IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Meet Ray Shoesmith. He's a fascinating animal.

Australian actor, writer and director Scott Ryan spent the better part of 20 years honing this character, and the results impressed no less than actress Helen Mirren and her husband, director Taylor Hackford.

Ryan's first draft of Ray's character came in a low-budget but critically acclaimed 2005 independent film called "The Magician," streaming on Amazon, which established Ray in Melbourne, before Ryan transplanted the character to Sydney, for three seasons of a half-hour TV show called "Mr. Inbetween," whose 26 episodes originally ran from 2018 to 2021, before it began streaming on Hulu.

Ray is a divorced dad who works a security gig at a strip club, and cares for his brother, who's dying by degrees from a progressive motor neuron disease, all while he strives to maintain a mostly civil relationship with his remarried ex-wife, for the sake of the young daughter, with whom they share custody. He even patiently bails his less sensible friends out of the hot water they repeatedly get themselves into.

Ray is also an enforcer and a murderer for hire, who employs crafty psychological terrorism to persuade people who owe debts to the wrong folks to finally pay them, if he's not shooting them in the head, after making them dig their own shallow graves in the Australian countryside.

Within a subgenre of crime drama that plays up professional killers' impulse-control problems, and frequently pathologizes mob members as inheriting a gangster culture with toxic traditions, Ray Shoesmith is so old-school straight-forward in his portrayal that he circles back around to become something new.

Ray is not Tony Soprano, who was driven by his uncontrollable temper and appetites, and he's not even Bill Hader's "Barry," who sought to repress and mitigate his guilt over his fundamental moral qualms with his vocation.

Because Ray is as good as Barry at his job, but unlike Barry, Ray feels little remorse over inflicting significant physical violence and mental trauma on his assigned targets. And unlike Tony, Ray's basic contentment with this work does not stem from any desire to hurt others, but from his mostly unquestioning belief that they had it coming.

Although an incident of lashing out at two rude youths on public lands Ray in a court-ordered anger management therapy group, Ray is arguably the one member of the group, including the moderator, who has no anger to manage. We see that his daily life includes enough risks of retaliation, from previously unidentified others, that proactive assaults arguably constitute a rational response to minor displays of disrespect in Ray's world.

Like fellow fictional Australian "Crocodile" Dundee, Ray is big on respect, but what's surprising is how ego-free his definition of essential respect is. We see him forgive betrayals ranging from abusive treatment to attempted murder, when they're directed toward him, but Ray will not tolerate those closest to him being victimized.

In contrast to the abusive men in Ray's therapy group, who hit and yell at their girlfriends, wives and children, Ray's willingness to resort to ruthless violence derives from his desire to protect his vulnerable loved ones, including his daughter, his girlfriend and his idiot best friend.

Tension stems from his daughter and his girlfriend's shocked reactions to the very same questionable acts Ray undertakes to try and defend them.

And yet, even with certain strangers, Ray exhibits something approaching a sense of fair play, as when his boss admits that he accidentally told Ray to kill the wrong man. Ray anonymously donates to the man's widow to compensate her for his mistake.

And not even God can help anyone whom Ray catches mistreating children.

This rough-hewn semblance of a proto-conscience separates Ray from the character of Parker, in the pulp novels Donald E. Westlake wrote under his pen name of "Richard Stark," because Parker is a more sharklike predator, always relentlessly moving forward, whereas Ray embodies the paradox of an "everyday psychopath." just a punch-clock laborer whose trade involves threatening, beating and burying those whom he's told deserve it.

Ryan plays Ray with a casual affability that inclines you to like him, even when you're pretty sure you shouldn't.

The intimidation factor of Ray's bullet-shaped bald head, and his sharply goatee-framed grin full of pointy teeth, are offset by how rarely Ray raises his voice, and by how much his heavy, sleepy-looking eyelids lend him a resemblance to Garfield the cat.

It was a line that another media critic wrote in reviewing the performances of U.S. actor Jeff Kober, and it's just as true of Scott Ryan; he's like a coyote who learned how to walk like a man.

Just as early episodes of "The Sopranos" cajoled audiences into laughing cathartically at Tony's sociopathic antics, so too does "Mr. Inbetween" get us to root for Ray for a lot of wrong reasons.

While "The Sopranos" ultimately maintained faithful fans' engagement by getting them to question, as his therapist Dr. Melfi did, whether Tony might actually manage to approach redemption (spoiler alert: he doesn't), what's so refreshing about "Mr. Inbetween" is Ray's relative lack of a maturational arc.

Yes, Ray weathers some serious losses, and demonstrates an unexpected grace in choosing to let his bitterness pass, with regard to his upbringing and his relationships, but through it all, he remains a defiantly unbowed bastard to the last.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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