Tommaso

Staggering. I think Ferrara shines brightest when he's working with a small scale with a singular viewpoint. This is such a wonderfully intimate and character-driven film that feels self-critical without having an obnoxious mentality. The direction and written is so spectacularly utilized with the structure. Willem Dafoe is phenomenal as always and has such a naturalist approach while still remaining cinematic. It's such a off thing to describe Tommaso but I can unequivocally say it's worth a watch; hopefully I can revisit soon.

Performances were good and it has interesting ideas. But it feels like a jumble of ideas stitched together. It could have been an extremely engaging and interesting movie if it had a tighter script that was more concerned with delivering on its theme.

Like another reviewer said, there is no character development,. It seems rather pretentious. What do the disjointed "metaphysical" scenes have to do with anything. Are they suppose to imply that the protaganist,is experiencing some kind of divine madness? I was not convinced.

Easy on the eyes, heavy on the heart. Well worth my time, this story continues to give well after viewing and brings up interesting questions in oneself.

If you dig a bit you find this is a semi-autobiographical film of the writer-director's life. In fact the young wife and young daughter are actually his real life wife and daughter.

I really looked forward to seeing this as it has Willem Dafoe in the title role as Tommaso. And he in fact does justice to the role. The problem is the movie in total is not that interesting. It contains lots of stilted language and long monologues but basically is a story of a man, an actor and writer, living in Rome and working to overcome his addictions and balance life with a much younger wife that seems to be losing interest in him.

I suspect this is the kind of movie that film students and critics love but most viewers of mainstream movies will not warm up to.

I managed to find it on the Kanopy streaming movies site via my public library's subscription.