In this article, I’m going to do something that I almost never do in this column and that is admitting that I made a mistake. Earlier this month in my Overrated series I railed against Showtime’s Ray Donovan. I said that it was one of the most overblown series in the 2010s, that it may have done damage to Showtime as a brand, and that I didn’t think the movie that was coming up later that month could successfully wrap up the series or salvage what had been in my mind a failed concept.
Well, I still think it was tremendously overrated and Showtime clearly is in trouble (though its unrelated to Ray Donovan; they’ve just gone through a flurry of cancellations including that of Black Monday another acclaimed series I didn’t like.) But last night I ended up seeing Ray Donovan: The Movie and it managed to not only successfully conclude the series but pretty much salvage both the title character and the concept itself.
It may have helped matters that the film was co-written by Liev Schreiber himself, who may have had a clearer picture when the idea for the movie was announced last year as how to he thought the series should have ended. And having seen his vision for it, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the series as a whole would have been better off with more input from Schreiber.
The film took place not long after the actions of the final season. Most of the film takes the form of a bloody Ray in a motel room to his therapist for the last two seasons, played by Alan Alda. The season ended with Mickey (Jon Voight) stealing a fortune from a rival family of the Donovans’ and in the process of the theft, his granddaughter Bridget’s (Kerris Dorsey) young husband was killed by a stray bullet. Ray was unable to intervene because simultaneously he learned why his sister had committed suicide and murdered the man he held responsible – who just happened to be the father of the woman he had been having an affair with in Season 7, Molly.
In the middle of the mourning, Ray did what he did so often when it came to dealing with dark situations and abandoned his family to find Mickey. His brothers knew very clearly what this was about – “he’s gonna kill Mickey.” Ray followed Mickey to Boston and chased down his father and after a spur of violence, which left him badly hurt he pointed a gun and his father and pulled the trigger…but there were no bullets left.
That’s the climatic moment that so many series lead up to in their final seasons – I was reminded of Walter and Skyler struggling for the knife in what is arguably the climactic moment of Breaking Bad and FBI Agent Stan confronting the Jennings’ in a garage in the final episode of The Americans. It didn’t really matter that Ray didn’t kill Mickey; the fact that he finally did it was what the series was leading up to.
By this point Bunch and Bridget had learned of Ray’s actions and had driven up to Boston. Bridget was quiet almost the entire ride, until she asked one question: “Do you think some people are just bad?” Bunchy paused for a long time, and then said: “Yeah I do.” At a stop at a convenience store, Bridge jacked the car, the phone that was tracking Mick and the gun.
Even in his current condition, badly wounded, Ray clearly was a man on a mission. Despite calls from both his brother and Bridge, he had no intention of stopping. When Molly called him and told him that Mick was planning to visit him to sell his money back, Ray drove to the Sullivan house. He found Mick was gone and Molly was there… with what looked to be millions of dollars. Mick had left it for his sons.
Ray did what he did when he just couldn’t deal – he started to leave. Molly begged him to know what had happened to her father. Ray did what he did so many times – he answered without answering. Then he started to leave – and Molly shot him in the stomach. For a man who has spent his entire life with a stoic expression glued to his face, the look of shock on Ray’s face was stunning.
Ray kept trying to soldier on but crashed his car…and his father came upon…and tried to take care of his son.
At this point I should mention the present action was only part of the film. We spent just as much of it in Ray’s childhood in South Boston. Throughout Season 7 we had been getting a picture of the Donovans youth and how Ray and his family grew up. Now we got the rest of the picture, and it was stunning. Because while it was still clear that Mickey Donovan was a ne’er do well, a con man and a criminal, it became increasingly clear that he was never as horrible as Ray had been telling us since the pilot. A large part of this was because of the molestation that he suffered through in his youth and we saw a scene that told us a lot about how traumatized he’d been. We were at his sister’s funeral and the priest who spent years abusing him had told him he was being transferred to another parish (this was the Boston archdiocese after all) and what a good boy he was to his family. Mickey then showed up to the funeral drunk and announced his hatred for ‘letting that fairy touch my daughter’. Ray responded: “At least he was there,” and then got into his fight with his father.
We always knew that Ray hated his father and how that affected all his actions. Now after more than a decade, we finally learned the truth about what caused everything that happened and it was a genuine shock. As we had learned Mickey had been cast as a ‘technical adviser’ on a major Hollywood movie about being a southie. He’d become drinking buddies with the star of the film, and one night an executive a young Ezra Goldman (the man who would bring Ray to LA and be his surrogate father) asked him to follow Sean and Mickey. It was a late night, there was a lot of drinking and coke, and a high movie star starting playing with a gun…and accidentally shot a woman. In the face of panic, the young Ray became the man we knew, coldly got Sean out of the bar…and then framed his unconscious father for the murder. The crime and sentence that had been responsible for pretty much all of the action in the series was entirely Ray’s doing.
The final minutes of Ray Donovan were among the most heartbreaking – yes, you read that right – I’ve seen on television in awhile, and actually proved that my idea of the only way the series could end was wrong. Mickey told his son that the money he got really was for him – his reward for taking care of all of them for so long. Ray did something that I would’ve thought was unthinkable in the last season – he accepted responsibility for what he had done to Mick. ‘You didn’t deserve that,” he whispered. And even as Mick tried to get his son to a hospital, Ray mentioned one of the only positive memories he had of his father – and Mick remembered. Mick did one of the antic performances we saw him do so often on the series – and for what may be the first time on the show, Ray smiled and laughed.
And then a shot rang on. Mickey fell down…to reveal Bridget standing over him with a gun. She had done what Ray never could, and Ray looked appalled: “Why?” he asked. “Because it has to stop,” she said. And considering everything that both father and grandfather had put her through her entire life, we understood.
Then she burst into tears. Bunchy showed up a moment later. Ray said the same thing he’d said to so many people over the years. “I’ll take care of this.” The final moments showed Ray thanking the doctor for trying to help him and in a sense admitted what we knew all along – the one person Ray could never fix was himself. Then he told him where he was, and we knew very clearly what was going to happen. Ray was to take the fall for his father’s death, and in the last seconds of the movie we saw him wheeled off into an ambulance, perhaps in his dying moments; otherwise to prison, but finally finding some kind of peace.
What made Ray Donovan: The Movie serve as a fitting ending to this show was that it wrapped up all the loose ends for the characters but didn’t offer the falsity of a happy ending. Mickey is dead and Ray almost certainly. Bridget will have to spend of her life knowing she killed her grandfather and that her father took the blame for it. Darryl (Pooch Hall), who killed a man in the final episode, will manage to get away (one last fix by Ray’s friends) but he will never see his family again. Given Terry’s condition (the Parkinson’s that he’s been suffering from since before the series started is worsening) he probably won’t live much longer. Only Bunchy, who finally managed to reach out to the mother of his child, has the possibility of a happy ending, and even then it is at best a ‘maybe’.
Now I stand by my earlier statement that Ray Donovan was a vastly overrated series. Despite ending as well as Breaking Bad or The Americans’ did, it never deserves to be spoken of them in the same breath when it comes to great television. But like them, and unlike similar series in the listing of Peak TV (especially Mad Men and The Good Wife) it managed to deliver an ending that was satisfying, true to its series, and altogether exceptional. And unlike Dexter: New Blood it justified its existence by bringing closure and an ending that its fans – and even people like me who didn’t like it – can be proud of.
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