Seeing is believing

REVIEWED - RAY: Jamie Foxx's portrayal of blind soul legend Ray Charles is a wonder to behold, writes Michael Dwyer

Taylor Hackford made his feature film début in 1980 with The Idolmaker, an incisive and cynical picture of the music industry that was modelled on Bob Marucci, the shrewd svengali who groomed Frankie Avalon, Fabian and other pop singers for success in the 1960s.

While Hackford's subsequent features mostly have been essentially formulaic love stories or thrillers - An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds, White Nights, Proof of Life - they were notable for the way he slickly incorporated potential hit singles in their packaging. His distinctive flair for wedding music and film has been demonstrated much more effectively in his Chuck Berry documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll; in La Bamba, the Ritchie Valens biopic Hackford developed and produced; and now, in his best film to date, Ray.

Its starting point is 1948, when Ray Charles was en route from Florida to Seattle, pursuing his musical ambitions, and the film dwells primarily on his rise as a hugely popular singer over the next 18 years.

Blind since childhood, Charles is depicted as remarkably self-sufficient and wholly selfish - an uncommonly resourceful individual, an astute businessman, and an unswervingly ambitious performer who never felt any sense of loyalty to his longtime band members nor to the Atlantic Records executives who nurtured and groomed his career.

The film does not shirk from dealing with his voracious sexual appetite and the uncontrolled adultery that persisted throughout his marriage, nor from charting his growing dependence on heroin, which almost wrecked his career.

The screenplay places undue emphasis on the lingering guilt Charles felt since he was a boy and still had his sight as he helplessly witnessed the accidental drowning of his younger brother. That cavil aside, Hackford has assembled an energetic, engrossing and illuminating chronicle of the singer's life and work, punctuated with many of his memorable recordings and featuring a spine-tingling central performance from Jamie Foxx that lights up the screen. As one gifted artist portrays another, the versatile Foxx is hypnotic to watch, and he so credibly inhabits the role of Charles that it's very easy to forget one is watching an actor at work.