Critics reviews

The film is a trip through Ferrara’s tortured soul as much as a voyage in Italy. It begins as a story of domestic bliss with just a few cracks letting the darkness in, then moves through Fellini-isms and self-conscious borrowings from Scorsese to get to a violent, paranoid ending that is both sick fantasy and meta-commentary on Italian-American relations.

Ferrara and Dafoe get at the dilemma of modern masculinity. In this film, they are the only contemporary American heterosexual filmmakers to deal with manhood honestly.

All of this, up to and including a penultimate crucifixion scene that literalizes the adage “Each man has his cross to bear,” invites accusations of navel-gazing narcissism, though how any film so vibrating with cinematic ingenuity could be received as anything other than an act of generosity is beyond me.

I love this movie. Adore it. Can’t stop talking about it to my friends. I am aware of its problematic aspects. But the film depicts a subtle, complicated, mostly internal process so thoughtfully—blending humility and go-for-broke nerve—that its flaws ultimately seemed minor to me.

The movie enters fantasy realms often, but “Tommaso” has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes “Tommaso” crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.

Tommaso is erotic in a manner that’s unusual for American films, suggesting that Ferrara has truly gotten Italy into his bloodstream. Almost every encounter here is freighted with the promise of sex.

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Tommaso, the sixth collaboration between director Abel Ferrara and actor Willem Dafoe, was fascinating—no, riveting—because of the multiple male sexual anxiety and wish fulfillment subtexts dancing around the screen as Dafoe played a character too close to Ferrara for comfort, and the actors playing his wife and child were Ferrara’s actual wife and child.

It is remarkable and not a little touching that Ferrara so wishes to share the torments and pleasures of his daily life he has found while striving to create greater things.

This is filmmaking as survival, an earnest confession and auto-critique (with crucifixions and all) that ought to be remembered as more than a mere footnote in Ferrara’s late period.