Abel Ferrera's gangster film 'The Funeral' resembles a pared-down version of Scorcese's 'Goodfellas', or a truer version of 'The Sopranos'. Utterly unsentimental and chilling, it refuses to add the faintest shine of glamour to its protagonists' lives, and the cast, headed by the vampirish Christopher Walkern, are universally excellent. And yet for all this, it's not actually that interesting. The movie industry is fascinated with violence as a subject; yet the freakishly horrible behaviour of the mafia may be a sad fact of life, but it's also an oddity. This is a good film, but it belongs to an over-exposed genre, with little to say about how ordinary people live. If I have to watch a gangster film, I'd rather chose Jim Jarmusch's hilarious 'Ghost Dog' than a movie that takes its subject so seriously.
Review of The Funeral
