Ray

This piece of shit hits DVD shelves on Tuesday. Hollywood has dedicated the full might of its propaganda machine towards convincing you that Taylor Hackford's insipid look at the life and times of Ray Charles isn't a lame, tired, completely vapid waste of time. But it is. Despite a nice performance (and great impersonation) by Jamie Foxx and the talents of a large cast and crew of solid professionals, Hackford and screenwriter James White found themselves completely unable to give Ray any sense of narrative cohesion or emotional maturity. Movies like this are the reason staid Oscar-contending biopics have such a bad reputation.



I don't know that I've ever seen a movie with less to say than Ray drag on for so long. Hackford and White fill their movie up to overflowing with tiny, meaningless details without ever stumbling on to insight, even by accident. We see familiar and a few unfamiliar events in the life of Ray Charles play out over the course of 2.5 hours, but we're getting everything in such small, generic blips, it's impossible to glean any information about Ray's internal life, his motivation, his drive, or what inspired his beautiful, inspirational and highly influential music.

The film opens with Ray as a young man (still using his original name, Ray Robinson) leaving his home in Northern Florida for Seattle. In one of the movie's trademark oversights, we're not told why Ray would choose Seattle over the many other cities one might think of as hotbeds for popular music at the time. We're told that some cliched racist Southern guy didn't want to let him on the bus, and that he outwitted them using his wits, but not where he's going, or why, or what he hopes will happen when he arrives there.

What happens is a series of introductions to other characters of no significance to the story, who will soon disappear. There's Larenz Tate as Quincy Jones, who appears, I think, just so someone can utter the line "Hi, Ray, I'm Quincy Jones!" giving audience members a cheap thrill at recognizing the name of a celebrity. I'd be willing to wager that you could have taped a random drunken conversation between Quincy Jones and Ray Charles in the late 1940's, and it would be a hell of a lot more interesting than the entire film Ray. But the movie has no time to show us anything interesting about Quincy, or Fathead Newman, or Mary Ann Fisher, or any of the other characters that populate the early sequences of the film.

Hackford and White are too busy cutting to poorly-designed flashbacks to Ray's childhood, or showing him empowering himself over and over again by conquering racists and shady promoters. Ray in these early sequences seems more like Encyclopedia Brown than a brilliant musician starting his musical career. We spend almost no time developing who this man is, and lots of time showing how he put racists and greedy hucksters in their place. Right on, Brother!

And about those flashbacks...They permeate the whole movie, and they're completely ridiculous. Hackford films everything set in the distant past in a color-saturated digital hellscape, making it look like Ray grew up in Toontown, not Florida.

These flashbacks give us a vague run-down of the early events in Ray's life. His father was not in the picture. His mother was a fiercely independent and proud woman who toiled endlessly in the care of her two sons, Ray and George. George dies in a tragic accident, and Ray never forgives himself for not doing more to save his sibling's life. Then, Ray goes blind, and his mother teaches him to never become a cripple, to always be self-reliant and never feel self-pity.

Okay, so, so far, I'm describing pretty much every Hollywood biographical film about an artist or entertainer. It's self-important, indulgent, silly and filled with stupid connections between the artist's famous work and their personal lives. I'm reminded of this year's other idiot yet strangely lauded biopic disaster, Finding Neverland, in which we see Julie Christie holding a coat hanger as the inspiration for Captain Hook.

Here, we see Ray picking out snatches of conversations and turning them into classic songs. In one of the film's most dreadful, unrealistic scenes, Ray and his mistress Margie (a wasted Regina King) stop in the middle of having an argument and begin spontaneously singing Ray's immortal
"Hit the Road Jack." This is so ludicrous, such an obvious set-up for a segue into another limply-shot third-of-a-performance scene, that it's amazing any editor permitted it to remain in the movie. I'm surprised Foxx and King didn't speak to Hackford about having this scene removed. What kind of people act like this? Oh, yeah, people in bad movies.

But, anyway, if these were the film's only crimes, it would merely be a bloated, overrated slice of standard mediocrity. What makes it utterly incomprehensible is the film's insistance on tying each and every event in Ray's life to his traumatic childhood through endless flashbacks and dream sequences.

There's an old screenwriting saw that goes "Show, Don't Tell." Every screenwriting teacher on Earth drills this into the heads of their students. Movies work when they demonstrate for their audience how things work, not when they feature characters talking about how things work. Ray does nothing but tell. It tells you that Ray felt bad about his brother's death.

In one scene, Ray packs up his clothes for a trip, and then imagines (and we see) his suitcase filling with water, and his dead brother's foot poking out.

This is lazy filmmaking. Hackford has no idea how to communicate to us that Ray felt guilty about his brother, and that his guilt haunted him well into his successful adult life. He lacks the skill to demonstrate this concept visually. He lacks the faith in his actors to allow them to express these real emotions. Instead, he uses a cheap special effect, and has Jamie Foxx blubber and fumble around rather than emote. Wouldn't it have been more powerful, more potent, to simply show us at the film's opening (in chronological order, for a change) Ray's brother dying, and then allow us to infer how this event affected his life?

Martin Scorsese's The Aviator has taken a lot of heat for something similar. In the opening scene of his film, he shows us Howard Hughes' mother bathing him compulsively, filling his head with strange paranoid ideas about germs and phobias. I agree with critics that complain about this scene, how it attempts to "explain" Hughes' bizarre behavior rather than simply showing it to us. But it was just one scene, a forgivable misstep in an otherwise fascinating and challenging enterprise. Ray is like an entire movie made up of just that one scene.

But it isn't just Ray's sense of well-being that's affected by his lingering feelings of shame. Hackford ties his chronic womanizing to a need for forgiveness from his mother, ties his heroin addiction to his need to "forget" about seeing his brother die, ties even his blindness in some way to his grief. Anyone with any sort of functioning brain can tell that people make decisions for a variety of reasons, and that no one's life can be reduced to one event that, domino-like, set every future event into motion. But Hackford and White don't care about subtlety, about getting to anything deep, significant or telling about Ray Charles. I don't know what they do care about, really. I can't imagine a more narrow, flat, meaningless film could be made out of such an interesting life.

I'll leave you with one final example of why this movie is an obvious, dumb and frustratingly childish attempt to garner critical praise and Oscar noms. Towards the film's end, Quincy Jones returns to the film for no reason other than to tell Ray he should stop playing to segregated audiences. Ray disagrees, arguing that people want to see him play in the South, and you can't play the South without segregation. Then, Ray goes to a Jim Crow gig, and as he's walking toward the stage door, a random protestor stops him and tells him basically the exact same thing as Quincy Jones.

For no reason, Ray relents and cancels the gig on the spot. Why now, and not when Jones was informing him of such in the previous scene? It's unclear. Why hadn't these protestors made any impression on Ray in the past, seeing as he'd been playing the segregated South for years? No one knows. Isn't it possible that the real Ray Charles simply decided to make a stand for his own moral principles, and not because it's what two different people told him to do?

Hackford utterly refuses to allow for any such ambiguity. We know Ray didn't want to play for segregated crowds any more because this is what we're told. We know he gave up the junk because of his dedication to his family because that's what he says in the movie. We know he was a great man because we see the State of Georgia give him an award. This is maybe the least insightful film about an artist I have ever seen. It's not surprising, in the end, that Taylor Hackford has such little insight into the mind of a creative person, being so uncreative himself.

If you want to see a great Jamie Foxx performance, rent Collateral. Or even Any Given Sunday, a deeply flawed film that nonetheless features some of the best work Foxx has ever done.