Willem Dafoe portrays a film director

Director Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso frustrates as often as it illuminates.

With Tommaso, director Abel Ferrara has made a film that I've seen described as semi-autobiographical. I don't know how close to the reality of his life Ferrara has gotten. Judging by the ways in which its main character puts himself in the middle of an unraveling patchwork of a life, I hope not too close.

An independent-minded director, Ferrara has been charting his own course since the early 1970s. During his prolific career, Ferrara, who'll be 69 next month, has divided audiences and critics with movies such as The King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1994).

In Tommaso , Ferrara strikes notes that rely almost entirely on his main actor, Willem Dafoe, who has worked with the director on several other movies. Here, Dafoe plays Tommaso, a director who has been living in Rome for several years with a much younger Eastern European wife (Cristina Chiriac) and the couple's three-year-old daughter.

Tommaso is trying hard to put a turbulent past behind him; he has renounced the drugs and alcohol that wrecked his stateside life and he seems intent on constructing some kind of family life in Rome, perhaps as a form of contrition for too much previous bad behavior.

Dafoe moves Tommaso through a variety of scenes that suggest the cobbled-together life of an ex-patriot. He runs an acting school where the focus seems to be on uninhibited movement. He takes care of his daughter and cooks meals when his wife won't. He also attends meetings with fellow addicts and tries to overcome the increasing disdain of a wife who seems eager to spend as little time with him as possible.

When he's stressed, Tommaso meditates or practices yoga. Occasionally, he can be seen working on a screenplay. He's taken up Buddhism.

Dafoe rarely disappoints. He gives Ferrara everything he can, never shying away from the fact that Tommaso can be a real pain in the butt.

It's unlikely anyone will confuse Tommaso with an exercise in rigorously disciplined filmmaking, and there are images (Tommaso meeting a naked woman at a coffee shop) that aren't easily explained. Scenes set in Tommaso's 12-step group feel repetitive and Ferrara can't resist adding an explosive bit of violence toward the end.

No faulting Dafoe, who's game for anything, even allowing Ferrara to refer to the actor's appearance in The Passion of the Christ. You’ll have to get to the film's end to find out how this happens.

Many flaws can be tolerated when a filmmaker works close to the bone, but for me, the movie’s indulgences, its insularity, its fantasies and confessions left little room for any characters other than Tommaso, which, in turn, made me wonder whether Ferrara hadn’t made a film that’s talking mostly to itself.

A tribute to the imagination of a director

Director Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini takes an episodic approach to Pier Paola Pasolini’s final days.

I've read that Willem Dafoe wore director Pier Paolo Pasolini's clothes and eyeglasses while acting in director Abel Ferrara's simply titled, Pasolini, an ode to the fallen Italian filmmaker.

Pasolini's story can be as intriguing as his movies. The director was found dead on a beach in 1975. Seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi confessed to the brutal murder, which Ferrara depicts as an extreme act of homophobic rage. Pelosi eventually retracted his confession, and Pasolini's death remains a source of speculation. He had plenty of enemies -- from censorious haters of the sexuality in his films to detractors who abhorred his politics.

Ferrara uses the days leading up to Pasolini's death as a springboard for exploring the imagination of a director who also was a novelist and poet. There was Pasolini's work and then there was the man. Pasolini became a champion of independent-minded art that refused to bow at the altar of social convention.

Ferrara also explores Pasolini's view that every bit of humanity was being wrung out of people by corporate and industrial forces and by their own acquisitiveness. There are no more humans, Pasolini tells an interviewer at one point. The interviewer says that he finds piercing moments of light in Pasolini's work doesn't fully understand them. You may find yourself saying the same about Ferrara's movie.

In ways that unbalance us, the movie includes snippets from a film that Pasolini proposed to make. Ferrara begins with a reference to Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini's last film, a work that was excoriated by some for its graphic, humiliating depictions of sexual exploitation.

Pasolini thoughtfully watches a scene from the film, his demeanor suggesting that he's far more interested in its political implications than in its explicitness.

We also learn that Pasolini lived with his mother (Adriana Asti) and a cousin (Giada Colagrande). His home life appears to be calm, even reflective. He also liked to prowl Rome's streets at night looking for sex, a pursuit that may have led to his demise.

Pasolini's films (from The Gospel According to St. Matthew to The Decameron to Arabian Nights) won him admiration from critics, cineastes and perhaps even from his fellow countrymen. People never have been shy about expressing pride in the renown of certain artists -- even if they don't always understand or approve of them.

