Ray & Liz

This miserable slog through the lives of an alcoholic couple in England's Black Country (an area of the West Midlands) is hard to sit through and is not sufficiently rewarding for doing so. It doesn't help that the film is actually a weird act of public therapy by its writer-director, Richard Billingham, a noted photographer who has taken pictures invoking his memories of a childhood spent in squalor and in the boozy haze of his parents. Ray & Liz is an extension of Billingham's penchant for gritty, personal revelation, with documentary touches (some of the action is shot in the fetid flat in which Billingham grew up), though actors play the people in his life. Basically, we see his father, Ray (played in advanced age by Patrick Romer), whose days consist of drinking a neighbor's homebrew, never eating, never leaving home, and staring out his window. Catching sight of his ex, Liz (Ella Smith), as she walks along the street, he asks her up. Liz proceeds to harangue him and take his money. Billingham balances these kitchen-sink horrors with two flashbacks exposing the extent of Ray and Liz's addictive, self-involved existence and neglect of their children. There's not a lot artistically, narratively or cinematically to glean from all this, and on some level, Billingham seems to know it. He reaches for the gravity of memory, intentionally overloading scenes with a sense of an inescapable, calcified past. He also resorts, somewhat interestingly, to a photographer's technique of saturating certain scenes with a deep, omnipresent color, suggesting rage and mortality. It looks good but doesn't get us anywhere. Not recommended. (T. Keogh)