Movie Review Tomasso

Tommaso **** / *****
Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Abel Ferrara.
Starring: Willem Dafoe (Tommaso), Cristina Chiriac (Nikki), Anna Ferrara (Deedee).

It has always felt like many of the characters at the center of Abel Ferrara films are some warped version of the man himself. This rogues gallery of characters, most notably Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant (1992), are often violent, drug addicted, sex-addicted men, prone to outbursts, but with a sense of Catholic guilt dragging at them, even as they have mainly left the structures of religion behind them to create their own, warped moral view. His latest film, Tommaso, is much more transparently autobiographical – and is really about what happens to those men if, and when, they finally grow up. It is a film about a toxic man trying to be better – trying to escape from the life he lived for years, but finds it isn’t always that easy.

 In the film, Ferrara regular Willem Dafoe plays Tomasso – a thinly veiled version of Ferrara himself. Now six years sober, the American film director has moved to Rome, gotten married to a woman half his age, Nikki (played by Ferrara’s real wife, Cristina Chiriac) and had a daughter – Deedee (their real daughter, Anna Ferrara). Tomasso mainly tinkers around – working on a screenplay that is probably Siberia, the film Ferrara and Dafoe made after this, taking Italian lessons, stopping for coffee, running theatre rehearsals, attending AA meetings, doing yoga, etc. In those AA meetings, Tomasso tells stories of his troubled, often violent former life – its high, but mostly its lows, particularly how he essentially abandoned his children from a previous relationship – and worries about doing the same thing to Deedee.

The marriage at its core seems, at first, to be mostly solid. Tomasso goes about his life, but most of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute parenting is done by Nikki. There is more than a hint that some unresolved daddy issues may have attracted Nikki to this older man to begin with – but it’s not really examined, perhaps because Tomasso doesn’t want to. Cracks start to form however – Tomasso sees his wife kissing another man, and those old worries, insecurities, and violent tendencies start to surface, as much as he tries to push them back down again. There is certainly a line between fantasy and reality in the film – but it’s never made explicit.

Ferrara seems to have made this film for practically nothing. The deliberately lo-fi camera work is grimy, but not ugly, and in addition to casting his own wife and daughter, shoots much of the film in their own apartment. And Dafoe has worked with Ferrara so often, he likely did it as a favor (Dafoe seems to inspire loyalty in directors – just look at how many times he has works with Ferrara or Paul Schrader or Lars von Trier or Wes Anderson, etc.). Yet that doesn’t mean Dafoe phones it in here – it’s actually one of his best performances. He is quiet here, and yet there is an element of a ticking time bomb here – where we’re all wondering, perhaps even Tomasso himself, just when it’s going to go off. He does, of course.

I cannot argue with those who don’t necessarily want to see a film like Tomasso – which is by and about essentially a toxic, privileged, white-male artist in his 60s just now trying to come to grips with the damage he has done, and improve because of it. Yet the film feels to me to be one of the best of Ferrara’s career – and certainly the most honest. He isn’t making excuses here – I don’t even think he’s asking for forgiveness. He’s simply trying to grow – and its unexpectedly moving to watch him try.