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.

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.

For me its on of these Films which spend so much time on "meaningful" pictures. It becomes just boring. Also the character doesnt seem to make any progress in this movie. And to just show the Problem over and over explained from different characters and "meaningful" pictures its not enough for me to make a good movie. Instead of trying to work on any development into any direction the film just freezes in the midst of the Probmlem and doesnt move anywhere from or with it. The "solutions" are presented by Narrators or Cut-scenes from some documentary and come in some meta philosophical ways and are not in itself relevant to any of the story. And also dont get integrated into the story. they just stay above everything and thus have no meaning whatsoever. Also they offer little solution but are itself explaining the root cause of the "problem" from another perspective.

I really cant see why people enjoy these Films which only spin themself around the problem and fake to be meaningful when there is no debate or discussion of the problem, solutions or development.

6 stars for the cinematagrophic quality and dafoes acting