Word: coppolas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comes Tetro, Coppola's first original script since The Conversation 35 years ago, and what seems a very personal work: a story about an Italian family with rancor and secrets galore - think The Godfather, but with artists instead of gangsters. The great news is that at 70, this unquestioned giant of American cinema is still making independent-minded movies. (He finances them largely through the profits of his very productive vineyard.) The bad news is that he made this one. (See a gallery of iconic images from Coppola's films...
...hear clear echoes of the Godfather films, for which Coppola, who knew nothing about real gangsters, has said he appropriated much of his own family dynamic - the scenes of eating and arguing. There are also hints of another 1974 classic, Chinatown, in the family mystery peeled layer by layer. And like Youth Without Youth, the new film boasts an exceptionally sensitive performance by a young actor - here Ehrenreich, who looks like a missing Sheen brother and plays the callow Bennie as if innocence and ignorance were the coolest qualities a teenager could possess...
...Gallo is an actor who's all brooding surfaces and no depth. He can't touch whatever primal pain Coppola wants Tetro to conceal and then reveal. Nor has Coppola filled out the canvas with telling incidents or characters that go much beyond caricature. Sitting through the two-plus hours of Tetro can be an ordeal...
...Granted that, the film, which uses the same team Coppola found for the much more daring and romantic Youth Without Youth, looks great. After hundreds of movies and TV shows shot in the shaky-cam style, it's a blessing to find one in which the camera is on a tripod - and almost never moves. That gives Tetro the stateliness of silent films, just as the use of glistening or sepulchral black-and-white brings some of the glamour of classic Hollywood. But Coppola fans want him to recapture the dramatic coherence and operatic grandeur of his most productive decade...
...Coppola has said he was inspired by the semiautobiographical works of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. (One of his first screenwriting credits was on the 1966 film version of Williams' This Property Is Condemned.) For those aware of the filmmaker's family history, Tetro's backstory has provocative reverberations. Coppola's father Carmine was a flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra who left regular work to pursue his ambitions as a composer; later he wrote the score for several of Francis' films. Carmine's brother Anton was, for much of their careers, the more renowned...