Movie Details
Movie: Raymond & Ray(2022)
Director: Rodrigo García
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jalyn Baiden, Ethan Hawke
Release date: 12 September 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.2/10
Language: English
Duration: 1h 40m
Trailer
Synopsis
While Netflix has been focusing mainly on quantity for a long time, and their serial production does not pay much attention to quality, the situation is the opposite with competitor Apple. The Apple streaming service shoots for fun and chooses projects carefully. And sometimes a completely inconspicuous piece breaks out among them, which resonates with the audience and eventually collects prestigious awards (we salute last year’s V rytmu srdce). In a good case, the novelty Raymond & Ray could also be included in the same category. Although it works with the traditional theme of estranged relatives and family trauma, the creators managed to get on board the actors like Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke, and the potential for a strong spectacle was there. However, the result will probably not rank among audience hits and aspirants for various nominations.
We thus follow the story of two estranged half-brothers, Raymond and Ray, who are of course completely different and at first glance only have one thing in common – a bad relationship with their father, who made their lives hell. He has now died, however, and the brothers gather years later to bury their cursed father. However, he prepared an unexpected task for them. In his last will, he expressed his wish that his sons dig his grave with their own hands. During this activity, of course, a lot of unexpected secrets, and family grievances surface, and both heroes realize that maybe they didn’t know their dad as much as they suspected.
So Raymond & Ray is at its core a classic conversation piece in which a handful of characters talk about death, family relationships, faith, or traumas that have affected them for the rest of their lives. And in this direction, the film works quite well and fulfills its purpose. The brothers are rightly different, and the conflict between them slowly bubbles up, the script also gradually reveals the individual skeletons in the closet and slowly adds secondary figures to the game who knew the cursed father from completely different angles. The atmosphere is properly melancholic and the creators help themselves in some moments with pleasantly gentle or even cynical humor. Thanks to this, the passage around the digging of the grave is a nice combination of serious dialogue and lighthearted moments. But even with these positives, the film basically won’t blow you away even for a moment.
Although the authors correctly fill the box of small “independent” conversations with a couple of actors, at the same time, they do not show anything extra significant in it, and the viewer just gradually ticks off individual properties and events that have to happen. And of course, they will happen. The dialogues are not strong enough, the plight of the characters does not affect you emotionally, and in terms of direction, it is a crafting routine that moves too slowly, and despite several tense scenes, it fails to hook the viewer sufficiently. And when the relationships seem to be progressing nicely, the film fades to nothing in the last third and leaves no emotional trace in you. Fortunately, there is a well-matched acting duo, which of course will play their standard without any problems and will be able to keep the audience’s attention even in the weaker moments of the director.
So Raymond & Ray is no big loss and serves its purpose in its conversational waters. At the same time, one can feel that with a more confident and skilled director, the whole thing could have turned out a little better, and thanks to the strong cast, there was the potential to leave a bigger mark on the genre. Unfortunately, this did not happen, and even if the new product from Apple does not leave you with a bad taste or negative feelings, at the same time, despite its strong themes, it will slip out of your head unexpectedly quickly.
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