There was something like ashy molasses in Ray Charles’ voice: dripping syrupy sweet with southern charm yet charged with gritty, unhewn candor, it resonated with a sense of immediacy and emotional clarity that was nothing short of divine.

His music can run the gamut from gimmicky pop classics to grandiose orchestral ballads but somewhere floating beneath the calculated, precise production there’s a poignant beauty that could only be described as natural. One’s heart could beat to the slipshod, improvised bravado of “What’d I Say,” or it could wiggle, staccato beat-to-beat, calypso style to “Unchain my Heart.”

And yet somehow, even after seventeen tedious years of development, Ray, based on Charles’ life, does not muster any semblance of the splendor within his music. The film lacks emotional attachment on any level and fails in every way as a meaningful addition to his life and legacy. With a mix of deceitful, manipulative Hollywood storytelling techniques masquerading as artistic strokes and tacky, unfocused, pop filmmaking, director Taylor Hackford manages to turn an amazing story of sheer will triumphing over adversity into a two-and-a-half hour mess that will damage Charles’ memory.

Jamie Foxx, star of Ray, has received considerable Oscar buzz for his almost perfect portrayal of Ray Charles—and deservedly so. From the close-eyed, contorted face that seems to interpret the world with tactile emotion to the quick paced, pitch-perfect, squeaky southern drawl, Foxx has Charles dead on. But with a script devoid of any genuine emotion, and a filmmaker who isn’t quite sure what he’s doing, Foxx’s performance does not resonate. It bears a greater resemblance to a three hour-long impression rather than an Oscar-worthy performance. Foxx is acting, and doing a damned fine job of it, but one knows this: the transparent, shallow notions embodied in the script cannot be hidden by Foxx’s technical skills.

While most viewers under the age of 30 will know Ray Charles for his dirge-like rendition of “America the Beautiful,” or for his shiny-suit stint in a series of Pepsi commercials, Charles’ history is anything but clean. It is certainly not the stuff of our morally-obsessed pop culture. Throughout the film, we see Charles smoke his first joint (which he got from a midget, by the way), sleep with countless women, become a heroin junkie, and systematically, one by one, alienate every person who ever gave a damn about him.

Charles certainly makes up for these shortcomings later in life—for the most part. He drops the junk and becomes quite the civil rights advocate, but he still womanizes heavily, fathering five (some sources say seven) children with other women while still married. However, the film tries to explain his foibles through overdone flashbacks that are peppered haphazardly throughout the film. It’s as if Hackford doesn’t trust us enough to make sense of things on our own, offering us visually tacky psychologically explanatory sequences that retard the tone and tenor of the film.

And it gets worse: Ray is strangely more comic than dramatic. While most contemporary dramas (especially biopics) could easily be called tragicomic, with jokes sprinkled here and there to complexify our sympathies with key characters, this film is too funny, creating a dramatic space in which characters are impossible to judge. When the film’s most loathsome characters are simultainiously its most engaging characters, the viewer’s interpretation of the film is split between what the diegesis is attempting to explicitly say and the way these characters actually show on screen.

Similarly schizophrenic direction is scattered throughout the entire film: the camera stays almost exclusively in extreme close or medium-close shots in order to provoke an ultimately false sense of intimacy and the film frequently inter-cuts between Charles’ sketchy adult life and the recording or performance of some of his biggest hits in an effort to exploit the emotion of Charles’ songs. But there is nothing but distance in Ray; the disruption in tone caused by the frequent comic interludes undermines our ultimate attachment to these characters.

Despite all of its flaws Ray remains somewhat watchable, somehow entertaining. It says all the wrong things in the wrong way but it’s still interesting—Charles led an extraordinary life. Though the film reads more like a bad history lesson than a work that complicates our understanding of a historical figure, Ray is still one to go see—if not for the music then for Foxx. His performance in Collateral is probably more worthwhile, but his Ray Charles certainly deserves wide attention.

—Bryant A. Jones

Zelary

Directed by Ondrej Trojan

Sony Pictures Classics

Zelary, the official submission of the Czech Republic to last year’s Academy Awards, is a beautifully-told story of redemption and second chances in which all is familiar, but nonetheless everything seems new.