Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: RAYMOND & RAY [Toronto International Film Festival 2022]

"Ray and Raymond" [Gala Presentation] again is another interesting character drama that the studios don't make anymore. Apple Original Films, like with their series "Black Bird", is interestingly enough starting to make a little more edgy films in terms of subject matter without walking too much over the line. The story here is a tried and true element of family coming together to bury a relative that they have been estranged from for years. Casting Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke as brothers is an interesting construct especially if you don't have to build sequences. You can just let the two of them be in a scene. It results in some very heartfelt and memorable bits though it never quite becomes transformative.

At the beginning, the film becomes and feels like a play, line reading before it settles into itself. McGregor and Hawke has very different styles in terms of emoting and acting but the film itself has unique tone. Rodrigo Garcia directed McGregor in "The Last Days In The Desert". Like that film, "Ray" focuses on the notion of home but also of expectation. This story is a comedy of errors but also of happenstance in what might actually have happened in the past in comparison to actually what is. The movie in its smaller details speak to this. The brothers, or even their extended family, are like each other but also complete unconnected. At one point the film separates after a particularly dramatic and interesting burial service that is both undeniably charming and human but also pathetic in its own sort of way.

This is when the brothers truly define themselves but only because their lives or at least the accepting of their lives has been formed in the earlier scenes. Their father was an awful person in many ways and yet through some of the women he interacted with later, there is not necessarily a redemption but a facet of a life; The two women that swirl with the brothers in a nurse Kiera (played by Sophie Okonedo) and their house host (in a way) Lucia (Maribel Verdú) offer different points of reflection but Verdu understands the humor and, in a way, how to handle all men. "Raymond & Ray" is a comedy and drama of errors but with enough heart, eccentricities and grounded performances to make it, if not a window into the normalcy of family dysfunction, at least a reflection of its possibility. B

By Tim Wassberg