One Addiction and One Funeral
Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and The Addiction
J.A. Hanson
January 1, 1997
The work of director Abel Ferrara and writer Nicholas St. John deals with deeply spiritual themes found nowhere else in contemporary American cinema.
The Funeral, the latest film from director Abel Ferrara and writer Nicholas St. John, is something of a conceptual step backward for this incredible creative team that fully realized their shared talents in the masterful film The Addiction. The Addiction (1994), starring Lili Taylor as philosophy Ph.D. candidate Katherine Conklin, is an extended metaphor for the depravity of man and what it takes to eradicate it.
Clocking in at only 86 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, The Addiction is one of the most stunningly, explicitly Christian films I have ever seen. Immensely powerful, it is the consummate treatment of the concerns presented by Ferrara and St. John in their previous works like The Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, and oddly enough, Body Snatchers, a reworking of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
What interests me, then, about a film like The Funeral is the question of why two artists of Ferrara and St. John's caliber seemingly choose to sell themselves short by making a new film that fails to equal the mastery of their best work. In a sense, however, they perhaps saved themselves from the embarrassment of needlessly attempting to match or surpass their own tour de force.
As was the case in Martin Scorsese's career, there comes a point at which all the major questions of an artist's career are more or less put to rest. They find their way back into his work after that point in only fragmentary form. This happened for Scorsese after The Last Temptation of Christ. The religious guilt, the endless self-questioning that were hallmarks of the characters ...
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