Ray (2004)

The year Jamie Foxx won the Academy Award for Best Actor was 2005. It was for this film, playing Ray Charles. Whether you know the outcome before watching or discover it along the way changes the experience — but either way, after watching Jamie Foxx’s performance, you understand why the trophy went to him. Rating: ★4.5. A film that follows the conventions of the musical biopic while exceeding the genre’s limits by being honest about the darkness in its subject’s life.

What it’s about — A blind musician who became a legend

Ray Charles Robinson was born in the American South during the Great Depression. Before losing his sight at seven, he witnesses his brother drowning. That guilt and loss follow him for the rest of his life. Entering the path of music as a blind man, he moves freely across rhythm and blues, country, jazz, and gospel to create his own sound. The film also shows what lies behind his success: heroin addiction, womanizing, and numerous conflicts with record labels.

Direction — A rhythm led by the performance scenes

Taylor Hackford’s direction has the rhythm to sustain a 152-minute runtime. The musical performance scenes function as the energy connecting the whole film, and the fact that Jamie Foxx actually played piano and handled the singing himself adds authenticity to these scenes. The flashback structure moving between present and past initially feels familiar, but the way childhood memories connect to adult Ray’s behavior grows more sophisticated and persuasive as it goes.

Performance — Jamie Foxx beyond imitation

Saying too much about Jamie Foxx’s performance might actually be excess. What he shows playing a blind musician is not external imitation but internal recreation. Ray Charles’s characteristic body movements, the way he tilts his head, his expression when smiling — all rendered with astonishing naturalness, while the vulnerability of the addict and the self-possession of the successful musician coexist simultaneously within a single character. Kerry Washington plays Ray’s wife Della Bea, convincingly portraying a woman who knows her husband’s flaws and keeps going alongside him anyway.

What the film says — The path where pain turns into art

The important thing is that this film does not portray Ray Charles as a saint. He had relationships with countless women while married, used heroin for over twenty years, and exploited members of his own band. The film doesn’t avoid this. Rather, these flaws contribute to explaining where his music came from. The film honestly follows the process by which the wounds of childhood, the experience of racial discrimination, and the solitude of blindness are converted into music.

Ratings & reception

TMDB score is 7.5. IMDb score is 7.7, and Rotten Tomatoes freshness is 80%. At the Academy Awards, Jamie Foxx won Best Actor in addition to the film’s Sound Editing win. The consensus is that while Jamie Foxx’s performance generated more conversation than the film itself, the structure of the musical biopic is solid in its own right.

What doesn’t quite work

The film is not entirely free of the episodic structure typical of biopics. There are passages in the middle where the accumulation of Ray’s successes is processed somewhat rapidly, and some supporting characters appear functionally without sufficient dimensionality. The 152-minute runtime is well-crafted overall, but in the latter half there is a feeling of being somewhat rushed toward a conclusion.

Verdict

Ray is a film that could be said to exist in order to see Jamie Foxx’s career-defining performance. But as a whole film, it is also a work that makes the most honest possible choices that a musical biopic can make. Even without knowing Ray Charles’s music, it stands fully as a story about how a human being transforms suffering into art.

Recommended for

• People who enjoy musical biopics
• Those who want to see the full extent of Jamie Foxx’s acting ability
• Viewers who want an honest story that shows the dark side of a successful artist too