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Rating: "If I do something wrong, it's because God didn't give me the grace to do what's right. Nothing happens without His permission. So, if this world sucks, it's His fault..."
I listen to the words of Ray Tempio (the immense Christopher Walken, once again), and I think of Harvey Keitel in "Bad Lieutenant," of that sad sinner, of the filthiest of lost sheep who, finding himself before God, has nothing to offer Him but his own rancor, his personal "God, why have you forsaken me?" ("..BASTARD! ..you just sit there in silence.. you think I should do everything like an idiot.. Where did you go? WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GO?!").
Ray and the Lieutenant: bad and violent men, willingly seduced and corrupted by sin, but who, until the end, seem unable to recognize their exclusive responsibility for the evil they have committed. It's God who abandoned them, who allowed them to lose the righteous path, who corrupted their bodies and souls. He cast them into the earthly hell only to sit somewhere watching them sink without lifting a finger.
Bad and violent men, but in whom there survives that unconscious need, that urgency to "touch" God, to have proof of His existence that goes beyond the crucifixes, stories, and statues of saints that surround them in their homes. That need for an epiphany, a sign that might turn their lives around, so that they can truly believe, so they can really change. And since that sign never arrives, deep within their souls seems to simmer an almost morbid desire to see how far they can go in their personal challenge to God, to discover how thin the line is between men's earthly life and the eternal damnation of souls.
But it is precisely here that lies the difference between Keitel's character and the protagonists of "The Funeral." If the Lieutenant, reaching the lowest point of his inner Golgotha, tastes a crumb of redemption through his ultimate sacrifice, the Tempio brothers cannot rid themselves of what made them sinners: pride. The pride of Johnny Tempio, initially portrayed as a romantic defender of the weak, alien to the hypocritical hierarchies of economic interests his brothers seem to be devoted to, but who proves to be equally unscrupulous, foolishly convinced of his own invincibility, enough to end up trivially executed outside a cinema. The pride of Ray Tempio, the eldest brother, accustomed to deciding the life and death of those around him, guilty or innocent, for whom the death of his younger brother becomes little more than a pretext to reaffirm his ability to command, to impose his will. And finally, that of Chez Tempio (an excellent Chris Penn), a gentle giant but psychologically disturbed ("sooner or later he will end up with his brain splattered on the wall, just like his father"), who offers his very personal "absolution" to a young prostitute, only to later punish her violently amid threats and deliriums of eternal damnation for not having taken advantage of the opportunity for salvation so magnanimously granted.
And it is always pride that leads them not to listen to the advice (perhaps banal, perhaps too good-hearted) of those impotent guardian angel-wives that life has placed beside them. Women seemingly fragile and submissive (just like the nun in Bad Lieutenant..), who try to tear them away from that self-destructive mechanism made of family codes, honor, necessity, and the desire for revenge. Women who seem to be the voice of reason that can't make its way through the fibers hardened by a childhood marked by murder and blood ("Don't you think what can happen to your family? Killing another won't bring him back to life"), that can't make them understand that man, the sinner, can always choose to abandon the bad road and find peace.
But for people like Ray, Johnny, and Chez, there can be no peace. Not in this life, and perhaps not even in the afterlife. Because, as Ray says, shortly before shooting the man who killed his brother: "maybe one day they'll find me too, dead, bled out in a sewer.. and when I'm dead, I'll roast in hell. I believe in this! ..but the trick is getting used to the idea from now on.."
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