Movie Review: Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut ***** / *****

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola.

Written by: John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Herr (narration) based on the novel by Joseph Conrad (uncredited).

Starring: Marlon Brando (Colonel Walter E. Kurtz), Martin Sheen (Captain Benjamin L. Willard), Robert Duvall (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore), Frederic Forrest (Jay 'Chef' Hicks), Sam Bottoms (Lance B. Johnson), Laurence Fishburne (Tyrone 'Clean' Miller), Albert Hall (Chief Phillips), Harrison Ford (Colonel Lucas), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist), G.D. Spradlin (General R. Corman), Jerry Ziesmer (Jerry, Civilian), Scott Glenn (Lieutenant Richard M. Colby).

 

Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie of all time. I’ve seen it countless times in many formats – I had a widescreen VHS back in the day that I watched a lot. I had a couple different DVD versions over the years, and then a Blu-Ray disc – both of which has gotten a lot of play. I’ve seen it on a big screen just once – back in 2001, when Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux – which was 197 minutes long, a full 53 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Watching Redux is a fascinating experience for someone who knows Apocalypse Now to see what Coppola thought either didn’t work, or he didn’t have time for, back in 1979. But while Redux is a fascinating experiment – it isn’t better than the original cut. It is too long, and the two major additions to the film – the two that make up the bulk of the additional runtime – don’t really work. The additional scenes with the Playmates is problematic in many ways, and really just don’t work. The massively long French Plantation sequence (seriously, it’s probably about 25 minutes) really does stop the movie in its tracks. It comes between the deaths of Clean and Chief – right in the stretch when the crew is getting closer and closer to Kurtz – or as Willard says, as the river is dragging them towards Kurtz. As a sequence unto itself, it kind of works – but it makes the themes of the film far too explicit, and really does stop the movie for this strange interlude.

 

For the films 40^th Anniversary, Coppola went back to the editing room once again, and the result in Apocalypse Now: Final Cut – which comes in at 180 minutes, between the theatrical version and Redux. In the intervening 18 years, Coppola seems to have thought better of including additional scenes with the Playmates – they are gone. But for reasons only he could explain, he keeps the entire French Plantation sequence. I think the only time I watched the Redux version was during that theatrical release – the original cut is better, so I never felt the need. Reading over the inclusions in Redux, it really does feel like that the changes in Final Cut compared to Redux is basically eliminating the additional Playmates sequence, and one sequence at the Kurtz compound featuring Kurtz reading about the war from Time Magazine to Willard as he is imprisoned. There could be a few other changes – but those appear the ones that are readily apparent.

 

In terms of what the ultimate version of Apocalypse Now is, I still say it’s the original cut. That French Plantation sequence still drags the movie to a halt, right when it should be ramping up – right when the crew should be on their unavoidable collision course with Kurtz. When death starts arriving for them one at a time. This strange, surreal interlude at the Plantation doesn’t work as part of the film.   

 

And yet, if you have a chance to see this Final Cut in a theatre this August, you absolutely must. I saw it on an IMAX screen (a far cry from the little art house theatre I saw Redux on in 2001) – and the experience is amazing. The entire Kilgore sequence in the film – from when they are first introduced to Robert Duvall’s insane Colonel (insane in a different way from Kurtz) shakes your insides from the sound. It is the best depiction of absolute chaos I have ever seen in a film – the sheer craziness of the war on full display. After that first hour, of course, the movie does become quieter – at least for a while – as the crew drifts done the river, towards a destination only Willard knows. And Willard gets sucked into the mind of Kurtz, and starts to understand him in a way that both fascinates and frightens him. Sequences such as a the surreal, nightmarish Do Lung Bridge sequence can only really be experienced in full on the big screen. And Brando’s hulking presence as Kurtz is best experienced on the big screen – where he truly does become larger than life.

 

But pretty much every sequence in the movie is brilliant. The trippy opening montage, with Willard drunkenly spending time in his hotel room, set to The Doors The End is a masterclass in editing. The conversation over lunch with the intelligence guys remains dark and mysterious. The Kilgore sequence is just an absolute masterpiece in itself. The Playboy sequence here, like in the original, when the three bunnies come to perform a USO show, and drive the men into a frenzy, crossing sex and violence together, is wonderful. The sequence where they stop a Vietnamese boat still has the power to disturb (even if the puppy is perhaps a touch too much). Everything with Dennis Hopper’s Photojournalist is wondrously comic, and disturbing at the same time. In any other movie, his insane, looping monologues would get more attention. And then Brando shows up, with completely different insane, looping monologues – delivering at a quarter of the speed of Hopper’s. I know there are still some who think the movie goes off the rails when they reach Kurtz’s compound – but they are still wrong. Brando’s performance remains one of the very best of his career – and therefore among the vest best of all time. He is matched by Robert Duvall as Kilgore – who has the big job of setting just how insane this movie is going to get, and doesn’t disappoint. Martin Sheen does get the credit he deserves for just how good he is here – perhaps because other than the narration, it’s a larger silent performance. He isn’t one of the men of the boat – he is apart from them, and they all know it. The men on the boat itself – Albert Hall as the by-the-books Chief, Frederic Forrest as the paranoid Chef, Sam Bottoms as the Stoner/Surfer kid Lance, and a very young Laurence Fishburne as the innocent (somewhat annoying) Clean – are all perfect as well.

