THE FUNERAL

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T H E   F U N E R A L

An October Films Release

by Stan Schwartz

{2.1 meg QT} {2.1 meg AVI}

I am in search of some kind of truth according to God. 
I know I didn't create the universe. Someone else did. 
So I'm in that search.

Abel Ferrara

Director Abel Ferrara, one of the more, shall we say, idiosyncratic contemporary filmmakers around, is a searcher. Although his work (Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction, and King of New York, to name a few) has shown a distinct penchant for urban seediness, extremity, marginality and violence as the main objects of his cinematic gaze, don't be fooled. There is more going on than that, and Mr. Ferrara's new film, The Funeral, is certainly no exception in that regard. Besides being extremely violent, exceptionally stylish, and supremely well acted, there is a genuine, heart-felt searching in progress, both moral and spiritual, which distinguishes it from the standard period gangster film. The Funeral is clearly the work of a doubting Italian Catholic working out some spiritual stance. Never an easy task, the fact that Mr. Ferrara manages to place the search within the parameters of extremely elegant genre filmmaking is reason enough to check out The Funeral.

Evocatively set in Depression Era New York (the beautiful production design is by Charles Lagola), The Funeral concerns itself with the three Tempio brothers: Ray (Christopher Walken in an intense and beautifully understated performance) is the eldest and strongest; Chez (Chris Penn, by turns frightening and heart-breaking) is the dangerously manic middle brother; and finally, Johnny (to whose funeral the film's title refers and beautifully acted by Vincent Gallo) is the youngest, wisecracking and most iconoclastic of the three. He's involved in the American Communist movement and would like to break out of the small-time racketeering world of his two older brothers.

Poor Johnny -- he's said some provocative things to rival gangster Gaspare Spoglia (Benicio del Toro) in regards to the local union situation and so one day finds himself gunned down in cold blood in front of the movie house where he's just seen The Petrified Forest. Through flashbacks, we see the events leading up to the murder, and in the present tense, we watch Ray attend to the matter of revenge, in terms of both the concrete exigencies of an actual plan as well as the more abstract moral implications of said plan. It is these moral implications set within a broader spiritual framework that give the film its fascination and most personal quality.

Ferrara explained how the script, by Nicholas St. John (a "true believer," according to Ferrara) was handed to him in a completely finished form and hence -- or so Ferrara would have you believe -- did not necessarily embody a personal statement on his (Ferrara's) own part per se. But surely, an auteurist director like Ferrara must hook into some key aspect of the script, an aspect which speaks to him personally, its separate authorship notwithstanding, and explore and amplify that aspect. Here, the character of Ray is clearly a kind of hook for Ferrara. Ray is someone who, on one hand, refuses to stay inside the house as long as the priest is still there administering last rites; but at the same time, he achingly engages in a moral debate with his victim just before shooting him dead. It is certainly a great credit to Christopher Walken that he can so beautifully and believably put across this strange and fascinating complexity, but it is also quite clear that there is more than a little of Mr. Ferrara's background in the character of Ray. Mr. Ferrara, sporting dark shades and looking more like a rock star than anything else, told me recently:

"I remember when my father was dying in the hospital. He was like Chris Walken['s character]. He never really was a Catholic, like going to church and whatever. He was lying there in pretty bad shape and I'm standing there and all of a sudden, he opens his eyes and there's the priest giving him last rites, and there's his face like, you know, I can't take this. You know what I mean? Even on his deathbed he could not give up the ego . . . the worst thing for him that could possibly happen is to be a deathbed Catholic. That's the ultimate poke-out. No, he's gonna stay right to the end like Walken: 'I know what I'm doing is wrong, I know I'm gonna go to hell, but so what?'"

But Ferrara then circled back to screenwriter St. John, an old friend and frequent collaborator: "For me, Nicky is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my life, so if he thinks that Eve took a bite of an apple, and I mean REALLY ate an apple, not a metaphor -- and that the Cat was nailed to a cross and He rose again, that's NOT a metaphor, that actually happened on Earth . . ." Suffice it to say that Ferrara rarely spoke in complete sentences, but he seemed to be implying that working on The Funeral pushed him further along the path towards some spiritual epiphany. With mischievous laughter, he added, "What I really want to do, I haven't broken the news to these guys yet, I wanna go right there to Jerusalem, right to where they nailed Him to the cross. So who's gonna get nailed and who's gonna do the nailing?" And finally: "I'm not a Christian -- yet! But I'm working on it. I've seen the light . . . once I get my shades off."

Catholicism aside, a funeral is a family affair, and the overlay of family relationships is the other main ingredient in The Funeral's particular richness. It is the women (Annabella Sciorra as Ray's wife Jean, and Isabella Rossellini as Chez's wife Clara) who furnish sharp counterpoint to this dusky macho world, and here they are smart, articulate, and decidedly and poignantly self-aware of their own victimization. Ms. Sciorra's Jean, arguably the moral center of the film, has one particularly moving speech in which she sadly describes what she has given up in order to be, to quote Ms. Sciorra herself, "culturally sucked into this world," a world which she now wants out of -- badly. Clara, for her part, fears Chez will end up like his father, whose madness led him to suicide, and to say Ms. Rossellini holds her own against Ms.Sciorra's luminous performance is saying quite a lot.

It is a strange and intense ride into the Ferrara universe. No one's saying you should have dinner with the guy (or indeed, should even want to), but two hours in his cinematic world is ultimately a darkly fascinating trip.

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