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The Funeral
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Abel Ferrara is the duly appointed Bad Boy of 1990s American cinema. His confronting, disturbing, defiantly amoral films reveal the profound influence of Martin Scorsese’s dramas of sin and redemption, as well as the deliberately chaotic and fragmented, in-your-face manner mastered by John Cassavetes. Yet Ferrara’s iconoclastic movies are not simply designed to upset or shock; thanks to his close collaboration since the 1970s with the gifted writer Nicholas St John, they are also intricately patterned, complex tales of the difficulties of moral behaviour in an utterly immoral, corrupt world. Ferrara is among the most important and accomplished filmmakers of the contemporary scene – moreover, he manages to churn the stuff out at a rapid rate, without ever seeming sloppy or run-and-gun. This makes the appearance of The Funeral both a delight and a disappointment. For die-hard fans of the director, it treads over some old ground: family ties, a legacy of violence, a community caught in a vicious, entropic, downward spiral. However, for those viewers unfamiliar with Ferrara’s singular contribution to modern cinema, The Funeral can serve as a decent introduction to his work. Set in the gangster milieu of New York in the 1930s, the plot weaves a mosaic around the lives and times of the Tempio brothers, Ray (Christopher Walken, who was a last-minute replacement for Nicholas Cage), Chez (Chris Penn) and Johnny (Vincent Gallo). The use of a period setting is a new element for Ferrara. The film builds an intricate flashback structure upon the decisive moment of Johnny’s funeral. The superb introductory shots of the living Johnny as a rapt spectator at a Humphrey Bogart crime movie (The Petrified Forest [1936], to be exact) opens the door to a group-portrait of the three brothers inexorably contaminated and twisted by a culture of all-pervasive violence and menace. When it comes to examining men and the seemingly intractable impulses driving the male psyche, Ferrara and St John are tortured, almost maudlin melancholics – and The Funeral is their most severely depressive meditation on this favoured theme. With a less sensational fix on the typical Ferraran subjects of boozing, bashing, swearing and whoring (I disagree with Walter Chaw’s claim that it’s centrally about “addiction”), it’s almost a didactic Brechtian Lehrstücke (learning-play) in its sober lesson-giving. It might seem, from a cursory look at his career, that Ferrara is obsessed with lone wolves, rebels far outside the social norm. But the theme of family has a special place in his work. He has explored this social-cultural unit in Bad Lieutenant (1992), Dangerous Game (1993), ‘R Xmas (2001) and, most deeply, in The Funeral. Family means two things for Ferrara. On the one hand, it is the absolute symbol of difficult human togetherness or community, people locked into bonds and binds that they struggle violently to contest, transcend or affirm. On the other hand it is, equally, the absolute symbol which everything that Ferrara, as an intuitive anarchist, suspects and resents in society: order, rules, confinement, moral law, crushing and repressive relations. It is fitting, then, that The Funeral (the last film, to date, scripted for Ferrara, or for anyone, by St John, and a complete embodiment of his artistic sensibility) is a melodrama about a gangster family – a unit in which, ultimately, brother must kill brother. Even when (you’ll understand this once you see it) that brother is already dead. In my account of Donnie Brasco (1997), I discussed the theme of home in cinema. Those stories of sad, increasingly divided heroes who are obliged to leave home in order to enter some other world – and then, for one reason or another, find it hard (if not impossible) to make their way back, or to re-integrate themselves into their old, relatively safe lives. William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) is one striking example of this plot-template. When the drama of home-base is described in this way, it becomes a physical, spatial matter of journeying, adventuring forth, crossing and re-crossing various thresholds. The act of the hero/ine leaving home often corresponds to a trouble of some sort that disturbs the initial sanctity and tranquillity of home. All this journeying and disturbance of the peace is fairy tale material – sometimes very fractured or grim fairy tales, but fairy tales nonetheless. Ferrara’s films are certainly all about home and trouble. But his wracked anti-heroes often don’t have to travel very far at all to find themselves in a hot spot. His films don’t really follow the fairy tale mode. Like all great home-stories, Ferrara’s portraits invariably start with a completely routine, mundane activity. Bad Lieutenant begins with a cop (Harvey Keitel) dropping his kids off at school as he drives to work. Dangerous