Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that the movie is in the theaters, audiences are at last going to learn just why it took Francis Coppola $30 million and almost four years to finish Apocalypse Now. The answer, it turns out, is not nearly so mysterious as one might suppose. Coppola delayed the completion of his Viet Nam film for the simple reason that he could not bring off the grand work he so badly wanted to make. He tinkered right to the end-long after a lesser director would have cut his losses-but his movie remains a collection of footage. While much...
...such is the nature of the entire film that even these hallucinatory passages are not so powerful as they might be. At times they are as anesthetizing as the Viet Nam footage that once dominated TV's evening newscasts. What is missing from these panoramas of death is a human context. There are almost no well-defined characters in Apocalypse Now. The biggest nonentity of all, sadly enough, is Willard. We are supposed to see the movie through his eyes-which are frequently superimposed on the film's images-but those eyes tell us nothing...
Perhaps if Coppola had succeeded in his efforts to recruit a star for the part, Willard might have commanded an audience's interest and empathy by sheer force of personal magnetism. Having no star, the director tried a more desperate solution: he commissioned Journalist Michael Herr (Dispatches) to write a narration that attempts to fill in Willard's personality ex post facto on the sound track. That narration-alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho and antiwar-is self-contradictory and often at odds with Willard's behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure...
...praise Gerald Hiken as Strider might be too faint a thing to do. You only believe in him if you have ever been moved to laughter, truth and tears. No one can ask more of an actor at the match point of illumination...
Strong feeling does not necessarily make strong art, and Segal's tableaux might remain in the category of dramatic curiosities but for one quality: his laconic Tightness of arrangement. "In his use of space," one of the catalogue essays rather absurdly claims, "Segal is close to the minimalists," because, apparently, "Segal's figures energize their spaces." (And what sculpture, minimal or other, does not?) Nevertheless, Segal knows exactly how much distance to allot between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter...