If the Corleones Had Gone to College...

Abel Ferrara's The Funeral

Abel Ferrara – the man responsible for the aggressive psychosexual blunt trauma of The Bad Lieutenant – does not initially appear to be a director overly concerned with feminism. His seedy New York-set films are masculine worlds, rife with criminal denizens racked with Catholic guilt. They are men living with the darker impulses of the soul, struggling with sin, guilt, and retribution. Ferrara’s films are at once both deeply moral and seemingly enthralled by men in the throes of addiction, degradation and violence. Yet, Ferrara’s relationship with women proves increasingly complex in his 1996 genre piece, The Funeral.

A mid-budget feature shot nearly back-to-back with The Addiction, it is a largely underrated and forgotten exercise in seamless performances and genre subversion. Set in 1930’s New York, it centres around an Italian-American family consisting of three gangster brothers: Ray (Christopher Walken), the coolly detached oldest, Chez (Chris Penn), the hot-headed drunk, and Johnny (Vincent Gallo), the idealistic, rebellious kid brother with strong Communist inclinations. Johnny has been shot to death in a sudden, mysterious murder, and the eponymous funeral, casket being carried back to the family home, comports the opening shots of the film, soundtracked by the hazy, druggy, melancholy torpor of Billie Holliday. The Funeral is one of Ferrara’s mid-90’s ventures received as neither cataclysmically poor nor with any particular fanfare. His frenetic editing style is absent; the narrative is steadily-paced and cohesive, shot with the softly-lit, nicotine stained mise en scene of rooms, bars, and corridors in a period setting.

We are introduced to the women of the family – Anabella Sciorra, Isabella Rossellini, and Gretchen Mol, respectively. They are each precariously placed in family lives with violent, unpredictable, controlling men; we first see them mourning over the body of Johnny in the somberly-lit family home. The very last image of them is strikingly similar, touched by further tragedy and still couched in the domesticity that is their apparent domain. They are victims of patriarchal culture from start to finish; and the emphasis remains on them throughout. In a world narrowly defined by the actions and speech of men, these women speak out against their husbands, express their moral qualms and disappointments about life, or in Rossellini’s case, look on with weary resignation at the constant abuses and betrayals suffered at the hands of men.

Ferrara makes an active choice to highlight female subjectivity whenever possible, in a way that is strikingly antithetical to the manner of that other great chronicler and definer of the Italian-American gangster, Francis Ford Coppola. The Godfather‘s treatment of wives, sisters, and mothers – all, naturally, defined by their biological and family functions – are only seen in relation to men, relegated to the shadowy corridors of the Corleone house. Kay famously has Michael’s office doors shut on her, concealing from her forever the truths of her husband’s business and excluding her from the inner sanctums of decision-making. “Women and children can afford to be careless. Not men,” Don Corleone tells his son, a statement hugely reflective of the space afforded women in films of this ilk. Power, greed, sin, revenge, hubris – they belong in the world of men, not for women to understand or concern themselves with. They are not built to know masculine pride or agency; what can they know about a philosophical will to power?

Ferrara’s men are no different in this respect, but Annabella Sciorra, playing oldest brother Ray’s wife, directly challenges his authority. She is outspoken in her disagreement with him about exacting revenge for his brother’s murder, offering moral and philosophical reasons not to. She is, of course, silenced and ignored, but her opinion actually comes to bear on the argument; Ferrara has given her a voice. In the Corleone’s world, these women would never have been allowed in the room. The effect of Walken’s reaction to his wife’s pleas shows the extent to which the men grapple with guilt over what Adrian Martin describes as the ‘wrongs they inflict on their suffering, seething women’. Certainly Walken’s Ray logically understands and even empathises with his wife’s point of view, but his masculine ties to violent revenge and taught reenactments of familial honour will not allow him to bend.

In his review of The Funeral, Roger Ebert said that this is what the Corleones might have been like, if they had gone to college. But it is nonetheless a vision of a family fractured and eventually destroyed by the narrow, suffocating confines of a type of masculinity which is both deeply-ingrained and utterly oppressive. Ferrara gives dedicated attention to the psychic wounds inflicted on these women by a corrupt culture driven by unchecked male ego. The Funeral only further evidences his extraordinary flexibility and depth of feeling as a filmmaker. His talent lies in portraying the subtleties, shades, and the ultimate humanity of those people living in the shadow of moral decline, and allowing us to feel for them.

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This is a reprinted, lightly edited essay I wrote a near-decade ago, which I thought I’d share with you all this month. Thank you so much for reading Sisters Under the Mink!