Word: coppolas
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...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...
...film's world premiere in Cannes last month, Coppola said of the similarities between life and script, "Nothing like this happened, and everything is true." Alas, in Tetro he has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true...
Read a TIME profile of Francis Ford Coppola...