Word: prestons
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TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1948 "car of tomorrow." Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau front a splendid cast...
...Preston Tucker proclaimed it "The car of tomorrow -- today!" The Tucker seated six adults and could cruise at 100 m.p.h. with its air-cooled rear engine. It boasted innovations that later became Detroit standards: disk brakes, a padded dashboard and curiosities such as a pop-out windshield and a crash compartment. (Preston's idea for seat belts was nixed by his company's board.) Sticker price...
...malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating, punching walls and embracing people, scampering down his assembly line in pursuit of the perfect car. Like many a Capra hero, he is sworn to fight the big boys who would crush his dream. And if they do . . . well, heck...
...Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in the performance of his life) knows better. He just nods sober agreement with Hughes. He is in the process of creating a utopian automobile that will get no further off the ground, commercially speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced...
Landau aside, no one else in the cast gets a similar opportunity to assert any complexity; Joan Allen as Tucker's wife Vera particularly suffers in this regard. But that is a small defect in a movie of large virtue. Preston Tucker failed to attain what we are pleased to think of as the American Dream of success: his factory produced only a few dozen cars before it closed. But there is another more common, more potent American Dream, which involves not the invention of products but the invention of self. And this movie, genial and fierce, is proof...