I approached this movie cautiously for all the wrong reasons when I first heard about it. With Ray Charles’ recent death, it seemed like a cash-in (of course, this isn’t the case). Jamie Foxx wasn’t known for drama, if known much at all, and heck, two x’s in a surname doesn’t really send signals of integrity (I know: I’m dumb sometimes). And he doesn’t even sing in the movie. But then I saw the trailer, and it blew me away, none of this stuff mattered anymore, I needed to see this movie.

Ray is pretty long, and it kind of follows the usual cookie-cutter template for bio-pics, but it has some killer moments, and an incredible soundtrack: I don’t just mean the music, that’s obvious; I mean the actual sound, the use of sound to place you in Ray’s world where sound is everything. Every footstep, motor, doorslam, camera flash, you could probably follow this movie without the images.

My favourite parts of the movie are with Ray as a kid. Most of the emotion comes here and the actress who plays his mother is pretty incredible, as is the young actor playing the child. It’s a little Forrest Gump-ish (“Don’t ever let anyone make you a cripple,”) but this kind of stuff never fails to move.

In the ‘present’, it’s all Jamie Foxx’s movie. Sometimes the camera lingers a little too long while he’s “singing” and the illusion is broken, but for the most part it’s a perfect illusion, Foxx is Charles, and in one long sequence, a concert in Indianapolis I think (there’s large pair of sunglasses behind him and he’s in a blue suit), I almost didn’t know whether I was watching a movie or the real thing.

The flashbacks are handled amazingly with interesting transition effects. One in particular stands out though, following the birth of Ray’s son: he begins crying, tears of joy, triggering the memory of his mother’s own tears of joy, the moment when she believed her son might just make it in the world, as he falls through the door, cries out for help, she ignores him, wanting him to learn to help himself, and he slowly stands, listening to the sounds as a guide, and finally ‘looking’ at her and saying, “I hear you too momma… why are you crying?”

Just a little choppy, just a little long, but brilliant none-the-less.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 1:37 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.