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Edited biography 'Ray' serves late musician, audience well
Jamie Foxx
Nicole Goode/Universal Pictures
Director: Taylor Hackford
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King
MPAA rating: PG-13 for depiction of drug addiction, sexuality and some thematic elements
But Taylor Hackford's "Ray" (filmed as "Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Story") is a well-crafted biography of the blind singer-pianist who died of liver failure June 10 at age 73.
The film proper spans 1948-66, from Charles' early performing years through his peak hit-making days. It segues through frequent, touching flashbacks to his impoverished childhood.
Still called Ray Charles Robinson back then, he was only 5 when he developed glaucoma and was blind by age 7. In between, he stood transfixed as his little brother George drowned in a washtub accident that was to haunt Ray thereafter.
At the risk of seeming heartless, his grief-stricken mother Aretha (eloquently etched by Sharon Warren) impresses on him the need to be self-sufficient ("Never let nobody or nothing turn you into a cripple"). Warren's scenes with C.J. Sanders, who plays the glazed-eyed boy Ray, are the picture's most compelling.
"Ray" nicely balances a sense of career progress, seasoned with plenty of Charles' recordings, with the suggestion of profligate substance abuse, but a highly distilled suggestion of the women who passed through his life.
It omits first wife Eileen Williams and concentrates on the second marriage, to Della Bea Robinson (Kerry Washington), called Bea, but fails to mention in the epilogue that the marriage was dissolved in 1977. Among the affairs depicted are those with blues singer Mary Ann Fisher (Aunjanue Ellis) and feisty Margie Hendricks (Regina King), who was lead singer of his backup group The Raelettes.
The film ascribes to Charles two children by Bea and one by Margie, misplacing nine others along the way.
"Ray" boasts a strong central performance by Jamie Foxx, whose keyboard fingering is his own. Foxx has mastered Charles' performing idiosyncrasies -- the rocking, the twitching, the seductive smile, the growing sense of himself as a marketable gold mine.
The movie walks us through the recording years with becoming clarity, carefully noting time frames, from the formative years with the obscure Swingtime Records label and through his breakout success (1952-59) with Atlantic Records ("I Got a Woman," "What'd I Say"), represented by sympathetic company executives Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff) and Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong).
Charles left them for a more lucrative deal -- including ownership of his own master recordings -- at the then-burgeoning ABC-Paramount label, where he rocketed with all three of his No. 1 hits, "Georgia on My Mind," "Hit the Road, Jack" and the one that crystallized his gift for country-western music, "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Director Taylor Hackford and screenwriter James L. White are co-credited with devising the story, which in this case is to say the selection and weight given to biographical elements to be dramatized.
Given the complexities and mine fields of such a job, they've served Charles well and the audience perhaps well enough. "Ray" runs a hefty two hours and 33 minutes but is so well paced, finely performed by the entire ensemble and musically invigorating that few are likely to mind.
"Ray's" several producers include Karen and Howard Baldwin -- he's the former owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, whose 25 produced movies to date include the Pittsburgh-made "Sudden Death."
