Tom­ma­so – first look review

There’s often a fine line between the sto­ries an auteur choos­es to put on screen and their own life. Tom­ma­so is a per­fect exam­ple, with writer/​director Abel Fer­rara set­ting his new film in his own Rome apart­ment, and cast­ing his wife and three-year-old daugh­ter in the sup­port­ing roles.

The lead is played by Willem Dafoe, on fan­tas­tic form as a New York film­mak­er strug­gling to find a sense of iden­ti­ty and a new home in the city. So does Fer­rara man­age to turn his per­son­al demons into a some­thing com­pelling, or is this sim­ply a van­i­ty project from the for­mer Hol­ly­wood hell-raiser?

You couldn’t wish for a bet­ter sur­ro­gate than Dafoe, who is as charm­ing and thought­ful in a role tai­lor-made for him. Fer­rara takes the time to estab­lish his peace­ful dai­ly rou­tine, which pays div­i­dends once his per­son­al rela­tion­ships become more com­pli­cat­ed. He works hard learn­ing Ital­ian to assim­i­late, he stops off at local cafés for quick espres­sos, and he picks fresh veg­eta­bles from the grocer’s. In short, it’s the most whole­some Dafoe has ever been.

His rela­tion­ship with Nik­ki, the moth­er of his child, seems doomed from the start (which must ring alarm bells for Cristi­na Chiri­ac, Ferrara’s real-life wife) but their grow­ing strife is well played, with the sen­si­tive, cau­tious Tom­ma­so clash­ing with her inde­pen­dent, free spir­it. We’ve seen rela­tion­ship trou­bles like this play out in count­less films before but Dafoe gives it more weight than most. You can real­ly see how hard he’s try­ing to make this new life work, and how much it hurts him when things go wrong.

Grad­u­al­ly it is revealed that Tomas­so is also still deal­ing with more seri­ous per­son­al issues from his past, includ­ing bat­tling alco­holism, just like Fer­rara. This strug­gle is mov­ing­ly por­trayed with­out ever falling into the cliché of Tomas­so hit­ting the bot­tle when times get hard. His vis­its to AA are a good excuse for Dafoe to deliv­er some great heart­felt mono­logues, and a brief encounter with a drunk home­less man is a com­pas­sion­ate and com­ic gem.

How­ev­er unlike­ly it might seem from the open­ing scenes, this wouldn’t be a Fer­rara film with­out some vio­lence. Con­sid­er­ing the con­trol and del­i­ca­cy of what pre­ced­ed, it’s a shame to see him default to blood­shed, espe­cial­ly when it feels so out of char­ac­ter. A few dream­like scenes of mag­i­cal real­ism sug­gest Tommaso’s state of mind isn’t entire­ly intact, but nev­er­the­less, the final 15 min­utes feel like they’re from anoth­er film.

Fer­rara digs deep into his per­son­al life to deliv­er a sweet, hon­est char­ac­ter study of a man strug­gling with guilt and anx­i­ety. Dafoe is incred­i­ble, but the film’s big fin­ish feels like a step back­wards after such an inti­mate, accept­ing and redemp­tive tale.