Taylor Hackford’s biopic tells Ray Charles’s story the way biopics usually tell them, one contract, one hit and one relapse at a time, for 152 minutes. Jamie Foxx and the songs make most of that not matter, and the rest we forgave.
Taylor Hackford’s film about Ray Charles begins with a blind teenager climbing onto a bus in Florida in 1948 and ends in the middle of the 1960s, and in between it does everything a musical biopic is expected to do. There is the poor childhood, the crooked first manager, the wife, the mistress, the needle, the road. Ray is good, and it is good almost entirely because of the man in the middle of it and the records he made. The film around him is competent and familiar, and at two and a half hours it is long.
Jamie Foxx plays Charles with his eyes sealed shut for the whole 152 minutes, and the performance is all body: the rocking at the keyboard, the hand resting on the shoulder of whoever is walking him through a room, the grin that arrives a beat before the joke. The singing voice is Charles’s own, so Foxx’s job is the face and the frame, and he never once looks like a sighted man pretending. He also lets the man be unpleasant. This Charles counts his money in single notes, fires people without raising his voice and lies to his wife with the charm he uses on a crowd. Foxx does not ask us to like him, which is why we did.
The music sequences are the reason to see it. Curtis Armstrong’s Ahmet Ertegun hums a tune across a desk and Foxx builds Mess Around out of it. A club owner needs twenty more minutes of set and Charles starts a riff on the electric piano that becomes What’d I Say, the band and then the crowd catching on one bar at a time. Regina King’s Margie Hendricks sings Hit the Road Jack at him across a stage, a duet that is really a row. We sat through these grinning, and once, during What’d I Say, we caught ourselves moving in the seat, which does not often happen to us at a biopic. Paul Hirsch cuts them long, staying with the band, so we watch the song being made.
Paweł Edelman shoots the two halves of the story in two lights. The childhood in Greenville, Florida is bleached and overexposed, dust and sunflowers and a washtub in the yard. The clubs and hotel rooms of the touring years are amber and smoke. Stephen Altman’s sets get the smallness of it right, the tour bus, the motel, the recording booth with one good microphone. Sharen Davis puts Charles in sharkskin suits that get sharper as the money does, and the Raelettes in dresses a size too bright for the rooms they sing in. Craig Armstrong’s score mostly has the sense to stay out of the way of the records.
The trouble is the shape. James L. White’s screenplay runs on a loop: a deal, a hit, a woman, a fix, a fight, another deal. Each turn is dramatised as a highlight, so that fifteen years pass and nobody seems to get older except by their suits. The childhood is returned to so often, and with the same images each time, that by the fourth visit we could have called the cuts.
The women get the worst of it. Kerry Washington’s Della Bea Robinson is written as patience itself, and Washington can only play the writing; she has one good scene of anger and spends the rest waiting in doorways. King fares better because Margie is allowed to want something and to be wrong about it. Harry Lennix and Clifton Powell, as the two men who run the business and the road, are given more shades of loyalty than either wife or mistress gets.
Hackford made a documentary about Chuck Berry in 1987, and he knew then how to stand back and let a musician be difficult. Here he stands back for the songs and steps in for everything else, and the film is better when he is out of the way. It is worth your evening if the music is yours, and again for Foxx. Bring a long evening; the film needs one.
