Raymond & Ray Buries the Idea of Toxic Masculinity

So many movies deny our humanity that Rodrigo García’s Raymond & Ray is a welcome exception. Ewan MacGregor and Ethan Hawke portray adult brothers who accept their obligation to bury the father they hated. That means they confront what they don’t like about themselves. “We came from chaos,” recovering addict and womanizer Ray (Hawke) tells divorced Raymond (MacGregor).

García’s original script is neatly conceived like Sam Shepherd’s brothers play True West, but Garcia looks beyond rancor. He sees the goodness in his characters that’s been stifled by harsh experience and social circumstances that led to mistrust: Raymond and Ray fail to understand how the man who raised them also struggled within himself.

In the course of executing their father’s last will, the brothers travel the Southeast and meet unique individuals — a young single mother, Lucia (Maribel Verdú); a nurse, Kiera (Sophie Okonedo); a worldly preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall); and an officious undertaker (Todd Louiso) — whose differences impress, instruct, and restore them. “Rituals are comforting,” Kiera says. That wisdom applies to the sense of ritual — catharsis — that contemporary film culture has lost. (Any echoes of the 1988 Tom Cruise–Dustin Hoffman Rainman reveal where the crisis started.)

Raymond & Ray restores the adventure of self-revelation that movies have forsaken for politicized virtue-signaling. When the father’s final wish causes Ray to scoff, “It’s some bullshit attempt to make amends with the universe, some final grasp at hokey atonement,” his cursing indicts the language of woke Hollywood.

García should know. His sensitive melodramas are almost off the grid of comic-book movies, social-justice tracts, and sordid crime procedurals. Instead, exploring people’s spiritual connections makes him America’s foremost humanist filmmaker. In the vignette films Nine Lives (2005) and Mother and Child (2009), García interweaved separate stories that all happened “under the same moon Jesus saw.” These are modern equivalents to such Hollywood classics as Frank Borzage’s spiritual dramas and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas — out of joint with the political zeitgeist that García was hired to catch in the failed, bizarro Glenn Close trans drama Albert Nobbs (2011). But the powerful Mother and Child offended pro-abortion reviewers, so the film never got the attention it deserved. Likewise, Raymond & Ray goes against orthodoxy — the current “toxic masculinity” madness.

Rather than take up that PC point — which essentially is intended to disorient and undermine heritage and history — García artfully plumbs the depths of masculinity and femininity through each character’s behavior and interaction. Sure, it’s contrived, yet with some breathtaking surprises: Raymond’s sneaking a memento into his pocket, Ray’s chagrin about his own sexual magnetism yet lamenting the physical endowment he didn’t inherit. García’s measure of masculinity includes the preacher’s street smarts: “I’m a man like any other. We run on feet of clay.”

The performers affirm García’s sympathy. MacGregor eventually overcomes the strain of Raymond’s tight-assed voice, which contrasts Okonedo’s warm Southern accent (“Don’t be weird,” she tells Ray), almost singing it like the great Ketty Lester. Hawke catches the look of a man trapped in more than he expects of life — he drops those habits of the Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) that confused narcissism for depth. When Ray confesses, “I wouldn’t know what to do with a kid, especially a boy,” his break on the word “boy” (meaning “son”) conveys both regret and grief.

García stages the funeral as a surreal spectacle befitting different styles of sorrow. (“I couldn’t carry your anger, it would crush me,” Raymond warns.) Both brothers, reflected in a pair of fraternal, acrobat twins (extensions of their family), share a contrapuntal Kaddish and Christian prayer. It is Felliniesque in the best, Altman-like way. What Lucia calls “a front-row seat to the human circus” complements this week’s other profound film, Peaceful (De son vivant). In Raymond & Ray, García’s eulogy for patriarchy is also its sly defense.