It's not a shame about 'Ray'

Not that Oscars mean anything at all except for an acknowledgement of the amount of money lavished upon a film, but there will be two weighty biopics battling it out at this year’s ceremony, Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Aviator’ and Taylor Hackford's ‘Ray’.

The life of Ray Charles has all the typically requisite raw materials for a film of this sort – a pioneer in his field, brilliantly if controversially combining gospel and r ‘n’ b styles, Charles was beset by a whole host of personal problems including womanising, a smack habit and fighting to overturn prejudices relating to his blindness and skin colour.

This public / private tension is the real point of interest, a fact underlined by the way that, after a powerful depiction of Charles’s horrific experiences of going cold turkey in rehab, the film comes to a swift conclusion, sweeping almost dismissively over the last few decades of the cleaned-up star’s life. (By this point, though, this may also be cause for a sigh of relief, as, at two and a half hours, it starts to feel rather long.)

Inevitably in a film which focuses on a particularly dynamic individual, other characters are little more than marionettes who move around in Charles’s orbit, and the understandable tendency for reverence and respect to creep in means that the undoubted damage he inflicted unknowingly and knowingly upon his family and those whose lives he touched is underplayed.

It is less clear, however, why the scene dealing with Charles being banned from the state of Georgia for refusing to play a segregated venue occupies so little space relatively in the overall narrative, when the significance of this refusal in the struggle for racial equality is so trumpeted at the end.

These are, however, minor gripes about a movie in which the leading actor, Jamie Foxx, is excellent and the music scenes convey vitality, freshness and exuberance. A feast for any fan of Charles’s music, but also an engaging and enjoyable film for those relatively unacquainted with it.