Hey, Ben here. While I was away last month, Justin invited Ryan Hall to write a few stories for The Movie Advocate. Make sure to check out his ruminations on Dogville and Two Lane Blacktop. Ryan runs a fantastic music blog called Tome to the Weather Machine, which has as of yesterday been revamped and relaunched. In honor of the relaunch, I thought I'd post another one of his stories here. Ryan brings two key elements to The Movie Advocate: 1) He's very comfortable navigating the murky, often disappointing waters of 90s art house, returning with only the brightest jewels of the genre. 2) He is an exceptionally good writer, and can make even the most morbidly sterile Lars Von Trier experiment (sorry dudes, I'm just not that into Von Trier) seem interesting through the power of his magic words. Without further ado, Ryan's review of Abel Ferrara's The Funeral...
“Gangsters never go to each others funerals”
Films by Abel Ferrara have a tendency to crush me under the weight of their message so much that I tend to miss some of the subtle aspects that justify such intense climaxes. The Funeral is no exception.
I believe that The Funeral matches and at times surpasses Gangster classics such as Goodfellas and Scarface in its exposition of the lives of the criminal underworld. Hate me if you will but I believe that The Funeral is one of the few movies that does not glorify the gangster lifestyle. It is easy to show gangsters as charismatic yet deeply troubled individuals, but to paint them with such broad strokes of cynicism and humanism is a bold move on Ferrara’s part. Mentally unstable, petty, juvenile, these men are prisoners of a lifestyle of cyclical violence that marked from childhood until their violent deaths.
Like all good gangster movies The Funeral begins with an existential crisis. While mourning the death of the youngest Tempio brother, Johnny, a Catholic priest accuses the family of living a technically atheist life while clinging to the vestiges of the Catholic tradition. The funeral is a fitting metaphor for a crisis in which each Tempio brother must confront his past, either choosing to let their destructive lifestyle die with Johnny, the true consequence of their decisions, or forge a deeper path into familiar territory with a vendetta to find his killer. The funeral of Johnny represents life’s greatest paradox, the tyranny of fatalism in the face of free will.
Ferrara does well by showing that Ray (Christopher Walken) and Chez (Chris Penn) are more than simply sum totals of all the violence they have experienced growing up. Ray killed his first man when he was still a child by literally having the gun placed in his hand and told that his victim would kill his family if he did not shoot him. Chez’s father committed suicide when he was Chez was a kid. Ferrara displays these flashbacks not as excuses or justification but as reminders or warnings of the destructive path that crime always takes.
The Tempio men are not the only ones caught in a cyclical web of negative consequences due to their actions, the Tempio women are trapped by their husbands lifestyles and resulting mental instability. Like minstrels in a Greek tragedy, however, Jean and Clara have the ability to peak beyond the fracas and gain clear moments of what is really happening. They give Ray and Chez clear warning of what will happen if they seek retribution for Johnny’s death.
And thus starts the descent into a typical signifier impregnated Abel Ferrara climax. Chez and Ray start out in search of Johnny’s killer. Ray eventually finds the murderer, a young, groveling, mechanic who killed Johnny out of a petty feud. At first the mechanic tells Ray a story that he killed Johnny because he raped and beat his girlfriend. Eventually he tells the truth that the real reason why he killed him is because he humiliated him in front of his friends. This revelation startles Ray with the pettiness of the situation. Would it be any more right to kill him based on his first explanation? What difference would it make if he extended mercy or killed him in cold blood? Neither would bring back Johnny nor undo the havoc wreaked in order to find his killer. Ray comes to the conclusion that no murder is honorable, that his life up to this point had been a pointless lie. Looking back on his life he falls under the weight of a crushing fatalism born of atheistic self-loathing and duty free Catholicism, he says, “If I do something wrong it is because God did not grace to do what’s right…If I do wrong it is because he does not supply me with the adequate tools.” He then shoots him on the spot.
Meanwhile Chez suffers a mental breakdown. Signs of his collapse litter the movie from his bi polar relationships with women in which he abuses after having sex with seeks comfort, or vice versa, as well as penchant for over the top robustness as levity for the family. When Chez arrives at the house the morning after Ray kills Johnny’s murderer he calmly walks into the kitchen and calmly shoots all the men in the Tempio family. After shooting Ray he fires two bullets into his already dead brother and then shoots himself in the head.
The demise of the Tempio family is a symbolic funeral for the American Gangster movie. Scorcese and Di Palma provided chilling metaphors as well as role models for scores of young movie goers. I doubt anyone will hang a poster of Chez Tempio in their dorm room after watching this movie.
Damn, it don’t feel good to be a gangster.
-Ryan