 

Seeing the film on a massive screen, with the best sound quality imaginable is like seeing the movie anew. It takes sequences you know by heart, and makes you see them slightly differently. So, yes, the best version of this film remains the original cut. If you are watching at home, there is no reason to watch either Redux or Final Cut unless you are interested in what was cut – which is interesting, but would probably mainly work best as Extra Features. Still, seeing this film on the big screen is more than worth it – even with the misguided French Plantation sequence, because you get to see a master filmmaker, at the height of his craft – a height he would never reach again – pulling you down into the Heart of Darkness. And hey, the film is three hours, with no intermission – so when you hear French, it’s a good time for a bathroom break. Don’t worry, the French Plantation sequence will still be going on when you get back.

Classic Movie Review: The Conversation (1974)

The Conversation (1974)
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola.
Written by: Francis Ford Coppola.
Starring: Gene Hackman (Harry Caul), John Cazale (Stan), Allen Garfield (Bernie Moran), Frederic Forrest (Mark), Cindy Williams (Ann), Michael Higgins (Paul), Elizabeth MacRae (Meredith), Teri Garr (Amy), Harrison Ford (Martin Stett), Robert Duvall (The Director).

In his Great Movies essay on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Roger Ebert writes “His colleagues in the surveillance industry think Harry Caul is such a genius that we realize with a little shock how bad he is at his job.” – which is something that I don’t quite agree with. I think Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), the main character in The Conversation, is great only at his job – he’s bad at everything else. He is a man who succeeds in recording conversations that no one else could – using his own specially designed equipment, and then mixing together different recordings into one cohesive tape. When he’s on the job – either recording the conversation or mixing them – he’s a genius. It’s everything else in his life that he completely and totally screws up at. We are told that at one time, Caul was the best at what he did in New York – but being the best meant getting a tape that no one thought possible – that lead to a triple murder. So he flees New York, and sets up shop in San Francisco. The opening scene of the movie is basically a brilliant montage of Harry getting the conversation that will obsess him throughout the movie – between a man and a woman who walk around in circles in a crowded public square. Harry will listen to that conversation over and over again, and try to piece together what it all means. And he’ll be completely wrong.

Harry’s is a job that you can only do if you don’t really care about what happens when you’re done. If you need a secret tape of a conversation between other people, the chances are you are not using it for purely good purposes. People will inevitably be hurt by what he does – but it’s the only world he knows, so he continues in it, even though he now knows what the consequences will be. He tries to cut himself off from the rest of humanity – he has an unlisted number that he thinks no one can get, triple locks on the door that he thinks his landlord cannot get into his apartment, he keeps his mistress (and that’s the right word, even if he isn’t married) at arm’s length. But he grossly overestimates his ability to shut out the world around him – and the power of the people he’s dealing with. Being paranoid is not something he needs to be in order to do his job – we see him at an annual convention for people in his business, some of whom flaunt their wares like salesman. It’s just who Harry has become, and it leaves him pretty much destroyed at the end of the movie.

The Conversation is the movie Francis Ford Coppola directed between the first two Godfather movies in the 1970s – and it’s another masterpiece like those two were. It is heavily influenced by European filmmakers – most notably Michelangelo Antonioni and his 1966 film Blowup – which is about a photographer who think he may have captured a murder in the background of one of his photos. In The Conversation, Harry believes the conversation he records may be evidence of an upcoming murder, and obsesses over what he hears on the tape – analyzing every vocal inflection to try and piece together what the meaning behind the words are. He becomes so locked into one way of thinking, he cannot imagine a different one.

The Conversation is a thriller, but a muted one. There are no chase sequences or gunfights or fistfights, or anything like that. There is a long sequence in the middle of the movie which is essentially a curiously muted party at Harry’s workshop involving the people in his industry – including a great performance by Allen Garfield as his chief competitor, who is pretty much Harry’s polar opposite. He comes across as gregarious and friendly, but there’s a coldness and a ruthlessness beneath that surface that only reveals itself slowly. We learn a lot about Harry in this extended sequence, even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the plot.

