Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Terence Howard, Warwick Davis, Curtis Armstrong. Dir. Taylor Hackford, Bristol Bay/Universal, 2004
Jamie Foxx, nominated for both Supporting Actor and Best Actor at the 2004 Academy Awards, won Best Actor for Ray and, watching Ray tonight for the first time in about 15 years, I'm glad it went down that way. Tom Cruise gave a career-best performance in Collateral, for which Foxx received his Supporting Actor nod. It's a great performance, too, but no moreso than Cruise, ignored by the Academy, so it feels right to me that Foxx got his statuette for the movie where he didn't share the spotlight with a star of Cruise's magnitude.
Not that it would make much difference if Foxx had some high-voltage costar in Ray, because the movie simply doesn't exist without Foxx and his essay of Ray Charles. Not unlike Coal Miner's Daughter, the other music biopic whose star picked up a Best Actor, Ray occurs from Ray's point of view, so there is no b-story, no intriguing subplots. It's all Ray Charles, all the time, requiring Foxx to not only appear in but essentially define, and often carry, every scene. That Foxx's evocation of Charles as a performing star and a troubled soul, an addict and a Civil Rights hero feels so right may have been the final nudge Oscar needed. Simply carrying the film, never being off-camera, always the focal point and hub of all the drama, is a feat worthy of award, and Sissy Spacek surely won hers for the same reason.
Ray, the motion picture, simply is Jamie Foxx. Kerry Washington, Terence Howard, Bokeem Woodbine, Curtis Hanson - they're all strong actors and they all give good performances opposite Foxx, but without Foxx's presence, without Foxx to play off, there's no movie. Great performances can be more than great lines or a great character. Foxx's performance is great, qualitatively, but it's equally great as a tour de force, a real leading man's moment.
That said, there's almost nothing else to say about Taylor Hackford's 2004 biopic. Charles died in June of '04, four months before Ray premiered, never having had its final cut played for him. He asked for two changes in the original screenplay: to show him as eager to learn piano, and to avoid implicating him in getting Raelette Mary Ann Fisher hooked on heroin. Neither makes a difference in the overall quality of the film, which is high, or the story, which was already meh, at best.
The only thing to say about Ray other than "Jamie Foxx" is "without Foxx, Ray would be yet another troubled-junkie-genius story, like Bird or Basquiat or Permanent Midnight, about an engaging and talented fellow whose imagination seems boundless, whose talent, vision, and ambition take our breath, and whose descent into opiated madness or mediocrity has been shown us about every way filmmakers know. Call it junkie-fatigue. I've seen all the biopics about the heroin-people, the cocaine-people, the whatever-people. The drug-tragedies. It started, for me, with movies like Alex Cox's 1986 Sid&Nancy, a movie which, in all its squalor, still managed to glamorize shooting up. Over the years, I've seen seemingly every movie about drug addiction, true or fantasy. Goodfellas, Blow, Drugstore Cowboy, Panic in Needle Park, Pink Floyd the Wall, The Benefactor, I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, Scarface, Clean&Sober - any movie about drugs/addiction/recovery released between 1967 and the Aughts, I've probably seen it, know its plot, or own it.
The result being, Ray's descent-to-addiction story left me largely unmoved other than in the ongoing force of Foxx's personality in the performance. As a story, itself, it's one I know, backward and forward, that I've heard told at about 10,000 meetings, that I've seen every director try tackling in a new way, and that I find the chief liability in all biopics. The rise to success, the moment of inspiration/creation, make great, exciting, elemental storytelling. Success, addiction, excess, the hardships of the road, make tedious storytelling. In Ray Charles's life, the storyteller faces an additional challenge: no comeback. Ray Charles kicked heroin for life. He stayed on the road, toured the world, showed up on TV and in movies, won Grammys, and was pardoned by the state of Georgia. He never found a way back onto the charts, though, never recorded another industry-changing album like Genius Loves Company or Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, never staged a late-career rennaisance powered by his Boomer-buddies, like Roy Orbison. He gave over $20M to HBCUs and worked as much as he wanted, when and where he wanted, but he didn't have the Loretta Lynn or Johnny Cash-style second act.
In Ray's case, that adds up to a movie which crackles with energy for 3/4 of its story, then limps to a somewhat tired - at least for those who know their junkie movies - victory in its last quarter. He got clean, he got pardoned, he got prizes. And scene.
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