Anyone who has ever had to bury a loved one knows the emotional toll it can take. That relatable feeling weaves throughout Raymond & Ray and elevates the film to a level I wasn’t expecting. Couple that with believable, real-feeling performances from the whole cast and you have a recipe for a good film.
The movie opens on a really nice shot of Ewan McGregor’s Raymond driving in the rain to go visit Ethan Hawke’s Ray, the two titular characters uniting within the first minute of the film. I appreciated that we don’t learn everything we need to know about these guys off the bat right at the beginning. All we know is that they’re half-brothers with the same father who has now passed. We learn they weren’t fond of their father and hadn’t spoken to him (or each other) in quite some time. Other than that, everything else we learn about these characters we find out along the way.
I really enjoyed the performances from every character in this film. Each character brought their own dynamic and it worked well. I especially liked Vondie Curtis-Hall as Reverend West. I thought his performance brought out a lot in the characters around him. McGregor and Hawke were good, however they were curiously flat in the first half hour, and I felt like it took them a while to get into their characters and really show it on screen.
The thing that really makes this film shine, however, is the emotion. Throughout the film, we see how much pain the main characters are going through, especially when everyone around them seems to think highly of their father. Some of the best scenes in this film are ones with no dialogue, where we can see the pain that the father had on Raymond and Ray, even extending into his death. He was the person that drove their family apart, and the film shows how real that sort of knife can divide a family. While it seems the two Rays have a decent enough relationship, the damage that was done was enough to forever affect who they are, and the film shows that not everything ends happily, which I appreciated.
Final Thoughts
Raymond & Ray is emotionally gripping, unforgiving in its character analysis, and overall draining to watch. That’s what makes it great. There are great performances mostly all around here, and I was all in for most of this film. Not a lot happened (it was a film about a funeral/burial after all), but once I finished, I felt like I had known the characters for a LOT longer than the 1h 45m runtime suggested. Aside from some minor flaws, I enjoyed this film much more than I expected going in.
