Ray

Ray Charles became blind when he was 9 (C.J. Sanders), two years after he saw his little brother (Terrone Bell) drown. In a memory that has haunted him since, he stood at the exact same spot while seeing with his very eyes his little brother drown in the bath basin. Why didn’t Ray try to save him? The same reason why all 7-year-olds don’t act quickly: Because they are new to the skills in life and can be shocked emotionally. No one seeing that part in “Ray,” Taylor Hackford’s 2004 musical biography, would think to blame the boy, but he never forgives himself.

If he had already lost his ability to see, he would not blame himself for the death and would not be feeling guilty forever that, the movie argues, is part of the reason for his drug addiction. Would he also have not been driven to become the most-well known artist that he became? Who can say? In that matter, what role did his blindness play? Did it make him so alive to sound like a better musician? Certainly he was so adapted to the world around him that he never had to use a cane or a dog; for Charles blindness was more of a characteristic than a handicap.

Jamie Foxx hints the complexities of Ray Charles in a great, exuberant performance. He doesn’t do the singing – that is all done by the late Ray Charles himself on the soundtrack - but what would be the point? Ray Charles was heavily involved with this movie for years, until he had passed away that year in June, and the film had access to his records, so they would obviously use them, because nobody could sing like Ray Charles.

What Foxx does correctly was the physical Ray Charles, and what an extrovert he was. The late Roger Ebert says, “Not for Ray the hesitant blind man of cliche feeling his way, afraid of the wrong step. In the movie and in life, he was adamantly present in body as well as spirit, filling a room, physically dominant, interlaced with other people.” In case you’re wondering, he was an eccentric in his mannerisms, especially when he was playing the keyboard; Ebert commented, “I can imagine a performance in which Ray Charles would come across like a manic clown.” But Foxx really gets the Ray’s body language as a type of choreography, in which he was conducting his music with himself, instead of doing it with a baton. Ebert says, “Foxx so accurately reflects my own images and memories of Charles that I abandoned thoughts of how much "like" Charles he was and just accepted him as Charles, and got on with the story.”

The movie puts Ray at the center of music movement, postwar. After an early career where he seemed to sound like Nat “King” Cole, he loosened up, found himself, and discovered a combination of gospel music from his childhood and the rhythm & blues from his teenage years and his first professional gigs. The result was, essentially, the start for soul music, in his early music like “I Got a Woman.”

The movie shows that Ray found the sound in Seattle, which is where he goes after he leaves him hometown of Georgia. Before and later, it flashes back to key scenes involving his mother Aretha, played by Sharon Warren, who taught him not to be intimidated by his blindness, to dream big, to demand that he gets the best. She had no education and had very little money, but insisted that he attend the school for the blind, which gave him his destination. He goes to Seattle after hearing about the club scene, but why does he go there instead of New York, New Orleans, Kansas City or Chicago? Definitely that time when he met Seattle teenager Quincy Jones, played by Larenz Tate, was one of the crucial life events to Ray (similarly to his friendship with the emcee Oberon, played by Warwick Davis, who is the person who got Ray addicted to marijuana).

The movie follows Ray from his birth in 1930 until 1966, when he finally comes over his heroin addiction and his story becomes happier but also perhaps less dramatic. By that time he had invented Gospel, had moved into mainstream with full orchestration, had moved out of mainstream into country music (“then anathema to a black musician,” to quote Ebert) and had, in 1961, by refusing to play a segregated concert in Georgia, putting a nail in the corpse of Jim Crow in the entertainment industry.

Ebert says, “In an industry that exploits many performers, he took canny charge of his career, cold-bloodedly leaving his longtime supporters at Atlantic Records to sign with ABC Paramount and gain control of his catalog. (It's worth noting that the white Atlantic owners Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler are portrayed positively, in a genre that usually shows music execs as bloodsuckers.)” Ray also had many children than the movie could tell its viewers, with more women than the movie has time for, and yet he found the lifelong support and love of his wife, Della Bea Robinson, played by Kerry Washington.

The film is two and a half hours long – not too long for the richness in the story – but to cover the years between 1966 up to the time of his death in 2004 would have required more speed and seeming summary than Hackford and his writer, James L. White, are willing to settle for. When we leave him, Ray is safely on the track to his glory years, although there is a brief scene in 1979 where he receives an apology from his hometown of Georgia over the concert incident, and “Georgia on My Mind” is named after as the state song.

Ray’s addiction was not only in drugs, but he was a womanizer as well. He only beat his drug addiction, but “Ray” is perceptive and not unsympathetic in dealing with his wandering ways. Of the women we see on screen, the most important one is Della Bea, played by Washington as Ebert put it, “a paragon of insight, acceptance and a certain resignation.” When one of Ray’s women dies, she asks him, “What about our baby?” “You knew?” says Charles. She knew everything.

His two essential affairs are with blues singer Ann Fisher (Aunjanue Ellis) and a member of his backup group, the Raelettes, Margie Hendricks (Regina King). Ebert comments, “Who knows what the reality was, but in the film we get the sense that Charles was honest, after his fashion, about his womanizing, and his women understood him, forgave him, accepted him and were essential to him.” Not that he was an easy man to get along with during the years he was heavily into marijuana, and not that they were saints, but that, all in all, whatever it was, it worked. “On the road,” says Margie, in a line that says more than it needs to, “I’m Mrs. Ray Charles.”

The movie would be worth seeing simply for the sound of the music and Jamie Foxx’s performance. Just that it looks deeper and gives us a sense of a man himself is what makes this film so special. Yes, there are moments when an incident in Ray’s life instantly inspires a song (Ebert says, “I doubt "What'd I Say?" translated quite so instantly from life to music”). But Taylor Hackford brings quick sympathy to Ray as a performer and a man, and people who are fans of his work know that he directed “Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll,” a documentary about Chuck Berry; a performer whose onstage and offstage moves more than bracing Hackford for this film. Ray Charles was quite a man; this movie not only knows it, but understands it.

Go see this movie if you haven’t because you are missing out. If you were a fan of Ray Charles’s music, or love Jamie Foxx, then this is the movie for you.

Thank you for joining in on my second entry of my “Black History month movie reviews.” Stay tuned for Monday when I do a President’s Day film review.