1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 17: The funeral
In 1995, Abel Ferrara released The Addiction, which was about a philosophy graduate student/vampire. The characters in his 1996 movie, The Funeral, also live as if they’re damned.
They’re philosophizing mobsters, not vampires. One of them, the youngest brother – Johnny, played by the skeletal Vincent Gallo – has just been killed. The family is in mourning. They’re keenly aware that death is their lot, too.
For the oldest brother, Ray – played by Christopher Walken – the event of dying is just another cinder in the lake of fire.
“I’ll roast in hell,” he says several times (and since it’s Walken saying it, it’s compelling).
He’s already roasting. It’s been that way since, as a child, he was brutally inducted into the family’s line of work.
A priest comes to Johnny’s funeral. Ray can’t stand to be near him, so he goes outside and sits in his car. It’s not that he doesn’t believe, it’s that he’s damned already. The priest goes through the motions, attending to the corpse and comforting the family, and then he summons Ray’s wife, Jean (Annabella Sciorra), for a chat. Your family goes to church, he says, but it needs to do a complete reversal of its “practical atheism” to climb out of this rut of violence.
The problem is, this isn’t an atheistic family, it’s a satanic one. One of their gangster minions is even named Ghouly, and he does a macabre dance.
Of the three brothers, it was Johnny who relished his satanic role. In flashback scenes, he dabbles in pro-union political activity – not idealistically, but out temperamental skewedness, since his own family is paid by industrialists to persecute the unions. After the funeral, Ray can’t acknowledge this fact about Johnny. Johnny was a communist, he insists. Not an anarchist. But other scenes make it clear that whatever Johnny did, he did out of perversity.
Ray rationalizes other things, too:
The middle brother, Chez (Chris Penn), is the most human. He lacks the coldness of his brothers. This doesn’t make him any less brutal. In one scene, he offers to extend mercy to a prostitute. When she doesn’t respond to his liking, he punishes her, angrily, but also with a terrible logic. “You sold your soul,” he tells her.
The wives live in fear and resignation. Chez’s wife, Clara (Isabella Rossellini), prays to Agnes, the patron saint of chastity, whose killer martyred her in a frenzy of lust. Clara doesn’t pray to obtain Agnes’s help, but to remind herself that the men will always take whatever they desire.
What do the men desire, then? Relief from their constant torture? Maybe Johnny wants this. He tells a friend: “I would say life is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you, without the movies.” He is gunned down in a relatively good mood, outside a cinema.
Chez and Ray enjoy no such relief. They always suffer. Their quest is for justice, which they go around pretending to administer to others – although they know it can never console them. Because they’re damned.
One technical note. The soundtrack is superb. It consists of period jazz (the year is 1939, I believe) and also of brief, piercing strains of orchestral strings. This isn’t only a ponderous, gloomy movie. It’s also a razor-sharp one. The string music makes the scenes feel more knife-like.
They’re philosophizing mobsters, not vampires. One of them, the youngest brother – Johnny, played by the skeletal Vincent Gallo – has just been killed. The family is in mourning. They’re keenly aware that death is their lot, too.
For the oldest brother, Ray – played by Christopher Walken – the event of dying is just another cinder in the lake of fire.
“I’ll roast in hell,” he says several times (and since it’s Walken saying it, it’s compelling).
He’s already roasting. It’s been that way since, as a child, he was brutally inducted into the family’s line of work.
A priest comes to Johnny’s funeral. Ray can’t stand to be near him, so he goes outside and sits in his car. It’s not that he doesn’t believe, it’s that he’s damned already. The priest goes through the motions, attending to the corpse and comforting the family, and then he summons Ray’s wife, Jean (Annabella Sciorra), for a chat. Your family goes to church, he says, but it needs to do a complete reversal of its “practical atheism” to climb out of this rut of violence.
The problem is, this isn’t an atheistic family, it’s a satanic one. One of their gangster minions is even named Ghouly, and he does a macabre dance.
Of the three brothers, it was Johnny who relished his satanic role. In flashback scenes, he dabbles in pro-union political activity – not idealistically, but out temperamental skewedness, since his own family is paid by industrialists to persecute the unions. After the funeral, Ray can’t acknowledge this fact about Johnny. Johnny was a communist, he insists. Not an anarchist. But other scenes make it clear that whatever Johnny did, he did out of perversity.
Ray rationalizes other things, too:
Ray: “All them Catholics gone insane. Everything we do depends on free choice, but at the same time, they say we need the grace of God to do what’s right. I don’t follow that, Jeany. If I do something wrong, it’s because God didn’t give me the grace to do what’s right. If this world stinks, it’s His fault. I’m only working with what I’ve been given.”Damnation, he reasons, is something he can’t do anything about. It isn’t his fault: it’s God’s. And since he’s damned and it isn’t his fault, he may as well keep killing.
Jean: “Is that why the people they find with the bullet holes in their skulls is God’s fault? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Ray: “I’m ashamed of nothing. I didn’t make the world.”
Jean: “But you’re not doing anything to make it better.”
Ray: “Yeah, and I’ll roast in hell.”
The middle brother, Chez (Chris Penn), is the most human. He lacks the coldness of his brothers. This doesn’t make him any less brutal. In one scene, he offers to extend mercy to a prostitute. When she doesn’t respond to his liking, he punishes her, angrily, but also with a terrible logic. “You sold your soul,” he tells her.
The wives live in fear and resignation. Chez’s wife, Clara (Isabella Rossellini), prays to Agnes, the patron saint of chastity, whose killer martyred her in a frenzy of lust. Clara doesn’t pray to obtain Agnes’s help, but to remind herself that the men will always take whatever they desire.
What do the men desire, then? Relief from their constant torture? Maybe Johnny wants this. He tells a friend: “I would say life is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you, without the movies.” He is gunned down in a relatively good mood, outside a cinema.
Chez and Ray enjoy no such relief. They always suffer. Their quest is for justice, which they go around pretending to administer to others – although they know it can never console them. Because they’re damned.
One technical note. The soundtrack is superb. It consists of period jazz (the year is 1939, I believe) and also of brief, piercing strains of orchestral strings. This isn’t only a ponderous, gloomy movie. It’s also a razor-sharp one. The string music makes the scenes feel more knife-like.
