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Ray charles movie1/20/2024 ![]() Cinematographer Pawel Edelman has given the film a rich, shadowed, dusky look. "Ray" has been made on the faith that a mass audience exists for something other than car crashes and adolescent japes. They communicate no belief in movies as a communal experience, not even the regret of people who want to work that way but, by temperament, can't. But this year, there has been something equally depressing about a good movie like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" as about a bad one like "Sideways," and that is the preciousness they both share. Sometimes it's the only way good work can get done. ![]() Almost all of the most-praised American pictures this year have been catered to small segments of the audience. It is exactly the old-fashioned quality of "Ray" that makes it so remarkable. Sanders) first uses his sense of hearing to find his way around the shack he shares with his mother, the film has the direct, overwhelming emotion that brings us to the movies, and the peculiarly American-movie lyricism that is a marriage of commercial savvy and the instincts of craft. This is conventional filmmaking, but at its best, as in the miraculous scene where the young Ray (played by the remarkable child actor C.J. Here his work feels caught up in the joy of responding to the most challenging subject he has ever tackled. Hackford's career has been marked by his wish to revive the well-crafted studio style of the '40s and '50s, but with a few exceptions ("Dolores Claiborne," some of "Everybody's All-American") it hasn't clicked. The work that director Taylor Hackford does in "Ray" reveals its own confidence and ambition. Theirs are faces that, as Stanley Crouch wrote of the African-American faces in the work of Pittsburgh photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris, "speak of something so far the other side of alienation that all narrow images of these people - or any people - are called to the carpet." Killingly sharp in their dresses and suits, availing themselves of the sophisticated night-life pleasures that once belonged only to whites, these people are separate (for now) but certainly anyone's equal in glamour, sexiness and hipness. ![]() The same confidence is visible on the faces we see in the black clubs Ray plays. The rock-solid confidence that made Charles' achievement possible is what underlies Jamie Foxx's magnificent performance. Ray Charles would not have been able to even imagine encompassing so much of the music he loved if he did not believe that a blind black man could make a place for himself in the America of the '40s and '50s, could transcend the barriers that defined what that place was. A movie bio of Ray Charles must be equal to the bigness of the man and the bigness of his vision of American music, and that's the crucial test that "Ray" passes. All of the conventions of the showbiz bio are in place in "Ray": the early tragedy that both spurs and haunts the hero the chance meetings that, as in Dickens, later prove fortuitous the exhilaration and shock that the hero's unique talents provoke the personal turmoil that, in the genre, is always attendant upon professional success the downward spiral that, in this case at least, presages redemption even the montage of neon signs sliding across the screen to denote new cities, new clubs.Īnd yet any viewers who look at "Ray" and see only clichés are declaring themselves hopelessly lost to the real achievement of this picture, which is nothing less than a statement of faith in the inclusiveness of American culture.
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