In aimless new dramedy Raymond & Ray, Ethan Hawke and Ewen McGregor play half-brothers who must bury their father — and decades of trauma — over the course of a long, late-summer day.
Directed by Rodrigo García, and produced by Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Roma), the film is never believable for even a second. Inessential by design and pleasant enough, this one’s built to go in one ear/eye and out the other just as quickly.
Raymond & Ray review
At the start of the 105-minute movie, which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, half-brothers Raymond (played by Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) haven’t spoken in a long time. They need to reconcile their lifetime of awkwardness and differences after their dad, Ben Harris (Tom Bower), dies. Ray hates the old man with a passion, while Raymond hates him in a more quiet, more insular way.
Raymond really wants to attend the funeral, but can’t drive himself due to a DUI conviction. Raymond, on the other hand, needs a little convincing. He hated the old man, so why not just let him go? But it’s harder to say no to his nicer, clearly spiraling and confused brother, so he packs up his gun and his trumpet and they head to the funeral.
When they get there, they’re in for a surprise. There are the fees, first of all. But then there’s their father’s last request: He wants his sons to physically bury him. As in, dig the hole themselves. They meet their dad’s friends and confidants (Maribel Verdú, Sophie Okonedo, Todd Louiso and the great Vondie Curtis-Hall among them), and mostly detail moments from their lives out loud for our benefit that no two lifelong relations would talk through. They also rethink their whole lives and their relationships with their father.
Everyone loved their dad, it turns out, which is news to them because they sure didn’t. He was a violent abuser who slept with Raymond’s wife, got remarried a dozen times, changed religions just as often, and was basically a selfish prick. So why did everyone like him so much? And when will all their other half-brothers finally arrive?
A good-natured lack of ambition
Director Rodrigo García started off as a guy making pleasant independent distractions like 2000’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives — buzzed-about dramas with sprawling ensembles that faded from memory a few years later.
Then he started directing high-profile TV like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, followed by low-profile TV like the Party of Five reboot a few years back.
The movies stayed the same exact degree of gentle character dramas, even as the world moved past the need for inoffensive character studies. His 2011 drama Albert Nobbs still gets talked about in a kind of lightly memed sort of way, but if anyone’s discussed Mother & Child, Passengers or the more recent Four Good Days at any length in the last decade, well, I must have missed that.
García just seems to lack ambition. It made sense that producers brought him in to direct TV because he can slot in, do a day’s work with no fuss and move on. But every few years, he emerges with a fatally polite, good-natured drama for us to forget about a few minutes after it ends.
It’s the same with Raymond & Ray, from the cutesy name to the Sundance-friendly premise that screams “do something better with your day.” If Apple TV+ movies played on airplanes (they might, in fairness — I don’t fly very often), that’s how most of the world would watch this.
Ewan McGregor sleepwalks through another role
McGregor and García worked together a few years back on Last Days in the Desert, their low-key movie about Jesus, in which the actor mostly stares into the middle distance. I like movies where people stare into the middle distance, but I’ll bet most of you are hearing about this movie for the first time right now, or reaching very far back into your memory to conjure any images of it.
Playing moody Jesus doesn’t require the world’s most stylistic or expressive actor, so McGregor did OK there. Here, opposite Ethan Hawke, he looks like a rank amateur.
McGregor does alright in his few big emotional scenes — like crying at his dad’s grave — but Hawke has matured into the most naturalistic performer alive. McGregor has not. Unless Danny Boyle‘s around, McGregor just kind of says his lines. (I think we can safely blame Star Wars, movies he had to drink heroic amounts of booze to get through, for knocking the wind out of his sails.)
Ethan Hawke’s better, but his role lacks realism
Hawke’s not even at his best here either, frankly. His character’s written initially as a gun-toting hick lowlife. Then he must immediately shed that persona to become a nebbish dealing with bureaucratic troubles, and then a soulful jazz trumpeter? There’s just no consistency there. I’m guessing it’s because García doesn’t know any gun-toting lowlifes, but he does know that Hawke can play the trumpet.
I don’t know Ethan Hawke (though I’ve met him — nice guy!) but I do know my fair share of gun-toting lowlifes. It really doesn’t track that these two characters grew up in the same house.
I have to assume García lost someone recently, because the movie’s script is largely a collection of odd details surrounding the death and burial of an old man. As such, it’s perfectly respectable. But García can’t bring himself to really do more than gently prod these issues.
A more exacting director would have mined them for more than a fleeting smile, but that’s just not who we’re dealing with. García, kinda like Peter Farrelly (director of the recent Apple TV+ movie The Greatest Beer Run Ever), is a solid enough crafter of scenes and dialogue, but he seems almost disinterested in images. Soft jazz plays under every scene as people loudly (but not too loudly) deal with their emotional troubles.
It’s like Going to Starbucks: The Motion Picture, even after the acrobats show up (don’t ask). Whatever you pictured from the poster, that’s what you get with Raymond & Ray.
★★☆☆☆
Watch Raymond & Ray on Apple TV+
Raymond and Ray premieres Friday on Apple TV+.
Rated: R
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
