Ray

Synopsis: The life story of Ray Charles Robinson (Jamie Foxx) the father of sweet soul music.

Given that Ray is about one of the groundbreaking pioneers of modern American popular music and an icon of Afro-American culture it is a surprisingly conservative film, very much in the mythologizing vein of the traditional biopic which presents its subject as the heroic master of his own destiny. Not that the film avoids the fact that Charles was a junkie and serial womaniser for a significant portion of his career (the part dealt with in this film, his most creative period, from the late '40s to the late '60s) but these messy aspects are sanitized and seamlessly incorporated into his apparently imperturbable and inexorable rise to fame and fortune. Don't come to this film looking for the kind of evocative verisimilitude of Bird (1988), Clint Eastwood's account of the life of jazz legend, Charlie Parker. It is closer to toe-tapping fictional musical confections such as last year's The FightingTemptations which had Cuba Gooding Jr. putting together a gospel choir (and whose editor, Paul Hirsch also is editor here).

Not that this means that Ray is a bad film. On the contrary, it is highly enjoyable albeit a little overlong as it takes an almost year by year look at Charles' life from arriving in Seattle in 1948 as a new kid on the block, before (mercifully) throwing to a text summary of his last 30 or so years (he died in 2004). In an effort to give some dramatic depth to the story the filmmakers intercut the chronological account with flashbacks and lateral segues into fantasy sequences in order to suggest his possession by tragic memories. This is all very well but as is the American wont, laid on with a wide trowel and unnecessarily reiterative. Whilst on the upside it is a handsome production, it is almost too handsome, its immaculate production values allowing for very little of the sense of grinding rural poverty which were apparently Charles's origins or of the hardship of segregated America which provided the context for much of his music (the scene depicting his conversion to the civil rights movement is, to say the least, perfunctory).

The music is, however, fabulous with either the original or new recordings by Charles himself convincingly brought to life on stage or in studio settings. I Got A Woman, What'd I Say, Hit The Road Jack and Unchain My Heart are only a few of the songs performed. Whether or not you are a fan of Charles' music there's the price of your seat, right there. I'm sure the singer's estate and publishing company will be very happy.

And finally there's Jamie Foxx's marvellous mimicry. With his wrap around sunglasses, beaming smile and stiff-backed sway, Charles was one of the most recognizable of black American musicians, regularly seen in music documentaries or cameoing in films such as The Blues Brothers (1980), Foxx gets him so right, whether in performance or daily life that after a while you cease to be aware that it is not Charles that you are seeing (in this respect the filmmakers make an inexplicably destructive decision towards the end of the film that spoils much of Foxx's fine work). If as biography Ray is glossily mythicising, as a celebration of the man and his music and an entertaining time at the movies, it is just the ticket.

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