Monday, May 19, 2008
A Sad & Colossal Mess from Coppola
I believe in the underdog and personal projects by artists who might get maligned by the press and can't find and audience. To be a champion for such a work when justified gives me great joy as a film lover.
But sometimes the work in question is so flawed, so greatly messed up that one can't justify the campaign to try to find something to really like about it, let alone recommend it to others. I remember years ago reading Hemmingway's Across the River and into the Trees a post WWII babble where the characters would riff endlessly about age and existence.
Francis Ford Coppola's film Youth Without Youth somehow brought me back to the experience of reading that tedium many many years later. I had believed this would be a kind of modest film experience in the mode of the quiet meditative Gardens of Stone, made after his son's death twenty years ago. Instead, this film is a kind of epic: the first third speculative fiction morphing into a bizarre Nazi espionage thriller and then into a turgid third act with a tongue speaking (or rather ancient language speaking) muse. This was a very long two hour movie which took me more than a couple of days to plod through via DVD.
I was pleased to see that Bruno Ganz was in it, but his performance seemed wooden and his English was distracting. He played a t doctor who protects his lightning struck patient who didn't die, but became younger. That patient was played by Tim Roth. This is an actor I have never been able to connect with and I'm not sure why except that he comes off as being very mannered to me. I'm wondering with another lead, I may have had more success with this film. But then I'm thinking that is probably unlikely. Much of Youth Without Youth has this professor character talking to himself in mirrors, in bed, and sometimes in the heat of the action. A mannered actor in a most mannered conventions thus buried this thing further for me.
Yet the film is gorgeous as one would expect from a Coppola production and it definitely takes some chances. For instance the dream and fantasy sequences would frequently be shot as sideways verticals or 90 degree flips. And there was an exterior sunset or two that one truly wanted to believe was not too great a product of digital enhancement. But visionary tricks don't connect if there is no story.
Walter Murch edited this film as he did with Coppola's Apocalypse Now and contributed the sound editing to the Conversation. If I was ever to return to Youth Without Youth, I would like to do that as one studying Murch's editing and sound techniques in the film. Much of the good stuff I could identify and notice in the film seemed to be associated with Murch's contributions. Then again, a study of Murch might be best spent with the earlier Coppola efforts or better yet the films of Anthony Minghella. I see on IMDB that Coppola his currently filming a new effort called Tetro and Murch is connected to it. Let us hope that will deliver something significant in his 70th year. It would be great to see this lion roar again.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
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