The Funeral

New York in the 1930s. Johnny, the youngest of three brothers, has been killed and his body is laid out at home. Ray, the eldest, is determined on revenge; Chez has come apart psychologically and listens to nobody. The women wait in the kitchen. Across the wake, the film uses flashbacks to show how the three came to be like this. The subject is not the mob but violence handed down as a family tradition. Their father made Ray shoot a man when he was a boy; the film shows that scene and everything else follows from it. The form is dark and narrow: the room with the coffin, a garage, rain. Abel Ferrara has removed almost all the action and built the film on talk. The screenplay is by Nicholas St. John, a writer who worked with him for years and the source of much of the religious material in his films. Chris Penn won the best supporting actor prize at the Venice film festival for the role. Christopher Walken plays Ray and Annabella Sciorra his wife, with Isabella Rossellini also in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like hard American independent crime drama and films about religion and guilt. Who it is not for: anyone coming with genre expectations; this is not a gangster picture and contains almost no action.