Most general accounts of Francis Ford Coppola's work have identified recurrent familial themes, while visually he has come to be understood as something of a guru of the extravagant. However, neither of these positions is entirely sustainable across an oeuvre that on closer inspection discloses considerable formal and thematic scope. If Coppola had by the close of the 1970s figured, understandably enough, that his career was blessed, this, his next venture, would bring about a very hasty and categorical fall from grace. Initially conceived as a modest antidote to the excesses of Apocalypse Now, the project ballooned into an experiment of gargantuan, tragic proportions that subsequently marked an immediate shift in his career to more modest productions.
This Oscar-nominated Vegas-set semi-musical, which led to Coppola's bankruptcy, is an intriguing production but not a good film. From Coppola, the inspired mastermind of The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and the Godfather films, it's a foremost letdown. A movie's innovative technical process is indeterminate. Movies make or break as per the substance of their material. The most miserable thing about this lavish exercise in style is that it has none. It's a tango of elegant and byzantine camera movements filling wonderful sets, and the characters get completely misplaced in the thick. There's never a second in this film when I'm concerned about what's happening to the people in it, and but one moment, a cameo by Allen Goorwitz as a furious coffee shop owner, when I feel that an actor's artlessness successfully slips past Coppola's suffocating panache and into the audience.
The raconteur of The Godfather turns into a pure technician here. There are unsettling congruences between Coppola's fanatical command of this film and the character of Harry Caul, the wiretapper in Coppola's The Conversation, who cared solely about technical outcomes and declined to let himself consider human ones. Movies are innumerable different things, but most of the best ones are about and for people, and this unmistakably hallucinatory and dreamlike piece of filmmaking takes little notice of the difficulties of the human spirit. Certainly, it appears virtually on the lookout against the actors who inhabit its painstakingly designed scenes. They're scarcely ever permitted to lead. They're figures in a larger blueprint, one that ebbs them, that views them as part of the furnishings. They aren't offered many close-ups. They're frequently suffused in loud red glimmering or overpowering blues and greens. They're positioned before off-puttingly glitzy sets or adrift shoddily stage-managed hordes. And occasionally they're interrupted at the heart of a sentiment because the uncompromisingly planned camera has affairs elsewhere.
I've forgotten, indeed, to mention the players, or who they play. That's not so much of an omission talking about a film like this. The two leads, the sexier-than-ever Teri Garr and the forgettable-as-ever Frederic Forrest occupy a Las Vegas of regret, languor, and glitzy lights. For a short time, they spring from their monotonous lives and meet new lovers, Raul Julia and Natassja Kinski, who string them along with flights of the imagination. In effect, Coppola's telling the simple story of a break-up but with the hyper-romantic lusciousness of the emotions we feel in those times, which is cool, until it becomes an unmotivated, auto-pilot story upstaged by its own, well, stages.
There are trivial amusements in this movie. One is Harry Dean Stanton's phone-in as a sleazy junkyard owner, while Coppola defies showing us Stanton's most valuable instrument, his telling eyes. Kinski, as a circus tightrope walker, has a pretty decent blip on the radar when she explains "to make a circus girl disappear, all you have to do is blink." Garr is endearing, but her role makes her unrewardingly submissive, and Forrest is more or less transparent here, playing such a nonentity. Ho hum.
This Oscar-nominated Vegas-set semi-musical, which led to Coppola's bankruptcy, is an intriguing production but not a good film. From Coppola, the inspired mastermind of The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and the Godfather films, it's a foremost letdown. A movie's innovative technical process is indeterminate. Movies make or break as per the substance of their material. The most miserable thing about this lavish exercise in style is that it has none. It's a tango of elegant and byzantine camera movements filling wonderful sets, and the characters get completely misplaced in the thick. There's never a second in this film when I'm concerned about what's happening to the people in it, and but one moment, a cameo by Allen Goorwitz as a furious coffee shop owner, when I feel that an actor's artlessness successfully slips past Coppola's suffocating panache and into the audience.
The raconteur of The Godfather turns into a pure technician here. There are unsettling congruences between Coppola's fanatical command of this film and the character of Harry Caul, the wiretapper in Coppola's The Conversation, who cared solely about technical outcomes and declined to let himself consider human ones. Movies are innumerable different things, but most of the best ones are about and for people, and this unmistakably hallucinatory and dreamlike piece of filmmaking takes little notice of the difficulties of the human spirit. Certainly, it appears virtually on the lookout against the actors who inhabit its painstakingly designed scenes. They're scarcely ever permitted to lead. They're figures in a larger blueprint, one that ebbs them, that views them as part of the furnishings. They aren't offered many close-ups. They're frequently suffused in loud red glimmering or overpowering blues and greens. They're positioned before off-puttingly glitzy sets or adrift shoddily stage-managed hordes. And occasionally they're interrupted at the heart of a sentiment because the uncompromisingly planned camera has affairs elsewhere.
I've forgotten, indeed, to mention the players, or who they play. That's not so much of an omission talking about a film like this. The two leads, the sexier-than-ever Teri Garr and the forgettable-as-ever Frederic Forrest occupy a Las Vegas of regret, languor, and glitzy lights. For a short time, they spring from their monotonous lives and meet new lovers, Raul Julia and Natassja Kinski, who string them along with flights of the imagination. In effect, Coppola's telling the simple story of a break-up but with the hyper-romantic lusciousness of the emotions we feel in those times, which is cool, until it becomes an unmotivated, auto-pilot story upstaged by its own, well, stages.
There are trivial amusements in this movie. One is Harry Dean Stanton's phone-in as a sleazy junkyard owner, while Coppola defies showing us Stanton's most valuable instrument, his telling eyes. Kinski, as a circus tightrope walker, has a pretty decent blip on the radar when she explains "to make a circus girl disappear, all you have to do is blink." Garr is endearing, but her role makes her unrewardingly submissive, and Forrest is more or less transparent here, playing such a nonentity. Ho hum.