Mary.

Dennis Lim watches Abel Ferrara shoot a doc during the Feast of San Gennaro ("a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on"), notes that Mary, opening Friday at Anthology Film Archives, "is simply the most direct expression of spiritual crisis in a filmography riven with Catholic notions of guilt and redemption," offers a bit of background on the director before turning to the future: "Mr Ferrara said he is energized by his recent documentary experiments, which have given him new ideas to use in his fiction.... He rattles off a list of feature possibilities: a 'Catholic western' inspired by The Searchers, a present-day Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a prequel to King of New York."

Updated through 10/18.

For the Voice's J Hoberman, Mary is "an anguished metaphysical roundhouse that leaves the wildly erratic filmmaker sitting on the floor while paradoxically affording his most cogent outing in several years.... Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness."

"Released belatedly, Mary turns out to be this season's most ambitious American film, a serious inquiry into the tenability of religious faith in a culture spiritually impoverished by the very technology that would spread the gospel," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Ferrara "about religious films, Jesus as a revolutionary figure, and why Werner Herzog 'can die in hell.'"

Online viewing tip. you are in heaven, and you are in hell - in the Cinema Echo Chamber. Evan Louison goes out with Ferrara, walking New York, talking religion.

Updates, 10/16: "Within the first fifteen minutes of Mary director Abel Ferrara has already folded five layers of reality onto one another," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. Two paragraphs follow, and then: "Going to such lengths of exposition in describing a film serves only to showcase just how far Abel Ferrara - one of the most, if not the most marginalized of contemporary American directors, cruelly and unjustly - will go to craft his art. I purposefully say the word craft because this director, perhaps - again - more than any other American working today, immediately strikes the novice viewer as precisely craftless, a series of nearly dissonant shifts in tone and dramatics from scene to scene, and within scenes too. Dialog can ring clunky as a mismatched set of barbells; style can flare up for expressionistic tremors only to simmer down in awkwardly matched shot/reverse-shot conversations. In a word, the man's films are cinematically aggravating. But this is praise - strong praise, in the context."

"I waited for a call from Ferrara so we could speak about the screening," sighs H Scott Bayer in the New York Press. "And waited. After waiting a day and a half, I was too stressed to care. Then, at 10 minutes to midnight on Friday night, a call came in from a sympathetic journalist with Abel's elusive cell. 'Call him right now, he's ready to talk.'" By then, all Bayer could muster was four questions.

Updates, 10/17: "As with many of Ferrara's best films, it varies its tone almost willfully, as though resentful of the possibility that his film might be mistaken as great by those who prefer their movies to slide down their throats without friction," writes Eric Henderson in Slant. "Mary isn't exactly a smart film, but it's a bluntly instinctive one."

Mary "is a weepy slab of overheated Gothic kitsch that shamelessly piggybacks on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and the controversy it engendered. Steeped in candlelight, with leaping shadows and ominous rumbles, it also conjures garish memories of The Exorcist sequels and the heavy-breathing nonsense of The Da Vinci Code," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"[Juliette] Binoche and a pre-Oscar [Forest] Whitaker deliver earnest performances, but Ferrara is stifled," finds Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out>. "Even New York, the city he loves, lacks character."

Nathan Rabin talks with Matthew Modine for the AV Club.

Update, 10/18: "In Mary, Abel Ferrara throws a lot of information at the viewer in a little amount of time and most of it's not without interest," writes Andrew Schenker. "But amidst all the film-within-a-film formal play, interviews with real life theologians, interpolated television footage of Middle East unrest, and earnest discussions of personal faith, the central throughline boils down to little more than a story of a man coming to accept a personal engagement with Christ and vowing to live a better life when confronted with tragedy. Yet even this story, intellectually dull where much of the film is stimulating, gets over on the heightened intensity Ferrara brings to its presentation and the impassioned emoting of Forest Whitaker."

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2008 2:45 PM