The last moralist.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

With the release of his latest picture, "The Funeral," director Abel Ferrara has established himself as something of a rarity within the motion picture industry--a moviemaker with a distinct moral vision. Ferrara has little interest in making movies about other movies or cynically celebrating pop culture. He is among the few American directors who creates characters and situations the viewer actually can care about, and for all his super-hip, acid New York pedigree, Ferrara's work sustains a moral and, to some, a moralistic vision.

Ferrara's films display a profound sense of social collapse, to the extent that he often is subjected to the familiar and tired criticism that he merely is partaking of the depravity he chronicles. Nevertheless, it is hard to miss his deep humanist concerns emerging from the catastrophic landscape he paints.

In "The Funeral," an organized crime family, led by Christopher Walken (who has become for Ferrara what Marcello Mastroianni was for Federico Fellini or Max von Sydow for Ingmar Bergman--a kind of authorial persona), confronts the consequences of its assumptions. The rewards for blind family allegiance is a subject well-mined in films such as "The Godfather," but Ferrara takes audiences to much more fundamental psychological/emotional issues of family bonding than the operatic, Greek-tragic concerns of someone like Francis Ford Coppola.

Mobsters Walken and Chris Penn mourn the death of their kid brother (Vincent Gallo), victim of a vendetta murder. The latter's interest in having his family protect trade unionists and the poor divides his brothers and hearkens to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America," with the notion that the Mob's falling out of touch with its immigrant origins and its connections with the downtrodden becomes a parable for the failure of the American Dream. In "The Funeral," the same parable pertains, but with an emotional depth and vulnerability rare in larger-scale crime sagas.

The film also defies generic conventions in that there are few dramatic highpoints as it eschews bloody set-pieces and abrupt turnabouts in the action. As in his other works, Ferrara emphasizes life's relentlessly absurd and implacable element. Motivations often are ambiguous (as when Walken changes his mind about chopping off the legs of a rival thought to be the killer of his brother). Still, the movie offers an emotional catharsis that provides little closure, as the Penn character discovers he is unable...