Ray: Jamie Foxx and all that soul

Catholic New Times, Jan 16, 2005 by Ted Schmidt

Ray starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington. Directed by Taylor Hackford, 152 minutes.

This is a film which, while abounding with cinematic cliches, nevertheless will end up giving you your money's worth, if for nothing else the startling performance of Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles.

The film begins with Foxx's fingers straddling the keys while the Dolby sound does justice to Charles' classic 1959 rocker, "What'd I Say." It is a traditional biopic with few surprises. Director Taylor Hackford (who also paid homage to seminal rocker Chuck Berry in 1987) is smart enough not to stray too far from letting Ray Charles impressive range of crossover hits carry the load. The blind singer with the gravel voice was a certified musical genius who managed to bring a deeply soulful sound to any genre of music he tackled. And Ray Charles (Robinson) tackled them all--pop, country, soul, jazz and country and western. Chances are you have at least one Charles disk in your collection.

The film manages to take us back and forward in Charle's career, beginning with his 1948 bus ride to Seattle where he began his long pop journey to stardom. Like all piano-player singers of that era, Charles was deeply influenced by the huge shadow of Nat Cole (as was Canada's own Diana Krall whose first album was a tribute to Cole). The woods were full of Cole wannabees and we watch brother Ray struggle to find his own voice in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The barely stated context of this whole film is the oppressive Jim Crow racism of the south, a savage virus which short-circuited not a few brilliant black musical careers.

We flash back to the singer's youth (born in Georgia, his mother moved with him to Greenville, Florida) and watch as he struggles with the glaucoma, which finally robbed him of his sight by the age of six. His poverty and black skin probably doomed him to a life in the dark.

Back to the early 1950s and Charles finally sorts it out and happens upon his famous formula of marrying the blues with gospel feeling. He is the first true "soul" singer. The film touches on his time with Lowell Fulson, an unheralded blues singer of the early 1950s and then quickly arrives at Charles natural home Atlantic records. Anybody with any love of modern pop music genuflects at the name of Atlantic. When you picked up that black and red piece of acetate, which spun at 78 revolutions per minute, r&b heaven was about to descend: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, LaVern Baker, Ruth Brown and the "genius" himself, Ray Charles. Director Hackford acknowledges the role of Atlantic records here.

Atlantic was a black stable, yet the label was the brainchild of two white intuitive producers, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. The former, a son of the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. fell in love with the black subculture and the latter, a New York Jew, the son of a Talmudic scholar had a deep feel for the new music which grew out of oppression and its subsequent release. It was Wexler who coined the term, "rhythm and blues" a more benign substitute for the pejorative "race records," which referred to the black record-buying public. Ertegun and Wexler vetted all the new acts and passed the winners on to brilliant Irish Catholic recording engineer Tom Dowd.

By 1955, the hits begin to roll and this is the best part of the film--"I Got a Woman," "This Little Girl of Mine," "Drown in My Own Tears," "The Right Time." The five Atlantic years 1955-1960. The five years 1955-1960 is the essential Ray Charles.

Charles' abandonment of Atlantic in 1960 when he moves to ABC Paramount serves as the fitting metaphor for Charles lack of fidelity in other areas of his life. While this is not glossed over in the film the reality was much worse. A serial philanderer and a heroin addict during the Atlantic years, Charles did little for the black cause during his life. This is the one false chord in the whole film. His entire career Charles was hassled by progressive blacks for his failure to step up on the race question. While donating money to black causes, he faced pickets all over North America when he played South Africa in the early 1980s; he took $100,000 away from Reagan's second inaugural in 1984. But let's not dwell on the less than perfect brother Ray. The man's talent was incandescent. The film should win a statue for James Foxx whose spastic contortions bear an eerie resemblance to Charles.