Game starts in an even more perfunctory manner, with filmmaker Eddie (Keitel again) just walking out of the front door of his family home. Body Snatchers (1993), Ferrara’s version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers premise, starts by showing domestic routines, particularly those of teenage kids. So, Ferrara’s characters don’t go to foreign countries, or enter an underworld wearing a disguise; they don’t get shaken around by natural disasters or sudden, apocalyptic disturbances. They tend to tread the circuit of a small, short loop: from home to work or to school, and then back again. Even the postgrad philosophy student in The Addiction (1995) who gets turned into a vampire decides to explore her new powers mainly within her department, in her immediate circle of students and teachers. I don’t mean to suggest by these descriptions that Ferrara’s films are keyed only to the everyday – neo-realistically speaking. In fact, they’re downright cataclysmic. I find his movies peculiarly disturbing and unsettling. They really get under my skin – and although I didn’t respond favourably to them at first, it’s this absolutely unshakeable power they possess which led me to revere Ferrara as a director over the course of the 1990s. (2024 Postscript: Ferrara stayed prolific, but the quality of his work seriously slumped at the turning-point of 4:44 Last Day on Earth [2011]. It has approached its former greatness only intermittently ever since, particularly in Tommaso [2019] and Siberia [2020]. Bad Ferrara – most of his documentaries, plus Welcome to New York [2014] and Padre Pio [2022] – is really bad.) If Ferrara’s characters don’t travel, and if they just keep beating that mundane path between home and work, just what is it about them that is so dramatic and compelling? Nicole Brenez has proposed an alternative to the dominant fairy tale/adventure model of screen narrative in order to take stock of Ferrara. In her account (which eventually formed the basis for a book from Illinois University Press), Ferrara begins with a mundane, almost documentary image of his characters in their everyday so that he can then proceed to deepen that image, excavate it, laser right through to the depths of a human being. And what’s in those depths? That’s a good question, and every filmmaker who expresses a personal view of the world answers it in their own unique, often idiosyncratic way. The core of the individual is something different for Robert Altman than it is for Jean Renoir, and it’s something quite different again for Wong Kar-wai. Ferrara gives us a cinema of X-rays, of minute, microscopic surgery – even a cinema of autopsy. Far more powerfully and viscerally than Peter Greenaway, Ferrara strips away the immediate, visible layers of a person and pokes around what gets found inside. That’s the journey his movies offer – not an outward journey so much an inward one, what J. G. Ballard once called inner space. And human beings are complex organisms indeed for this filmmaker. They are bundles, pressure cookers stoked by outside forces as well as internal drives. Ferrara’s films always proceed via flashpoints – sudden assertions of passion, insight or resistance bursting forth from the fictional characters. They are all at once public and private selves – and then, as Samuel Fuller diagnosed, they are secret selves, a third face (the title of Fuller’s autobiography) that is a mystery to themselves as much as to anyone else. Ferrara’s characters are torn, driven. They are caught on the hop by small changes in their landscape that completely alter the nature of that landscape: the difference between day and night, for instance, between day-life and night-life, drives these people crazy, as if they are all vampires. They are also characters without borders: they keep extending their bodily sensations and mental thoughts through the use of any kind of artificial stimulant – booze and drugs especially – and this experimentation can drive them beyond the brink of madness (as in The Blackout, 1997). And my autopsy reference is not just metaphorical: take a look at the images of organic and inorganic bodies literally turned inside out, seized in the most mind-boggling apparitions of mutation or withering in Body Snatchers. But even when Ferrara is not making outright horror movies, an inhuman aspect nonetheless haunts his nervy, sleepwalking heroes. Look at Walken as Frank White in King of New York (1990) – presented for all intents and purposes like a zombie, one of the living dead, with his thin, white face, his sudden disappearances and absorptions into the dark, his mumbly, high-pitched voice and disquieting Mona Lisa smile. He talks in cryptic poetry, as when a tenacious cop corners him on a train with the declaration “You can’t run forever”, and White yells back four of my favourite words in all cinema: “I don’t need forever!” Come to think of it, Ferrara’s characters almost never run. They brood, they sit, they