'Ray' a shining tribute to legend

By DEBORAH HORNBLOW of The Hartford Courant

Ray Charles died earlier this year, but in Taylor Hackford’s biopic “Ray” you might swear that one of the world’s legendary musicians and entertainers has been brought back to life in the performance by Jamie Foxx. The actor turns in a career-defining role that makes “Ray” as much a resurrection as a movie.

Foxx’s performance mimics with stunning precision Charles’ keyboard moves—the way he cocked his head around a microphone, the dance of his feet beneath the piano bench and the head-back-and-swinging posture of musical ecstasy that was so much a part of his live shows.

In offstage scenes, Foxx convincingly plays a blind man who has developed a remarkable degree of independence, one who can feel his way around unfamiliar places—city blocks, hotel rooms, stages and bar rooms—and whose hearing is so acute he can locate a cricket on the kitchen floor or hear a hummingbird’s wings outside the window of a restaurant.

Foxx’s performance is not the only thing Hackford has going in his shining, if long and sometimes cinematically overwrought “Ray.”

The 152-minute biopic is carried along by the spirit of Charles’ music, the groundbreaking blend of gospel and R&B, country music, blues and jazz that constitutes his musical legacy and forms the film’s soundtrack. Starting with Charles’ breakthrough “Mess Around” and encompassing “I Got a Woman,” “What’d I Say,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Unchain My Heart” and “Hard Times,” “Ray” has the benefit of a Billboard Top 10 score of timeless hits.

Charles’ life also happens to be a fascinating story. Hackford’s film begins with Ray Charles Robinson as a young man bluffing his way aboard a bus bound for Seattle.

The moment sets the stage for Charles’ life on the road and marks the start of his career as a professional musician, and the scenes that follow play like a who’s who of the 1950s music industry.

On the Seattle sidewalk, Charles meets a young horn player whose name is Quincy Jones (Larenz Tate). Charles gets piano gigs in a local bar and goes on the road with Lowell Fulsom (Chris Thomas King).

He has the fortune to be sought out by Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong), the nurturing head of Atlantic Records, who, along with his partner Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff), signs Charles and gives him complete creative freedom.

The scene in which Ertegun tells Charles he has to be more than “another Nat Cole” and offers up his tune “Mess Around” dramatizes a crucial career shift and opens the door for Charles’ singular style.

Although Hackford’s film follows the trajectory of Charles’ rapidly rising career in studio sessions, performances and the attendant changes in recording technology that influenced his sound, “Ray” also makes room for flashbacks to Charles’ youth.

These sequences occasionally suffer from slick, overly arty design (as in shots of colored glass bottles that hang from a tree and sound like wind chimes), but they encapsulate Charles’ crucial relationship to his mother, Aretha Robinson (Sharon Warren), a strong-willed and loving woman who spent her life working as a sharecropper and refused to pity her son; the drowning accident that took the life of Charles’ younger brother George (Terrone Bell); and the scenes in which Ray loses his eyesight at age 7.

The film also juxtaposes scenes of Charles’ personal life with the ongoing narrative of his musical development. When Charles meets and falls in love with Della Bea Robinson (Kerry Washington), the musical result is “I Got a Woman.”

When Charles says goodbye to a longtime girlfriend, the musical result is “Hit the Road, Jack.” When Charles is involved in a civil rights dispute at a concert venue in Georgia, the song that follows on the soundtrack is “Unchain My Heart.”

Along the way, Charles is introduced to heroin. Over the objections of his horn player David “Fathead” Newman (Bokeem Woodbine), Charles takes his first taste.

The resulting longtime addiction eventually becomes an issue in his marriage and his career and threatens, on more than one occasion, to land him in jail.

The scenes in which Charles finally quits his habit are technically overwrought, and they mirror the filmic language Hackford uses in the sequences in which Charles contends with sudden sensations that reawaken the nightmare of his brother’s drowning.

In the latter, water seems to fill a suitcase or flood a floor. In the former, the junkie Charles writhes in a hospital bed as the screen shows a montage of sights and sounds from his past.

With everything “Ray” has going for it, the greatest aspect of Hackford’s film is its courage in defining Charles as a man of genius who was, nonetheless, far from perfect. “Ray” is a homage but not, pardon the awkward turn of phrase, a blind one.

Some of the film’s best scenes dramatize the ways in which Charles sometimes used music and even created songs to avoid personal confrontation.

When his first female background singer becomes a bit too dependent and ambitious, he hires The Cookies, a three-part harmonizing female trio who are rechristened the Raylettes, and he begins writing songs to incorporate all their voices.

Of course Charles doesn’t tell his original singer that she will now share the stage with three other women; he simply lets things happen, and the reworking of the band composition and Charles’ bedmates takes it toll.

Charles’ pattern resurfaces in his dealings with his longtime band manager and friend Jeff Brown (Clifton Powell). “Ray” also openly contends with the way in which Bea Robinson accepted the fact that her husband lived parallel lives: one as her husband and the father of their children, the other as a musician on the road who had a smack habit and a string of other women, most notably The Cookies’ Margie (Regina King).

Hackford’s film is not without humor. One of the film’s running gags involves Charles’ habit of shaking hands with a woman and reaching to feel her wrist as a means of calculating her size and prettiness.

Foxx is not the only actor to give a memorable performance. King’s Margie, the “soul” of the band, has the sass, spunk and musical chops to make her eventual conflict with Charles an especially bitter loss.

Watching her lead the other Cookies through an improvised first take of “What’d I Say” is like watching the birth of the hip.

The ending of “Ray” is rushed and less an organic coda than a necessary conclusion to a picture that is already 21/2 hours long. But all in all, “Ray” is a tremendous credit to its creators and, mostly, to the man whose life and music it honors.