That’s because more than anything, The Conversation is a character study of Harry – a paranoid, lonely man who is scared of the implications he thinks he hears on that tape. This is one of Hackman’s best performances – quieter than he usually does, and more subtle. That last, haunting shot in the movie is of a broken man – one undone by his own hand. The Conversation doesn’t have quite the reputation of Coppola’s other 1970s films – but it’s a masterpiece just the same.

Classic Movie Review: One From the Heart (1982)

One From the Heart (1982)
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola.
Written by: Armyan Bernstein & Francis Ford Coppola.
Starring: Frederic Forrest (Hank), Teri Garr (Frannie), Raul Julia (Ray), Nastassja Kinski (Leila), Lainie Kazan (Maggie), Harry Dean Stanton (Moe).

Francis Ford Coppola had one of the greatest decades any director has ever had in the 1970s. He directed four films – The Godfather (1972), The Conversation, The Godfather Part II (both 1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) – all four of which were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, two of them winning. He won a Best Director Oscar for The Godfather Part II, won three writing Oscars (for Patton, and the two Godfathers) and the Palme D’Or for Apocalypse Now. More important than any of those awards however is the fact that three decades later, all of his 1970s films are still considered to be masterpieces. Making Apocalypse Now was a long, torturous process, but he ended up making what I still consider to be the best film ever made. And then, with 1982’s One From the Heart, the bottom fell out.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. One From the Heart was supposed to be a simple movie – an antidote to the bloated production of Apocalypse Now, and was supposed to help establish Coppola as a truly independent filmmaker – and get his Zoetrope ideal off the ground running and finance personal projects for Coppola and other filmmakers. Instead, the film, originally budgeted at $2 million, exploded into a $28 million dollar movie, that bombed at the office and with critics, and led to Zoetrope, and Coppola himself, going bankrupt. Pretty much all the films Coppola directed for the rest of the 1980s and 1990s were made in an attempt to pay off his debts – which eventually he was able to do – and thanks in part to a successful winery, he is once again able to make just the films he wants to make – which has led to Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011) – personal movies, that have mainly be greeted with a shrug (although I found much to admire about the first two – and still need to see Twixt). One thing is for sure though – One From the Heart marked the end of Coppola’s career as a truly great director. There is much to admire about some of his later films – but never again would he reach the heights of the 1970s.

Watching the film three decades removed from its release, it’s easy to see where things went so wrong with the movie – but also easy to admire much of what Coppola accomplished with the film. I’m not going to go nearly as far as the film’s most adamant defenders, who claim it is another Coppola masterpiece, but the film is not an epic failure like Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate either. Coppola used innovative editing techniques that are still used today. It’s easy to see the film’s influence on films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001). The film is always at least interesting, and sometimes brilliantly so, to look at and listen to. Coppola built his stage bound Las Vegas sets, in all their garish, brilliant color (which is what sent the budget skyrocketing) – but damn it, if they don’t look impressive. Too bad all the technical brilliance on display throughout One From the Heart is at the service of a rather simplistic, rather dull story.

The film stars Frederic Forest and Teri Garr as Hank and Frannie – a couple who has been together for five years, and are stuck in a rut. They have different ideas on where they want the next step of their relationship to go – he’s spent money buying out his roommate in the rundown home they pair live in, so he can fix it up nicely for them. She’s spent money on a trip to Bora Bora he doesn’t want to go on. They argue, they breakup and each goes running to a friend – he to Moe (Harry Dean Stanton) and she to Maggie (Lainie Kazan). They also both meet an interesting stranger in the night – her Ray (Raul Julia), a romantic waiter who says he’s a singer and piano player, him Leila (Natassja Kinksi), a travelling circus performer on the road with her family. The whole movie is set to a brilliant song-score written by Tom Waits, and performed by Waits and Crystal Gale. Waits would receive the film’s only Oscar nomination for his music – that apparently even inspired the production design of the movie, and certainly inspired the film’s overall tone.

There is not a moment in One From the Heart than is anything other than interesting to watch. Coppola is doing some brilliant technical things throughout the movie, and the music sets the tone for a film that is both romantic, and mournful. Yet the story itself really lets the technical achievement done. Hank and Frannie just do not seem right for each other – and Ray and Leila do more than provide a contrast for each of them to compare their current lover to – but actually both represent a far more logical option for both of them. They seem to be on the same page, want the same things moving forward, and they have undeniable sexual chemistry together. Hank and Frannie have run their course – but the movie doesn’t seem to realize it, continuing to let them crash back into each other right up until the “happy” finale. For the most part, the performances are fine – but they are awfully one note.

I’m not sure why Coppola felt this rather simple, rather wrong-headed story deserved such epic treatment. Had he had a better one, perhaps One From the Heart really would be a masterpiece, even if it still bombed at the box office. But he doesn’t. What the film really is, is a hugely ambitious misfire with so much to love about it, that I wished I could like it more.

Movie Review: Tetro

Tetro *** ½
Directed By: Francis Ford Coppola.

