![]() ![]() ![]() Just as quickly as any beloved character draws your sympathy, they rip your heart open. But if it hasn’t always been certain whether she wouldn’t succumb to a generational history of violence, “Ray Donovan: The Movie,” clarifies with an exclamation mark. It had to end,” she says to Ray after a devastating final development that may seem to signal that this traumatic familial cycle has finally been broken. Seriously, does Ray ever sit down and eat?Ī young widow, Bridget somehow retained her sanity and humanity through a tumultuous childhood. Shifting its location to New York City, it’s a wonder that Ray has yet to willingly find a permanent resting place in the East River, with his family alongside him, given his interminable will to dive into the deepest of ends, in the darkest of nights, using his shrewdness to clean up one hellish mess after another, seemingly subsisting only on serviceable scotch and coffee. He’s destined to put others in harm’s way. He’s aware and tries to be anything but like his father, yet the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Like his relationship with his father, Ray’s relationship with his daughter is just as complicated. In Ray’s universe, every action he takes has reverberating effects, and the people closest to him feel them the most, most especially his daughter Bridget (Kerris Dorsey), who plays a crucial role in bringing the finale to a close. For long-time fans of the series, how you suspected it would end, is exactly how it ends painful and conflicted. In what effectively becomes a showdown between fatalism and nihilism, one has to be eliminated. Nearly half of Americans have a family member or close friend who is an addict, so it’s possible that we empathize with Mickey because we see ourselves in him, and we want to be better, and do better.īut we also want Ray to win, while recognizing that in this dynamic, both of them simply can’t exist harmoniously. Mickey drinks Ray drinks his brothers drink, burying their pain and struggle in addiction. It’s not a coincidence that alcohol abuse is itself a character in the series. Maybe he reflects a failure in all of us a flaw we acknowledge but are powerless to do anything about. The audience roots for him and wants him to win. He understands the shitty hand that he’s been dealt, and he plays the hell out of it. It would be easy to hate him, but his love of life is palpable. There’s a streak in Mickey that suggests he cares for his children. Yet the character is painted in a way that engenders empathy. He is a “piece of shit” father Mickey knows this and has accepted it. It’s titled “Ray Donovan,” but it may as well be called “Ray & Mickey,” because Voight’s performance is every bit as responsible for the series’ thump. That pretty much sums up their volatile relationship, and yet, now as grown men, one just can’t seem to exist without the other. “You always were a piece of shit,” a young Ray confronts his drunken father, and they throw punches at each other. Through a series of flashback sequences (there are several of them in the movie) with Christopher Gray as the young Ray and Bill Heck having tons of fun as Mickey, Ray’s childhood is continually fleshed out, and the movie answers dangling questions about this long-running story of tumultuous familial drama. Picking up where the seventh season’s cliffhanger ended, Mickey is on the run, and Ray is determined to find him before everyone else does, while his brothers Terry (Eddie Marsan), Bunchy (Dash Mihok), and Daryll (Pooch Hall) juggle the usual existential inquiries and a past from which they never seem able to run. Oscars 2023: Best Original Song Predictions Paramount+ Prices Are Going Up After Showtime Merger ![]() 'Party Down' Season 3 Struggles to Recapture Its Cavalier Spirit Liev Schreiber plays Ray Donovan as a scruffy, taciturn presence who is up against an equally unrelenting force in his ex-con father, Mickey, played by Jon Voight, a paralyzing, unpredictable, but oddly lovable character audiences can’t help but root for, which says something about the writing, casting, and performances. The series’ drumbeat is a toxic father-son relationship. But material trappings can’t completely mask a pain that stems from childhood trauma that haunts him through seven seasons, and now a movie finale made mostly for diehard fans. That’s because Ray is great at what he does. He always sparkles in his sharp blazers and crisp, white, Dolce and Gabbana shirts that get bloodied so that yours don’t have to, for a considerable fee of course. That said, for newbies to the “Ray Donovan” universe adventurous enough to enter it for the first time via its movie finale, the title character is a fixer for the elite the invisible and invincible man who makes expensive problems disappear. It’s nearly impossible to discuss Showtime’s “ Ray Donovan: The Movie” without giving away key plot points. ![]()
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