Ray

The appropriately named Taylor Hackford has spent his entire career trying to bring back the anonymous studio look of the majority of forties and fifties Hollywood product. Supposedly Hackford spent nearly two decades trying to make a film about Ray Charles, but after watching Ray there is no way to tell he feels any passion at all for the material. The film looks outstanding and Jamie Foxx gives a star-making performance, but every decision the director makes shows that he has no trust in his audience to understand what is happening to the main character. What interest the film can garner from Foxx’s superb performance and the incomparable music dissipates repeatedly when Hackford shows himself to be the hack that he has always been. The film hits rock bottom when, after being arrested for heroin possession in Indiana, the cops interrogating Ray let reporters and photographers into the jail cell to take his picture. The audience is treated to a slow motion shot from Ray’s point-of-view consisting of the camera flashes firing off and the reporters leaning in to yell questions at him. This is a manipulative and false sequence because the film wants us to feel sympathy for the character for experiencing something Ray never experienced. For all those who have forgotten, Ray Charles was blind. There can’t be a point-of-view shot from his POV unless it’s a black screen. Had Hackford chosen to do that at different points in the film it would have made for an interesting way to get the audience to feel “with” Ray as opposed to feel “about” Ray. And Hackford makes that same decision, to admire Ray instead of get to understand him, at just about every turn. Ray Charles life should make for a superb film, but Ray is not it.