Raymond & Ray Review: A Shticky Family Affair

The patness of Rodrigo García’s Raymond & Ray is signified up front by its title. Raymond (Ewan McGregor) prefers the formal variation of his first name, which embodies his fuddy-duddy nature and all-around skittishness with a life that includes a boring white-collar job and several broken relationships. Conversely, Raymond’s half-brother, Ray, (Ethan Hawke), keeps things loose and casual, as he belongs squarely in Hawke’s hipster wheelhouse as a lady’s man, a recovering addict, and a tortured jazz musician. Once Raymond & Ray is over, this is still essentially all we know about these men. It’s as if García fell in love with his film’s cute title and didn’t think his premise through any farther from there.

These brothers do share similar daddy issues, as their father, Harris (Tom Bower), was a womanizer with children all over the East Coast who enjoyed tormenting Raymond and Ray, beginning with giving them the same name. Harris’s history, as gradually parceled out over the course of the siblings’ delayed coming-of-age odyssey, is surprisingly lurid. Harris was distant and abusive, yet women couldn’t get enough of him, a contradiction that never makes much sense because García doesn’t explore it. Learning that Harris has died, Raymond drives up to Ray’s cabin in Virginia and insists that they go to the old man’s funeral.

For a spell, it appears that Raymond & Ray is going to be a one-set two-hander in which these two haunted men wrestle with Harris’s legacy while Raymond tries to coax Ray out of his cabin. That might have been preferable, or at least it would’ve spared viewers the introduction of characters who are even more superficially drawn than Raymond and Ray.

Once they reach the town where Harris lived, each man gets an attractive woman to listen to him, spark up sexual tension, and gently coax him toward a life that isn’t bound to their father’s torments. For Raymond, there’s Lucia (Maribel Verdú), one of Harris’s former lovers, and for Ray, there’s Kiera (Sophie Okonedo), Harris’s nurse. If the women sound like consolation prizes, that’s because they are, as García’s script furnishes them with backstories that make sense only in terms of providing wish-fulfillment for emotionally stunted men.

Raymond & Ray feels oddly negligible as films concerned with grief and buried rage go. It’s a buddy movie in which traumatic events are randomly alluded to in order to momentarily goose the audience. García, who’s the son of the great Gabriel García Márquez, used to make wrenching films that felt wrested from life, particularly Nine Lives, but Raymond & Ray follows a strict three-act playbook that offers catharses on demand. García knows he’s playing with formula too, as he has Ray joke twice with Raymond, asking if this is the moment where they’re supposed to hug. They don’t, of course, which is meant to show us that García is keeping it real. But, then, the distant characterizations and soap-operatic twists suggest otherwise.

García’s attitude toward Harris also leaves a hole at Raymond & Ray’s center. The brothers are told over and over how wonderful Harris was by people who knew the man near the end of his life. Was Harris a reformed sinner? If so, why did he ditch one woman after another, leaving his children to grow up fatherless? And why does Harris passively aggressively insist in his will that Raymond and Ray dig his grave themselves? García keeps throwing shtick like that at the viewer, staging these bits with a self-congratulatory solemnity that smothers the life out of the film. Sam Shepard’s plays, which are an influence here, take themselves seriously, but they have a vigorous and neurotic power. García’s film takes too many of its cues from Raymond: It’s fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.