Pasolini includes sex and violence but Ferrara (best known for movies such as King of New York, Bad Lieutenant and The Addiction) seems in a reflective mood himself.

Is Pasolini about an important Italian filmmaker, about the Ferrara views of the role of artists or about Pasolini's belief that humanity was poised on the edge of an especially dangerous moment? Perhaps all of the above.

It would be impossible and also unforgivable not to say more about Dafoe's performance. Dafoe not only wears Pasolini's clothes but internalizes his spirit. He even holds our attention when Ferrara shows Pasolini sitting at his typewriter, pounding away at a screenplay.

Think what you will about Pasolini, but know that Dafoe, who speaks in English here and who last played Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate, is a gift to every director who wants to push the medium's boundaries -- and cinema lovers, as well. Movies would be poorer, staider and less challenging without him.

The end of the world and other matters

ABEL FERRARA TACKLES THE DEATH OF EVERYTHING

What would you do if you knew that the world was going to end today? No loopholes. No escape clauses. You and the rest of humanity are about to become extinct. That's the question that director Abel Ferrara -- perhaps best known for the scabrous cop drama Bad Lieutenant -- asks in 4:44 Last Day on Earth. Judging by the movie's two main characters (Willem DaFoe and Shanyn Leigh) the answer goes something like this: You'd pretty much do what you always do -- only with a heightened consciousness that you were living your final hours. Leigh plays an artist who paints in the couple's New York loft; DaFoe portrays a reformed drug addict. So what happens? A delivery kid shows up with Chinese food. DaFoe calls his daughter from a previous relationship. The couple makes love, argues, meditates and prepares for the worst. Ferrara surrounds DaFoe and Leigh with TVs (always on), computers and smart phones, making us wonder whether even the end of the world can't be experienced without some form of electronic mediation. Those familiar with Ferrara's work will find a softer, less heated approach in a movie that's not nearly as pretentious as Lars von Trier's Melancholia, which also dealt with the end of the world. Although Buddhist lectures and an interview with the Dalai Lama sometimes play on TVs in the background, neither character in 4:44 Last Day on Earth seems to be asking big questions. The point, one supposes, is not to imagine the end of all humanity, but to encourage thought about what really should matter to us. The movie blames man-created holes in the ozone layer for the approaching doom. But let's face it: The difficult truth, the one we seldom choose to acknowledge, is that any day could be our last. DaFoe and Leigh sometimes seem to be improvising, which means there are awkwardly acted moments, but there's also an undeniable quality of exhausted resignation about 4:44 The Last Day on Earth, a feeling that stems from knowing that there will come a moment when the universe puts a period at the end of each of our meager sentences -- and from thinking that all of humanity could reach a point when there will no next generation to set things right.

A THIEF IS TOPPLED FROM HIS ARROGANT PERCH

The Norwegian film Headhunters begins as if it's going to be a crackling thriller about a corporate headhunter who, in his spare time, steals art. In this full-time executive and part-time thief, director Morten Tyldum has found an interesting character, and actor Aksel Hennie imbues him with the kind of arrogance that accrues to someone who thinks he's putting something over on the world, even if he's not sure his run of unearned luck can last. Hennie's Roger Brown has a beautiful wife (Synnøve Macody Lund), a stylishly modern home and lots of possibilities for new art thefts. He also has an accomplice (Elvind Sander), a worker at a security firm who (for a price) shuts off the alarms at the homes Roger burglarizes. Roger's life changes on the day that he's approached by a confident CEO type (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who's looking for a new job. The movie then turns into a kind of cat-and-mouse game revolving around a valuable painting that has come into the possession of Coster-Waldau's character. We suspect something particularly strange is up when Coster-Waldau's character begins to reveal his background. He's a former special forces guy who worked for a company that has invented all kinds of high-tech tracking devices. Tyldum eventually switches gears, turning the movie into a disturbing game of can-you-top-this with Roger falling into one terrible trap after another. I'll spare you the details, but the squeamish should exercise a bit of caution here. Tyldum has a refined taste for macabre visual sight gags, and it should tell you something that Headhunters already has been slated for an American remake, perhaps because Tyldum builds the story around imaginatively conceived and steadily escalating physical horrors and perhaps because the movie's view of corporate types is fashionably unflattering. Headhunters is involving to be sure, but I couldn't help thinking that it's also one more movie looking for outré ways to distinguish itself from the rest of the indie pack.