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What’s good about director Taylor Hackford’s bio-pic of the ascent of Ray Charles is Jamie Foxx’s characterization of the soul-music giant. The early Oscar buzz is hyperbole, but Foxx does have Charles’s blindisms, bandstand panache, and modulated patter down. And his slyness. Foxx’s Charles plays women as smoothly as he does the piano until, inevitably, his callousness brings things down. At that, Foxx and Hackford seem to be taking it easy on the real Charles, a very prickly character, even though they detail his decades as a junkie and his betrayals of his wife, his family, and his lovers. In this film, as appeared to be the case in his life, the only thing Charles values more than his own ego is his music. What’s bad about Ray is Hackford’s made-for-TV-movie approach. The story rattles along in clumsy vignettes, flashbacks, and short cuts. Clichés abound; far worse is Hackford’s overstatement of Atlantic Records’ president Ahmet Ertegun’s contribution to Charles’s initial discovery of his own style. Kerry Washington charms as Della Bea Robinson, Charles’s long-suffering second wife. But Regina King as Margie Hendricks, who stands in for the string of back-up-singing Raylettes that Charles bedded over the years, seems especially constrained by the film’s simplicity. (152 minutes)
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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