GRADE: A-

"Carry this with you," Ray Tempio's father tells him, handing him the empty casing of a bullet that the boy has just used to kill a man. "Nothing will cost you more." At his father's urging, young Ray executed an enemy of his family. If you show mercy to your enemies, he's told, they will come back to kill you.

Ray has carried those words with him through his formative and adult years, even though they may be a reflection of the kind of philosophy that led his father to suicide. Still, it's the philosophy he knows -- part of the worldview he's locked into. The scene comes in a flashback early in Abel Ferrara's Depression-era gangster movie, The Funeral. Fans of Ferrara's earlier work -- which includes King of New York, Bad Lieutenant and last year's wacked-out vampire allegory, The Addiction -- should know what to expect, but many others may be baffled by this oddball crime drama cum murder mystery cum philosophical treatise. Ferrara's heady moral brew is an aquired taste: bitter, yet rare and satisfying.

Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, and Vincent Gallo are Ray, Chez, and Johnny Tempio. The latter brother is laid out dead in a coffin as the movie begins, three bullet holes in his chest. Ray, who presides over the funereal household with an eerie majesty, is bent on vengeance. Chez, a loose cannon, is just angry. Watch carefully -- Ferrara switches into flashback without warning, so viewers are advised to keep on their toes.

We learn more about Johnny -- he was a budding Communist whose ideals gave him keen interest in his racketeering family's influence on labor unions. He was a brash loudmouth who fed his hubris by dating the wife of rival Gaspare Spoglia (Benicio del Toro). But most of all, he was a Tempio, and that means Ray is out for blood. Ray's henchmen round up and question Gaspare, the most likely culprit. But as Ray investigates deeper, he's confronted with the possibility that Johnny may have gotten just what was coming to him. And what then?

The women have had their fill of violence and vengeance. Ray's wife Jeanette (Anabella Sciorra) confides to Johnny's fiance (Gretchen Mol) that she's lucky she won't wind up married to "one of them," and keeps a figure of Saint Agnes next to the bed, as a reminder of "what happens to you when you say no." Lancome spokesmodel Isabella Rossellini looks startlingly world weary as Chez's beleagured wife, and she has her own saint on the table -- the patroness for treatment of the insane.

Indeed, it's the very real tribulations of these women that help keep the testosterone-enhanced performances of Walken and Penn in check. The Funeral never takes the easy tack of glamorizing its gangsters, and Sciorra's strong-minded performance is a tough and unsentimental reminder of how lives are torn apart by sacred bonds turned unholy.

Ferrara gives her plenty of screen space, since she's got a pair of scenery-chewing performances to compete with. Walken is, as ever, giddily hammish. He's intense and scary and very serious about the role, but there's an element of high comedy buried underneath the facade. Walken is such a good actor than even though he's unmistakably aware of how crazy his character is, he plays it with an unwavering passion even as he tumbles over the top.

Still, the real kudos must go to Penn, who's stuck exercising mostly his aptitude for ugliness. I've had my fill of the abusive male as a character type, but Penn really helps us understand this one. Ferrara never asks us to excuse Chez's behavior toward women -- Chez treats his wife poorly and with little passion; he first rebukes, then forces himself on a young prostitute who can't comprehend his sudden moralizing -- but he does remember to show us why this man has a wife and friends in the first place. In one of the movie's best and truest scenes, Chez belts out a pop tune, surrounded by friends and associates at his bar. The exuberant magnetism Penn summons is undeniable, and a great testament to his still-underrated talents.

The Funeral isn't all so well-balanced. Ever since Bad Lieutenant, I've wished Ferrara and longtime collaborator Nicholas St. John could find a way to better weave their more didactic concerns into the fabric of the film. As it is, the film stops dead several times so that the characters can have conversations that delve into moral responsibility and the teachings of Catholicism. These are almost Godardian moments, where the audience is suddenly jerked out of the movie's fiction-world to be lectured. I also have severe reservations about the very ending of the picture, which is a big, gaudy exclamation point at the end of an otherwise well-constructed story. It may be the logical extension of Chez's tortured existence, but it's an extension that we could well have imagined without seeing it actually played out on-screen.

Ferrara got his start making deliciously nasty exploitation flicks that left nothing much to the imagination (Driller Killer, Ms. 45). He's now working in a different milieu, and it's one that he hasn't necessarily come to terms with. Still, the low-key style he has pioneered over his body of work, unpleasant and unrelenting, seems to me a more significant and consistent exploration of modern America's dark side than anything that's been tried recently. His accomplishments dwarf the much flashier series of film noir retreads we've been subjected to, films which simply fetishize their subject matter rather than exploring it. Whatever else Ferrara may be, he's an explorer, and The Funeral may be as good a point as any for a willing neophyte to join the expedition.