Summary:
Ray is about the life and times of that blind music legend Ray Charles Robinson, who incorporated gospel with r&b, and pissed off a lot of people in the process. He was ambitious, talented, and found his trademark voice thanks to his mother, and the friends and agents that pushed him in the right direction.
So this story says.
What I Thought:
I grew up listening to Ray Charles. I loved his music, and it wasn’t until much later in life that I knew how innovative and influential he was as a musician. He definetely lived a full life. Ray is overlong at nearly 2 and a half hours, and although it’s not a badly done drama, it doesn’t deliver much that we haven’t seen in countless other music star movies. It’s a lot BETTER than most of them, and is not as good as others.
The reason to see Ray is for Jamie Foxx. I’m really opening my eyes to this guy after seeing Collateral and now this. He has a very quiet acting style – doesn’t overplay it - which has worked perfectly for both roles. He kicked ass in both of these movies, and I now need to see Any Given Sunday to see him do his thing opposite Al Pacino, who can yell, scream and scene-steal with the best of ‘em. Foxx is the star of the movie, he very nearly becomes Ray, and if he wasn’t able to cull out a decent performance, the whole movie would have fallen flat.
This movie basically covers his life from around 1945-1962, give or take a few years, along with flashbacks of how Ray Charles lost his sight, and his mother’s tough love, helping him to be independent and to not see his blindness as a handicap. During this span of his lifetime, Ray went from a hopeful and optimistic no-name musician that everyone recognized as a force to be reckoned with, up to him getting his way with ABC, and as the trailer says, get’s “a deal that’s better than Sinatra”.
I enjoyed the musical interludes and didn’t roll my eyes more than a couple of times during almost the entire movie’s runtime. It was only in the last ten minutes that it faltered. I will admit that in the first hour, I looked at my watch expecting an hour and a half to have already gone by, and was hoping that it was only two hours long! The pace was very slow, but that was expected so I just kinda shrugged my shoulders and kept watching.
As for those last ten minutes, my main complain lies in his drug rehabilitation. He had to kick the heroin habit, and they go through his withdrawl phase, using it as the reason for everything that is wrong with his life. What I didn’t like about the end was that they tried to use his rehab as being a retribution for all that was bad in his life, and the demons of his past become washed away as the heroin escapes his body. Once he’s cured of the drug, he also seems to have magically been cured of all the things that weren’t right in his life.
Suddenly, it’s 40 years later, and one has to go “What the hell?” As for the resolution, well it was definetely anti-climactic, and seemed to disregard Ray Charles’ long-standing popularity over the next several decades as nothing but a side note, just a reference that needed to be mentioned, but wasn’t delved into at all. I guess if you’re going to choose to select the most significant section of his life, Ray succeeded in doing just that.
As I stated already, the main attraction for Ray would be Jamie Foxx. People are whispering ‘Oscar’, and he’ll probably get the nod, but I don’t think it’s worthy of one. Average movie, great performance, but I was more impressed with Collateral in every department, so give him a nod for that one instead of this one, which is ultimately just Academy Award fodder, that tries to jump through all the required Academy Award Checklist hoops in hopes (like that final line, “she hears… [dramatic pause]… she hears.” Oh, pleeeease!!) of garnering its’ accolades. I don’t like when movies try so hard. However, if you’re in the mood for a slow movie that has some fun music and is a decent drama for the most part, then Ray might not be such a bad thing to go see.
Grade: C-
Reviewed: 11/11/04