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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
Swaying from side to side at the piano, his back arched almost to the point of snapping, his head reaching for unseen lights, Jamie Foxx, as Ray Charles in "Ray," seems pulled upward to the heavens and downward to the keys at the same time. Watching this vibrantly intelligent and tough-minded bio-pic, which was written by James L. White and Taylor Hackford and directed by Hackford, we can't always make out how much of Charles's full-body attack at the piano is spasmodic and involuntary and how much is a consciously chosen style. But that's all right--we don't need to know. This movie tells us a lot about Ray Charles, who died earlier this year, at the age of seventy-three, but it doesn't tell us everything. Though properly awed by Charles's talent, "Ray" refuses to get chummy or possessive; it allows the man more than a few dark corners.
The movie picks up Charles's story in the late forties, when he's a tense, wary, ambitious but imitative teen-age musician, and carries him through his musical discoveries and his personal pleasures and torments until 1964, when he's both a world-famous artist and a miserable heroin addict. The episode of Ray kicking the drug, with overhead shots of him rolling around in agony, is all too reminiscent of inspirational movies from the fifties like "I Want to Live!" The rest of "Ray" is infinitely better. The sepia-tinted club...
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