Thursday, December 06, 2007
Francis Ford Crappola
Elliott and I saw the newest Coppola film, Youth Without Youth at the Paris Theatre this week, and before getting into I'm going to lavish considerable time and attention to the accoutrements of the theater-going experience. First, it's a sincere pleasure to sit in a theater with only one screen, even if you have to go to 58th Street to do it. (Seriously, it was dark and snowing up there and they have an FAO Schwartz; that's how far north it is). Some budding soft-drink company called Tava was giving their shit away for free. Rich or poor: everyone loves free. I hadn't eaten dinner and reconciled myself to getting reamed up the ass for popcorn that makes your lips burn, but downstairs in the concession they were handing out free bags of popcorn plus gourmet cupcakes. When something has dulce de leche all over it, I'm going to take two, even if the item in question is a vagina dentata. But gourmet cupcakes will do.
Even though I can't fit into my pants anymore, I totally had popcorn, soda and three halves of three cupcakes for dinner.
Now the part about the movie. Coppola came out, age sixty-eight, to plug his latest film with a disarming level of earnestness. It's the first since The Rainmaker, which came out in 1997. While disputing his introducer's claim that his production company, Zoetrope, was "on hiatus," he ticked off a list of things his daughter Sofia was doing as proof that his own creativity hadn't sputtered out completely. Kudos, nepotist.
After plugging his wine label, he wryly referred to his desire to be a "young, independent filmmaker" before popping a Cialis with the Weinstein brothers. Then it was time for the worst film I've seen in the theaters so far in 2007. In short, it's the story of a scholar (Tim Roth) who at the age of eighty is struck by lightning and heals into his forty-year old self, with time to complete his magnum opus on the origins of language. His accrues supernatural powers and falls in love with a woman who's the exact double of his first love, and they travel the world together as she falls victim to various trances and altered states, speaking in tongues and brushing ever closer to the primeval language of man.
As an screenplay adapted from Mircea Eliade's story of the same name (a Jorge Luis Borges copycat), it was essentially dead in the water from the get-go. Imagine trying to remain faithful to the story about the king who commands his cartographers to draw increasingly detailed maps of his domain until they eventually create one that's exactly its size. To that, add a horrifically bland performance by Tim Roth with assistance from a bevy of high-pitched Eastern European doctors and academics who are seemingly motivated by pure beneficence.
This is not a whimsical film. Its flirtation with magical realism adheres strictly to its conventions as a plot device, without any interesting explorations of the themes that would, you might think, leap to mind immediately once you'd heard a one-line synopsis. The way in which Roth's "girlfriend" ages while he remains eternally youthful isn't boring because it's a common cliche; it's boring because it's like Dorian Gray with the decadence drained away. It doesn't even make sense. You never really see any hint of what Roth is working on, nor does the film clue you into why it matters. He's merely focused. There is an undeveloped allegorical theme of Romania through the middle third of the twentieth century, and the unrealized promises of all its abortive governments, but no amount of newspaper front page montages can sustain such scattershot connections.
While many of the individual shots are beautifully composed (including the titles), the film is painful. It's essentially one large, ponderous, slow-moving fiasco. It's like a demigod orchestrated the collision of two galaxies over the course of an eon and expected us to be enthralled as stars missed each other by light-years and only a few stray asteroids banged together. Coppola wants to be a young filmmaker, but the ability to conjure up a budget that must have lurched into the tens of millions doesn't come from small-scale viticulture. He's an old man who tapped decades worth of favors to disgorge this shitty meditation on recuperated youth, and like Roth's hidden monograph, it's irrelevant.
Even though I can't fit into my pants anymore, I totally had popcorn, soda and three halves of three cupcakes for dinner.
Now the part about the movie. Coppola came out, age sixty-eight, to plug his latest film with a disarming level of earnestness. It's the first since The Rainmaker, which came out in 1997. While disputing his introducer's claim that his production company, Zoetrope, was "on hiatus," he ticked off a list of things his daughter Sofia was doing as proof that his own creativity hadn't sputtered out completely. Kudos, nepotist.
After plugging his wine label, he wryly referred to his desire to be a "young, independent filmmaker" before popping a Cialis with the Weinstein brothers. Then it was time for the worst film I've seen in the theaters so far in 2007. In short, it's the story of a scholar (Tim Roth) who at the age of eighty is struck by lightning and heals into his forty-year old self, with time to complete his magnum opus on the origins of language. His accrues supernatural powers and falls in love with a woman who's the exact double of his first love, and they travel the world together as she falls victim to various trances and altered states, speaking in tongues and brushing ever closer to the primeval language of man.
As an screenplay adapted from Mircea Eliade's story of the same name (a Jorge Luis Borges copycat), it was essentially dead in the water from the get-go. Imagine trying to remain faithful to the story about the king who commands his cartographers to draw increasingly detailed maps of his domain until they eventually create one that's exactly its size. To that, add a horrifically bland performance by Tim Roth with assistance from a bevy of high-pitched Eastern European doctors and academics who are seemingly motivated by pure beneficence.
This is not a whimsical film. Its flirtation with magical realism adheres strictly to its conventions as a plot device, without any interesting explorations of the themes that would, you might think, leap to mind immediately once you'd heard a one-line synopsis. The way in which Roth's "girlfriend" ages while he remains eternally youthful isn't boring because it's a common cliche; it's boring because it's like Dorian Gray with the decadence drained away. It doesn't even make sense. You never really see any hint of what Roth is working on, nor does the film clue you into why it matters. He's merely focused. There is an undeveloped allegorical theme of Romania through the middle third of the twentieth century, and the unrealized promises of all its abortive governments, but no amount of newspaper front page montages can sustain such scattershot connections.
While many of the individual shots are beautifully composed (including the titles), the film is painful. It's essentially one large, ponderous, slow-moving fiasco. It's like a demigod orchestrated the collision of two galaxies over the course of an eon and expected us to be enthralled as stars missed each other by light-years and only a few stray asteroids banged together. Coppola wants to be a young filmmaker, but the ability to conjure up a budget that must have lurched into the tens of millions doesn't come from small-scale viticulture. He's an old man who tapped decades worth of favors to disgorge this shitty meditation on recuperated youth, and like Roth's hidden monograph, it's irrelevant.
