Word: tuckers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...depict Tucker's life with his family and its extension, his closest co- workers (Martin Landau is particularly good as his shadowy chief financial officer), Coppola uses the tones of an old Saturday Evening Post illustration, all lamplit glow. Tucker's public life, promoting his dream, looks like an ad from the same magazine, hard-edged, overly bright. But when he confronts the automotive traditionalists in his own organization or the politicians whom the movie shows endlessly harassing him at Detroit's behest, and when, finally, he ; is placed on trial for fraud, the film turns paranoid in the manner...
...energy from the surrealistic yet unpretentious play of these styles. But not all of it. The script is rich in ambiguous allusions to the sustaining myths of old-fashioned popular fiction and the folklore of capitalism. It neither blandly accepts them nor blithely satirizes them. Bridges' portrayal of Tucker is in the same key. In the largest sense, he is fully, honestly committed to his dream. But there are lovely little moments when we feel his love of hype and con for their own sake, and sense that whatever the outcome of his enterprise, he knows he has already lifted...
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...
...Tucker, about a cock $eyed optimist who in $vented a dream of a car, $is a winner for Francis $Coppola and a star $ vehicle for Jeff Bridges...