early stage.  I thought I should try again, though:  Ray was very well received back in 2004 and Jamie Foxx’s interpretation of Ray Charles swept the awards board for that year.  Reckoning I’d be more likely to pay attention in a cinema than at home, I went to a screening in BFI’s ‘Black Star’ season.  Getting through the whole of Ray – all 152 minutes – hasn’t improved the opinion I’d formed about it from earlier, limited acquaintance.   I think Jamie Foxx’s performance is seriously overrated.

In the film’s opening scene, set in 1948, Ray Charles Robinson wants to get on a cross-country bus, travelling from his native Florida to Seattle, where he’ll try for work as a piano player.  His chances of a seat on the bus don’t look good until he tells a lie to the racially insulting white driver.  Ray says he lost his sight fighting for his country on Omaha Beach and the chastened driver undergoes an immediate change of heart.  Ray would have been a boy soldier in 1944 – he was only eighteen four years later – but the fact that Jamie Foxx is in his mid-thirties makes the story easy to swallow.  This short exchange with the bus driver (well played by Mike Pniewski) is edgy and particular – unlike most of what follows over the next two-and-a-half hours.  Early on, Ray moves back and forth in time, with plenty of place-and-date signposting on the screen.  Taylor Hackford then settles into a more traditional linear narrative, interspersed with occasional flashbacks to Ray’s childhood on a sharecropping plantation in Northern Florida.  If the Wikipedia article on the film is correct, James L White’s screenplay departs from the historical record in several respects, not least the circumstances of the death by drowning of Ray’s younger brother, George – an event witnessed by Ray shortly before he went blind.

Ray fails to ring true even when it’s not playing fast and loose with the facts of its subject’s life.  Reviewing Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, Pauline Kael described the director as the first person she’d call if ‘I wanted a corpse revived.’  Hackford doesn’t reanimate musical biopic clichés in Ray, though he’s clearly aware that’s what they are (newspaper headlines regularly zooming into close-up, and so on).   There’s the occasional interesting insight – as when some black Christians interrupt one of Ray’s sets to accuse him of turning gospel music into ‘devil’s music’, by sexualising it – but the protagonist’s womanising, disagreements with management and substance abuse are wheeled out perfunctorily.  Ray eventually seeks help for heroin addiction:  his doctor speaks for the audience when he wearily tells the patient, ‘You’re not the first celebrity junkie I’ve dealt with’.  Ray’s cold turkey, complete with scary white lighting and a jittery hand-held camera, forms the dramatic climax to the film – along with his vision of being reunited and reconciled with his late mother (Sharon Warren) and brother George (Terrone Bell), who tells Ray it wasn’t his fault that he drowned.  With this comforting assurance, Ray stays off heroin for the rest of his life.  This fantasy sequence isn’t par for the biopic course but it’s uncomfortable in a different way:  it struck me as unlikely that a movie about a white contemporary of Ray Charles would allow the hero to imagine something so sentimentally simple-minded.

One of my strongest early musical memories is lying in the back garden at home in summertime, with Alan Freeman’s ‘Pick of the Pops’ on a portable radio and Ray Charles’s ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ pouring out of it (the song topped the UK charts in July 1962).   But I don’t know much about Charles the musician.  I’m not even sure which of his best-known songs are and aren’t R&B:  it comes as a bit of a shock in Ray when ‘Georgia on My Mind’ (which I really like) is presented as an MOR sellout.  (‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ is relatively kindly treated – calculatedly commercial but also reflecting Charles’s abiding love of Country and Western.)  It’s a relief when ‘Georgia on My Mind’ comes good in the end.  In a hagiographic postscript, we watch a grey-haired Ray Charles attending a 1979 ceremony at which ‘Georgia’ is adopted as the state song.  This is also the occasion of the state legislature’s formal apology to Ray:  they lift a lifetime ban on his performing in Georgia, imposed in 1962 after he refuses to play to segregated audiences in Augusta.  The ceremony and a reprise of ‘Georgia’ make for an emotionally rousing finale although this is a largely fictionalised version of actual events.

Jamie Foxx does the piano playing in Ray but mimes to Ray Charles’s vocals throughout.   It’s possible for an actor in a biopic who does this to convince you, through precision lip-syncing and strong engagement with the character and the song being sung, that the voice you’re hearing is their own:  Jessica Lange miming to Patsy Cline numbers in Sweet Dreams is one example.   For me, Jamie Foxx doesn’t get close to creating this illusion – the effect is rather of his being upstaged whenever Ray Charles’s voice intervenes – but this isn’t the only reason why I don’t care for Foxx’s performance.  I assume his impersonation is accurate in terms of Charles’s movement and spoken voice but the actor always looks and sounds as if he’s doing an imitation.  At Taylor Hackford’s request, he played the role with his eyelids glued shut; of course you admire this degree of commitment in trying to ‘be’ Ray Charles.  But Foxx gives the impression of concentrating so hard on getting things technically right that he has no connection with the other actors (this is distinguishable, I think, from the sense of isolation Charles experienced in his blindness).  Not that there’s a great deal from others for Foxx to connect with anyway:  much of the supporting acting in Ray is crude overacting.  A shining exception is the emotionally transparent C J Sanders, who plays Ray as a seven-year-old, immediately before and after he loses his sight.  Jamie Foxx met and talked with Ray Charles as part of his preparation for Ray but Charles didn’t live to see the story of his life on screen.  He died, aged seventy-three, in June 2004.  Was the proximity of his death to the release of Taylor Hackford’s film, four months later, part of the explanation for its incredibly generous critical reception?

15 November 2016