flop to the floor, they walk the walk between the stations of their disjointed daily lives. They implode or explode on the spot, in the places where they live. When they implode, they crumple into catatonic, amnesiac wrecks. When they explode, they dance – like macabre skeletons or failing bodies abandoned to the last spasms of life-energy. It’s as if Ferrara had read the words of Serge Daney, who once said that a good screen story “invents new ways of dancing” – meaning the dance of gestures and movements, attitudes and postures, free flight and nervous stasis. Ferrara is good with recognisable forms of dance, too. Walken does a great jive in King of New York; and Chris Penn gives a show-stopping swing routine in The Funeral. (The actor died from heart disease in 2006). The Funeral is some kind of crime-gangster movie – although a severely moral, questioning one. It’s an essay (or Pasolinian theorem) on the origin, legacy and effects of masculine violence. It exudes a masochistic, entropic air. Although the customary Ferrara energy is absent, he is well focussed on his themes: sin and guilt, redemption and hope, the infernal, vicious circle of violence handed down from generation to generation, deforming entire lifetimes and bringing forth an apocalyptic chain of destructive and self-destructive acts. The influence of Scorsese is evident, especially his breakthrough Mean Streets (1973), which wielded a determining mark also on James Toback’s rivetingly distressing debut feature, Fingers (1978). In The Funeral, Ferrara and St John explore a twisted form of self-reflection, a lucidity (of sorts) that expresses itself in the film’s veritable set-piece, a quite perverse stream-of-consciousness monologue from the mouth of Ray (it’s a great scene for Walken and his special, eccentric abilities as performer). He agonises aloud about the morality of murder, as he’s deciding whether to kill the guy he finally has in his hands at that very moment. This scene, with its large component of the character’s delusion and self-contradiction, condenses so much that’s powerful and compelling in Ferrara’s work. The words address and articulate the deepest theme underlying the movie’s logic: the difficulty of moral behaviour, of ethical choice in an utterly immoral and corrupt world, when one has been fashioned by a completely immoral history. Does Walken-as-Ray, in this scene – no longer a criminal King but something far more pathetic – have forever? Maybe he wants to stretch time and take forever, because, at this crucible of violence and despair, it looks like, at last, he needs it – maybe he even longs for it. The Funeral, ultimately, is notable for three things in particular. First, foregoing Ferrara’s usual love of fractured montage in a masterwork such as King of New York, The Funeral tends more toward long take mise en scène – a parti pris probably inspired by the period setting. A rumour went around that Ferrara initially wanted to go much further in this master-shot direction, to make a film wholly comprised of sequence-shots, but eventually pulled back from such an extreme, exclusive, systematic use of the technique. This stylistic tension or vacillation is sometimes noticeable in the découpage. At any rate, the funereal aura imparted here is very likely a homage to that most melancholic of gangster masterpieces, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Second, the intricate narrative structure of flashbacks has a true meaning and force, beyond the back-and-forth games so typical of modern American independent cinema. It is in fact a structure that creates, with its memories-within-memories, a kind of collective sibling mind, overlapping experiences and sensations. (See the diagram at the foot of this review.) This brings The Funeral close to the psychic swirls that govern The Addiction and The Blackout. Finally, it is a remarkable, somewhat unexpected attempt by Ferrara to deal with the subjectivity of women (played intensely by Isabella Rossellini, Gretchen Mol and Anabella Sciorra) and their fraught emotions when pinned hopelessly within a world of violent, doomed men. The film offers the type of loaded sidelong glance at women’s experience that has characterised much male-centred American cinema since The Godfather (1972). Did Ferrara really need to inject this note of special gender-pleading? His critical attitude toward the male characters is always perfectly clear; they are caught in the trap of their own impulses, their conditioning, their “original sins” of violence; the culture that shapes them serves to strap them into an express ride straight to their own doom. There is nothing noble, or even ambiguous about this trajectory for the brothers in The Funeral. The
women cry masochistically, but at least they point the way forward to
the Drea Di Matteo figure in ‘R Xmas,
rather than backwards to the blind-rage, psycho-killer of Ms
.45 (1981).
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