THE FUNERAL (1996): Reversing The Genre, But Compromising Conviction

If there’s any director whose reputation precedes them, it’s Abel Ferrara. More Cain than Abel in terms of his cinematic content, the director is known for intertwining in his films extreme violence, sex and drug use, and the popularity of his most notable films (Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction) also happens to reflect the rise of independent cinema in the 1990s. In that period, like Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Abel Ferrara was both a “copyist” and a “disruptor”. He never completely abandoned the shocking, exploitative content of his first films (The Driller Killer/Ms .45) and liked to lace it with hefty doses of existential angst emanating from misunderstood loners, popularised by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The Funeral, which reunites Ferrara with Christopher Walken for the first time since King of New York, is the prime example of Ferrara’s film being a familiar-sounding “disruptor” – “a genre disruptor”, in this case.

Plot

Partnering with his usual collaborator, scriptwriter Nicholas St. John, Ferrara presents in The Funeral the 1930s New York City, where the Tempio crime family holds the funeral of Johnny (Vincent Gallo), the youngest of the three brothers who has recently been murdered. His brothers Ray (Christopher Walken) and Chez (Chris Penn) soon have a different take on both grief and the need for retribution. When the murder suspect emerges – rival gangster Gaspare Spoglia (Benicio del Toro), clear-headed Ray seems to know exactly what needs to be done.

“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences”, once said Robert Lewis Stevenson, and the Tempio family has finally sat down to theirs. We see the family realising the consequences of their prolonged criminal lifestyle, and the catalyst, that “wake-up” call is the youngest brother’s demise. Johnny, being the “black sheep” of the family who harboured communist views and disrespected others, has strayed. Now murdered, it’s up to his brothers to pick up the pieces. In a flashback fashion, we also see the events leading up to his death, as well as Ray’s initiation into the life of crime.

Different Take on a “Mafia” Story

Despite its familiar set-up, The Funeral is neither Goodfellas nor Miller’s Crossing. Just as Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant showed a completely different side of policing, far removed from its glorification and popularisation in such films as Lethal Weapon or Beverly Hills Cop, The Funeral shows a side to the life of a mobster that is different from one’s run-of-the-mill, glamorised portrayal of it. It is an ugly life, filled with a misguided sense of “honour” and “pride”, extreme violence, and a destructive behaviour towards oneself, and one’s family and its values.

However, The Funeral is neither a murder mystery (Ferrera is too interested in characters, causes and consequences for that), nor a period, décor-focused drama (for the same reason). Instead, the themes take the central stage, and it’s this focus that makes Ferrara’s work overall so introspective. Similar to Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, a film made some thirty years earlier, The Funeral is best described as a familial character study with plenty of moments of both poignancy and brutality, and its impressive ensemble cast only underlines the impression. The music helps to injects that poignancy (including song “Gloomy Sunday” performed Billie Holiday), and plenty of close-up shots build up the needed intimacy.

Characters With a Buried “Existential Angst”

Abel Ferrara’s characters are used to sitting comfortably on the razor’s edge. They seem to know instinctively that it’s only death or its close proximity that can reveal that eternal and final truth, no matter how cruel or painful it can also be. And, despite the common interpretation of Ferrara’s characters often “swaying between good and bad”, it may be more correct to say that they’re “bad all the way”, but often try to justify their bad actions through either their background, past trauma or their internal deluded interpretation of “good”. The “vicious trinity” that is the three Tempio brothers can also be characterised along these lines, as Ray’s wife, Jean, also says in the film: [the brothers present themselves] as “tough, rugged individuals and we fall for it, but they’re criminals, they’re criminals because they never reason about their heartless, illiterate upbringings”.

As usual, it’s the innocent women around their self-destructive men that pay the price, and Jean and Clara, the wives of Ray and Chez, are also the only ones talking any sense in this story, trying to veer their men off the vicious cycle of violence and pain. Annabella Sciorra and Isabella Rossellini give sufficiently dignified performances as these stoic, disillusioned women, even if other cast, including Benicio del Toro, as the fresh-faced rival gangster, or Gretchen Mol as Johnny’s gentle fiancée Helen, appear to be no more than forgettable caricatures.

Neither Ray nor Chez backs down from doing the most horrific actions in the name of either temporal relief or misleading presentation of reality or their identity. It’s not redemption that characterises Ferrara’s work, as it’s commonly believed, but rather its lack or, at best, the futile attempts to reach it. “The only way anything is going to change is if this family has a total reversal of heart” is another line from the film. Of course, the Tempio family doesn’t. In the end, the trio of brothers are the willing victims of their own vices, choices, fixed personalities or illogical perceptions of good and evil that they could not overcome. Even Ray’s belief in the mafia superstition that killers would not want to be in the presence of their victims, as in this case their wounds would start bleeding, is the sure sign of his normal powers of reasoning gone haywire, with his thinking permanently fixed along the lines of the mob mentality. Neither he nor his brother can change their obsessive, persistent nature; it gets the better of them. That’s the core of the underlying absurdity that characterises Ferrara’s work.

Ensemble Cast’S Drawbacks

Despite the superb performances and the attractive cinematography by Ken Kelsch, the film doesn’t have a smooth sailing. Ferrara is one of those directors whose vision is best realised by one courageous actor of “depth” who can single-handedly carry the director’s “extreme brutality” torch that lights up one not-always-promising script and makes the overall picture brim with powerful performances or thematic conviction. Since this job is not for the faint of heart, only such “thick-skinned” actors as Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken or Willem Dafoe have been up to it, often being vision-bearers/”fire-walkers” in a sense, not afraid to step on the controversial presentation of trauma, violence, sex, drug-use or religion to realise Ferrara’s idiosyncratic vision.

And, it’s probably in this respect that The Funeral weakens itself. Being necessarily an ensemble film that aims to show the grief-stricken response on the part of a number of people (Johnny’s brothers and their wives), there’s no single conviction present to carry the film to its satisfying conclusion. Christopher Walken, who almost reprises his role from King of New York in portraying one cold, calculating and revenge-driven man, brings much nuance, but still shares the spotlight with equally good Chris Penn in the role of emotionally unstable bar manager Chez who can be “sad, bad or simply mad” – we all try to figure out which. The result is the curious interplay of the two brothers’ contrasting personalities, with a dose of moralising thrown in, but no cohesive “single-actor” conviction that often makes Ferrara’s films so powerful vis-à-vis their deep, controversy-laden characterisations.

Conclusion

 “Go where the pain is”, instructs new writers Anne Rice, the author of a series of books on vampires, a topic not unfamiliar to Ferrara after The Addiction, and both he and scriptwriter St. John are always happy to oblige. Let’s get close and personal with pain – and that pain in the film comes with the realisation of both – what we have done (on the part of Chez) and what we are prepared to do (on the part of Ray) – the two sides of the same coin. In Ferrara’s world of fatalistic nihilism, there’s no escape from life torments, and only death and self-destruction hold the key to solving the mystery of the human condition plagued by vice and trauma. It’s a bleak message, but perhaps somewhere deep inside we also realise and appreciate that it’s also the one that needs to be told.