Timing was right for Foxx to secure lead role in 'Ray'

The actor incorporates his musical background into the role.
By DAVID GERMAIN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
He certainly did not feel it at the time, but director Taylor Hackford is enormously lucky it took 15 years to bring his film biography of Ray Charles to the screen.
Hackford himself concedes it was a blessing it took so long to put the project together since he first met Charles in the late 1980s.
The odds are slight that Hackford could have found an actor back then who could have come close to Jamie Foxx's skill, commitment and sheer rightness for the title role.
"Ray" was just waiting for Foxx to flower as a performer, gradually easing himself into more dramatic roles after his start in standup comedy and such lowbrow raunch as "Booty Call."
Beyond the physical resemblance, Foxx is so good, so earnest, so authentic as Ray Charles that you practically forget he's an actor playing a part and start to feel that he IS Ray Charles.
Primed by Foxx's excellent turn as a cabbie hijacked by Tom Cruise's hitman in "Collateral," Academy Awards voters cannot help but give Foxx a best-actor nomination for "Ray."
The herky-jerky head bobbing, the hemming, hawing hesitation of the voice. The smooth, playfully cocky spirit beneath the soft-spoken and seemingly deferential facade. The passionate emulation of Charles' keyboard style (a classically trained pianist, Foxx taps his musical training to great effect). Even the way the sweat hangs off his brow.
It all screams Ray!
Charles' life
Charles, who died in June, gave his blessing to a warts-and-all treatment of his life, so "Ray" unflinchingly depicts his introduction to drugs, prolonged heroin addiction and painful cold-turkey recovery.
His tender yet troubled home life with his wife, luminously played by Kerry Washington, is set alongside his womanizing ways, notably in his affair with Margie Hendricks (fiercely portrayed by Regina King), the tragic spitfire of Charles' backup singers, the Raelettes.
The singer's kinship with early collaborators such as manager Jeff Brown (Clifton Powell) and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong) and producer Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff) is countered by the unsentimental business savvy that prompted him to change record labels and drop Brown for manager Joe Adams (Harry Lennix).
Foxx's performance cuts much deeper than the dead-on impersonations of some film biographies, Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in "Man on the Moon" or Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in "The Doors." Those movies are great technical performances that give viewers the outer incarnation of their subjects without much glimpse beneath the skin.
With "Ray," Foxx delivers a stirring, soulful portrait of the artist on the level of Sissy Spacek's Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter."
Minor problems
The film itself has flecks and flaws that keep it out of the league of that Lynn biopic. Charles' boyhood tragedies -- his brother's death and the gradual loss of his eyesight -- are handled rather superficially through sketchy flashbacks. The editing tends toward choppiness, particularly in the film's abrupt flash-forward to round out Charles' later years.
Even at 21/2 hours, "Ray" feels like a drastically reduced story, a two-disc best-of compilation scaled back and crammed onto a single CD.
It might have played better as a four-hour cable miniseries, yet in the film's favor, "Ray" is almost always interesting, even if the drama is uneven at times.
The film tracks Charles' rise from teenage keyboard jockey for clubs and house bands in the late 1940s, through his early stumblings as a Nat King Cole sound-alike, to his '50s breakthrough, when he found his voice and style in a raw, joyous blend of gospel-tinged blues on such hits as "I Got a Woman," "What'd I Say" and "Unchain My Heart."
Vocals
Foxx provides vocals for a couple of softer, Cole-styled numbers, but Hackford wisely has him lip-synch to Charles' own voice for most of the songs. Imitating the man is one thing. Imitating the voice is another.
It would have been lovely had Charles lived to bask in the adoration of fans at the premiere of "Ray." Charles was able to view a cut of the film shortly before he died, though, allowing him to appreciate the remarkable performance of the man stepping into his shoes.