Written By: Francis Ford Coppola.

Starring: Vincent Gallo (Tetro), Maribel Verdú (Miranda), Alden Ehrenreich (Bennie), Klaus Maria Brandauer (Carlo), Carmen Maura (Alone), Rodrigo De la Serna (Jose), Leticia Brédice (Josefina), Mike Amigorena (Abelardo), Sofía Castiglione (Maria Luisa), Francesca De Sapio (Amalia).

You have to admire Francis Ford Coppola. So many filmmakers talk about doing smaller, more personal movies, but so few actually put their money where their mouth is and do it. His friend George Lucas has been saying that for more than 20 years, but all he keeps delivering is more Star Wars, and producing work on Indiana Jones. But after more than a decade off from making films, Coppola has returned with two smaller films, which appear to be passion projects for him. I know a lot of people did not appreciate Youth Without Youth (2007), his first film back, but I quite liked it. His new film, Tetro, is even better.

The movie centers on a pair of brothers, who share a father and not much else in common. 10 years ago, Angelo (Vincent Gallo) left on what was supposed to be a writing sabbatical, and promised his younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) that he would return for him - but never did. Now Bennie is 18, and has tracked his brother down in Argentina. Bennie has spent all the intervening years idolizing his (much) older brother, but when he shows up at his house, the welcome is anything but warm. Angelo, who now refuses to answer to that name and goes simply by Tetro, tells him he does not want anything to do with any of his family. The Angelo he knew is dead. But Miranda (Maribel Verdu) insists that they let Bennie stay with them, and Tetro eventually agrees. Tetro left all those years ago to try and outrun the car accident that caused his mother’s death (Tetro was driving the car), and to get out of the influence of his famous father, Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer).Carlo is a famous conductor, who resented other people in his family who had ambition. When Angelo informed him he wanted to make his living as a writer, his father tells him that in order to do that, he would have to be a genius - and there is only room in this family for one genius.

Tetro did write after he left, but he never shared his work with anyone. Bennie stumbles across a suitcase full of his writing. He decides to finish the play that Tetro started without telling him. He submits the play to a famous festival run by a critic known only as Alone (Carmen Maura) - a character straight out of Fellini.

For two hours, Coppola weaves his story, gradually revealing the secrets of Tetro and Bennie’s family. You could, if you were so inclined, complain about the artificiality of the story, the operatic emotions, and the filmmaking. But Coppola is an intelligent filmmaker. He knows all of this, so this is not a flaw in the film, but a deliberate choice. Coppola references the brilliant Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film The Tales of Hoffman, and Coppola echoes that films over the top exuberance in scenes. Most of the movie is shot in glorious black and white, but the flashbacks with Carlo and the dance sequences, which express the emotions behind the story, are shot in color. The movie comes gloriously, artistically alive.

The performances play a key role in making the movie work as well as it does. The brilliant filmmaking by Coppola would all be for naught had the actors not sold they hell out of their characters. Carmen Maura (a veteran of Pedro Almodovar films) is gloriously vain and superficial as Alone. She could have easily stepped right out of La Dolce Vita, and Maura sells her character perfectly. Maribel Verdu (Y Tu Mama Tambien and Pan’s Labyrinth) is touching vulnerable, supportive and tough as Miranda, the only person who Tetro allows to contradict him. Perhaps he knows that if he doesn’t allow her to speak her mind, then he’ll have no one left. Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who looks and sounds like Leonardo DiCaprio’s younger brother, is just about perfect as the hungry young man searching for answers - both talented beyond his years, and also a little too naïve. But the really stunning performance is by Vincent Gallo. Gallo is not an actor who blends into the background. With his thin, angular face, wild eyes, shock of black hair and nasally voice, you notice him every time he is on screen. He could easily have a career like Christopher Walken, playing one crazed villain after another, but that holds no interest for Gallo. He is choosy about the roles he takes. Tetro gives him a great role. He first stalks onto the screen on crutches (pretty much everyone in the film gets hit by a car at some point), and alternates in the movie between insane, comedic and heartfelt - and he pulls them all off brilliantly. I hope that Gallo acts more in the future - and maybe even gets back to directing. Hiss Buffalo 66 was a wonderful debut, and even the much reviled The Brown Bunny was an interesting failure. The man is insanely talented.

As is Francis Ford Coppola. In the 1970s, he made four the best films in American history with the first two Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, but some time since then, he lost some of that genius. In the three decades since, he has made some terrible films, some bad films, some good films and even some great films, but nothing that approaches that level of greatness again. Tetro still does not achieve that level of greatness. But it is a very good one, a personal film that shows that the ambitious filmmaker that Coppola once was has not completely left him. I do not know if he’ll ever be able to achieve that level of greatness again, but with Tetro, for the first time in years, I think that it’s at least possible.