"Tetro" (2009)

Something's been made of Coppola's 2nd youth, a recent period in his filmography that began (appropriately) with Youth Without Youth in 2007. That film materialised exactly 10 years after The Rainmaker, which in 1997 had been a modest but energetic adieu to a director whose last notable achievement was the fantastically old-school, sumptuous production of Dracula. One of the more consistent traits in all Coppola's oeuvre is his careful selection & control of set and production design. Shining examples are Dracula and, of course, The Godfather films: these films exhibit atmosphere, and even where black holes congregate in the plot and the dialogue fails, overwhelmed by editorial pandemonium (as famously occurs in Apocalypse Now), or when the melodramatic swarms the screen in overtures, the ambience of the production set & the location, its characters & flora, the overall gleam of the screen muffles those parts of Coppola which are inescapably and anachronistically italianate: his love for the operatic, which pervades even his smaller-scale films.

Youth Without Youth, a film that begins promising, as it presents a terrific opening title screen (the 1st in the revamped American Zoetrope production line) that boasts something along the lines of a metaphysical 3rd Man, gradually degenerates as it develops its ludicrous plotline. Mircea Eliade after all was no professional novelist. Nevertheless, YWY's one admirable trait is its sense of atmosphere, allowing us at least to breathe a little of the Old World lovingly romanticized by the director.


Tetro is no different in its romanticization. Again the American Zoetrope presentation, an old-school single title screen presenting 'Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, starring Vincent Gallo'. It takes as its shooting location Buenos Aires, and in the spirit of romance, squeezes the color out of it. We are then treated to a revision of Coppola's Rumble Fish: the same themes of brotherliness & loyalty are refashioned, the same black-&-white aesthetics reminted. We are again confronted with the long shadow a legendary older brother casts on the younger, who searches for him & finds him. Rather than Matt Dillon in the starring role (whom Coppola had in mind from as far back as when he first wrote the screenplay in the late 70s), we are treated to the bizarrely but persistently likable Vincent Gallo. For this we are grateful (an older Matt Dillon would not have provided the film the lurch it needed.) Coppola had seen Buffalo 66, and makes great use of the prepackaged ethos Gallo brings into the proceedings; for Gallo's persona precisely fits the Tetro character: his irascibility, his affected loner look, his queer attractiveness, his failed artist's temperament: Gallo is all of these, the consummate 21st century dandy-dilettante. In Coppola's words, Gallo's look is 'iconic'. So the Gallo mug takes center stage in the opening shot: as the titular character stares into the luminscent burn of an overexposed lightbulb, his mesmerised eyes evoke the trace of a suitably mysterious and tormented past. Herein one of the central aesthetic themes takes root: the deathly obsession with light. Besides the ostensible prettiness & mood to be gained by playing with light photography, the theme of light plays a part in the film's dramatic tragedy. Even if there are loose associations between the facet of light and the familial revelations in the film's plot, the stylized cinematography is a necessary concomitant of the total mood.

Tetro has clear advantages over YWY: it is a work of love in Coppola's view, written by him and expressing some of his personal feelings on family and artistic achievement. As a result, it is more restrained than what is presented in YWY, since it creates a sympathy with the Tetro character through a rhythmic succession of flashbacks and present tense unconstrained by the urgency of genre devices (which caused YWY a whole lot of silliness). Tetro's young brother Bennie is played by a newcomer, Alden Ehrenreich, who looks like a young DiCaprio when he smiles, and captures the right amount of awkwardness coming to grip with the myth of his too often absent older brother. It may be that Ehrenreich speaks & acts exactly like an 18-year-old because he really is 18. But the rapport between the brothers holds true.

Nevertheless, Coppola's age shows once we reach the 2nd part of the film in which the tragedy arises. We may suppose that Coppola has drunk a good deal of wine in the 10 years that separate The Rainmaker and YWY, and we may imagine that during that interim he has listened to a good deal of opera. As such we are treated to his elderly passions: opera and the stuff of opera. By stuff I refer to the classically dubious plotlines of opera that the form insists on since it is nurtured by the stuff & circumstance of hyperbole. In film such hyperbole cannot usually work since cinema is usually kept grounded (or suspended) from the otherliness of sensationalized yarns. But Coppola pulls out the closet skeletons and tango dancing anyway, unafraid of how silly such heightened frivolities will seem if there are no Death Stars and screaming Luke Skywalkers surrounding the dramatic fracas. Hyperbole works so long as it can be in space, taking place in a galaxy far far away. But here we are in a mythical Buenos Aires, where literary critics can adopt pennames like 'Alone' and control the entire literary scene singlehandedly, where Argentine lovers have passionate spats and smash (what else?) guitars on the street, and where Vincent Gallo, a guy from Buffalo, New York, can miraculously speak spanish.

It is part of the film's charm that though it is nowhere near the perfectionism of Coppola's pastmaster work, it relies smoothly on the contours of its region to make itself a shimmering, if unbelievable, surface. Key to its strength is Coppola's newfound naivete, presenting a foreign magical world as it would have to appear to an 18-year-old searching for his long lost brother. Patagonia after all is a land of diamond-encrusted glaciers.

What is also to be commented upon is the possibility that Tetro's world, much like his fictional penname, may not indeed be true. Perhaps Tetro isn't who he is supposed to be (who he claims to be when constructing his life to his brother) and perhaps his manuscript, written backwards but legible with the use of a mirror, projects a false, fictionalised past. This possibility (that Tetro's manuscript is as much a falsity as his own name) is only hinted at throughout the film, and completely ignored by the resolution. We may surmise that it was originally a thread to be pursued by Coppola when he first wrote down the idea, since according to some reports, he had written a draft of it at around the same time he was making The Conversation, a film as much about uncertainty and fictional selves as Tetro. The former ends on a sax note of complete mystery: nothing is resolved, nothing discovered - in place of unbearable silence and the terror of being listened to by strangers, Gene Hackman plays the sax. Rather than face the past, Bennie (and Tetro before him) chooses to stare into the light.
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One final note: it is beyond ironic that of all the people in a close family of artists to depict the sins of the beknighted father in a film bordering on the autobiographical, it would be the legendary father himself. Coppola's offspring are Roman & Sophia, who are both filmmakers of perceivable talent, and who have been both somewhat caught in the enormous winedark shadow of their pater familias. This is the most intriguing aspect of the film's psychology, more so than what actually takes place in the film: perhaps Francis Ford sees himself involved in the Tetrocini father character, and perhaps he exorcises that demon of fame with this film, allowing his now grown, now burgeoning children the pass of faith? We may suppose that this sign of self-consciousness on the part of Francis Ford goes a long way of demonstrating what a nurturing, responsible, and ultimately fatherly person the great director has been to Sophia and Roman...