Raymond & Ray is a dramedy about two traumatized brothers attending the funeral of their abusive father.
Ethan Hawke brings his confidence and presence, and makes Ray three dimensional, makes him dynamic. It's a grounded, subtle, realized. Ewan McGregor struggles a bit with the more buttoned up Raymond but the two have great chemistry and where McGregor stumbles its mostly the fault of the script not his acting. It's great to see Sophie Okonedo as Kiera and Maribel Verdú as Lucia, both bring their unique energies to the screen, but as written both function solely as foils for the two brothers. Bechdel test: fail. The cast are all talented but the themes their asked to contend with are left mystifyingly unexplored.
Visually effective save for the handful of glaring greenscreen car scenes, a decent score with some nice diegetic trumpet playing from Hawke(even though that aspect of the character feels a bit shoehorned given his personal interest and Born To Be Blue). The big offense is the themes, death, grief, trauma, abuse, all of which are hinted at, indicated, but never explored, never actually confronted. There are no insights here, none of it is ever really addressed, nothing is worked through, and for the most part no one takes or gives responsibility for the damage. Most of the characters in the movie are messed up and that's taken here as the norm, they have no impetus to change, no motivation to transform, no path in which to do either. So it ends with the titular leads, basically, in the same position and condition in which the movie started, which is not something that's remotely interesting- two 50 year old messed up white dudes going to their asshole father's funeral while continuing not to deal with how and why they are messed up. Snooze. Shit, Breakfast Club has better insights about fathers and sons and that's not even what it's about.
An intriguing premise and two solid leads devolves into cowardly emotional simplicity.
Currently streaming on Apple+.
Don't See It.
No comments:
Post a Comment