«Raymond & Ray», two very different brothers grappling with memories, characters and loneliness (score 6½)- Corriere.it

It is a successful crossing of genres, albeit without exclamation points, this of «Raymond & Ray», a film available on Apple Tv+, because, by recounting a death, the 63-year-old director Rodrigo Garcia, son of the great writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, a masterpiece from Colombia, manages to mix feelings, characters, loneliness and even a few surprises from the registry office. The set is almost always the cemetery, but don’t think it’s a too sad film, because it’s a very sui generis funeral ceremony, where two half-brothers who haven’t seen or seen each other for a long time converge to bury a dying father suddenly but not much regret.

The two grown boys are mirror image opposites as a character system and scale of values, it is the play of the parts of the DNA: there is Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and there is Ray (Ethan Hawke). The former is repressed and conditioned by clerical work, capable of finding small outlets of happiness and removing what emerges as unresolved and unexpressed, while the latter, a former music lover and trumpeter, as well as avid seducer of the American provinces, does not hold back his nature a little wilder and out of the norm, as he will demonstrate during the narration of this last trip, playing jazz and seducing women.

The problem is that neither of them she had real relationships with her father and now they find themselves “conversing” with a body without memories, without really knowing how much one can sin against a human soul who had never understood them and probably vice versa. The premise of «Raymond & Ray» lies in this incongruous family history which is shown to be clearly enlarged at the time of the funeral and then in the burial in the cemetery, because other companion-wives and at least other half-brothers appear, so much so that it becomes a family reunion with minors intent on playing and the two adults instead forced, by paternal will, to dig the grave sweatily.

It will be, it is immediately clear, the occasion for the two half-brothers more review and control the power of memories, so much so that you end up burying the box of the past that the father had kept in the last corner of his life. Passionate about family duels at the last stage, Garcìa after dealing with the mother-daughter duel (Glenn Close and Mila Kunis) throws himself here on male and virile infantilism, always on the parameters of America disappointed by modern westerns. It is therefore a drama of posthumous feelings and a comedy of dark feelings, a struggle of characters and mixed solitudes and naturally also a comedy of misunderstandings in which the surprising emotional life of the deceased comes to light little by little to the general astonishment of even the insiders. at the funeral home: it would have been perfect as an episode of that magnificent macabre family series that was «Six feet under».

The film is composite and almost funny in the game filial and final surprises with the double and triple family that meets and knows each other and shows up at the cemetery, dark style one step away from the comedy like “Arsenic and old lace”, but without homicidal ladies: here it is loneliness that kills and disinterest in the destinies of others, especially if they have little money, even if they are part of one’s family tree. Certainly among the merits of the funerary comedy there is that of having chosen two actors who get on well together even having to oppose their instincts, McGregor and Hawke are really two brothers of a certain composed cinema and if the former has sometimes fled to other planets , the latter has always had its feet on this earth.