Lightning Strikes Twice: The Digital Rebirth of Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola's post-2007 comeback is vexing, bewildering, esoteric and, to these eyes, his most exciting work since the 1970s. Funding his own projects with wine money, Coppola has used digital not only as a means of keeping shooting costs down but to explore new forms of cinematic grammar and assembly. The most classical of New Hollywood has emerged its most postmodern. I delve into this aspect of Coppola's rejuvenation for Film.com, from his masterpiece Youth Without Youth to the uneven but unexpectedly personal Twixt. Form and content may not converge like they did during the '70s (but then, did they ever for the director after that gold run), but I would sooner watch these experimental works than the bulk of the director's corpus.

Check out my full piece at Film.com.

Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola, 2007)

Francis Ford Coppola's modern rejuvenation is one of the most unexpected and wonderful occurrences of contemporary American cinema. Almost entirely written off as a has-been who burned out while trapped in his mock-up Vietnam, Coppola's seeming early retirement after 1997's The Rainmaker appeared less premature but, if anything, belated. But Youth Without Youth was not merely Coppola's first film in a decade but his greatest in a generation, at least since 1983's Rumble Fish. The usual round of scathing late-period reviews greeted the director's work, but if one looks past a script that clearly reads better than it sounds aloud, Youth Without Youth becomes one of the most powerful expressions of the possibilities of the new cinema and, for all its reduced scale and budget, an astonishing leap forward in the classically minded Coppola's search for the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Based on the novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth wears its literary influences on its sleeves, introducing a 70-year-old Romanian intellectual, Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) at the end of a career spent unsuccessfully tracing linguistics to the origins of language. Despondent for a life wasted in solitary confinement, he returns home with plans to commit suicide, until a bolt of lightning strikes him as he crosses the street. Left horrifically charred, blind and near death, poor Dominic appears to suffer one final injustice before he shuffles off this mortal coil. Then, he makes a full recovery with breathtaking speed, not merely recuperating but aging backwards three decades.

Tetro

As overstated as Francis Ford Coppola's fall from grace may be, there's no denying that he never hit the same heights as his series of '70s films, in which he made four films, all four of which were masterpieces. It seemed as if, like all other filmmakers, Coppola himself couldn't top The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, and only brief flashes of inspiration -- Tucker, bits of Rumble Fish and Dracula, which I seriously and unfairly underrated and will soon revise -- pointed toward the genius that was. After spending a decade at his vineyard watching his daughter carve out a sizable amount of respect for herself, however, Coppola has reemerged, and the titan of New Hollywood became the unlikeliest of things: an independent. Youth Without Youth, a twisty, hugely ambitious feature, packed as many different types of movie -- time travel, WWII romance, philosophical meditation -- about reversed aging as David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Coppola did so with a fraction of the budget.

Taken with his latest feature, Tetro, Coppola's comeback places a particular focus on the actual beauty and meaning of creation, that is, the art of art. Youth Without Youth, a film about a man miraculously aged backwards and allowed a second chance at youth with the wisdom of an aged brain, could easily be a commentary on how digital photography, decreased actor salaries and an increasing ability to work outside the major studio system and still have a few million dollars to work with have given the director a second lease on artistic life.

Tetro takes this one step further. Semi-autobiographical in its story of an Italian-American family of gifted artists, Tetro is infused with the history of filmmaking in the same way that his Dracula was infused with the history of, well, damn near all of Teutonic artforms. Containing clips and extrapolated reinterpretations of Michael Powell's The Tales of Hoffmann and The Red Shoes, Coppola's latest is appropriately operatic, and bizarrely melodramatic in the Almodóvar tradition. Its tale of family rivalry and scorn will set tongues wagging over which character represents which celebrity in the fertile family tree of the Coppolas, but the structure here lends itself to something more universal, not so much impersonal as overseeing.

The film's title refers to one Angelo Tetrocini (Vincent Gallo), who takes on an abbreviation of his surname as he hides out in Buenos Aires suffering from writer's block. His much-younger brother, Benjamin (Aiden Ehrenreich) comes looking for him, but Tetro makes it immediately clear that, though his feud with his family never extended to his brother, his mere presence reminds him of what he left. Bennie, who also left military school to defy their father, works on a cruise ship so he can still wear an approximation of a naval uniform, and he uses his week-long furlough in Argentina to spend time with his brother, who lets him stay only at the urging of Tetro's girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdú).

Bennie, virginal and confused in a country full of people who speak an unfamiliar language, has all the more reason to hang on his brother while there, desperately trying to coax an explanation for why he never came back for the boy. It's clear that Tetro's resentment does not extend to Bennie, who's so similar to his older brother that the eldest snaps, "Don't do me, do you. I'll be me" when Bennie sarcastically refuses to answer questions to prove how irritating the silent treatment is. The last thing Tetro wants to be is a role model, though it's surprising that even his fresh-faced kid brother could do so. Gallo pours his reptilian ego into the role, a failed artist who holds onto his failure as if it had become his art, too proud to release it. He forbids Bennie from telling Miranda about their father and looks keen to send his brother back to America as soon as possible.

But Bennie stays, and his quest to dig up what drove his brother away and to uncover his own hidden past lead Coppola through a range of daring artistic devices. Shot mostly in high-contrast, digital black-and-white, Tetro lives and dies by the precise framing by the director and his cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., who also contributed to the beautiful compositions of Coppola's previous feature. The chiaroscuro mise-en-scène in Tetro is picturesque and provocative, not just emotionally but artistically: Tetro moves a mirror into place in his flat and the reflective effects allow for compounded compositions. When Bennie finally spills the beans about their father, a famous composer, to Miranda, the director cuts to Tetro frozen at the top of the stairs eavesdropping, shooting in deep focus to capture the stairs stretching behind and below the man in Expressionistic suggestion. The influence of the Germans is only exacerbated as the scene wears on and Tetro shouts down his brother as the camera remains on Bennie's face as the shadow of his brother bears down on him like Count Orlock.

When combined with the open quotation and literal presentation of Michael Powell's movies, the influence of Expressionism on Tetro opens up the true heart of the picture. Consider the outright usage of footage from Hoffmann: that was Powell's attempt to bring opera into the cinematic medium in a way that could only exist in that medium (much as The Red Shoes did for ballet). Coppola's features have always been operatic, especially his treasured Godfather series, but even his '80s youth movies have an unabashed melodrama, if the chief influence there -- making the logical step backwards in age and maturity -- is the musical and not opera. Here, as with Youth Without Youth, Coppola utilizes the broad emotions and half-cooked plot of the story to drive larger statements about art.

Tetro fled his father for being controlling and egomaniacal, insisting to both his sons, "There's only room for one genius in this family." The tortured son plans to write a play about his abusive childhood, but he stalls in Buenos Aires, content to live in his failure and refusing to work on his project. And when Bennie discovers his brother's manuscripts and sets out to write an ending for the work, his attempt to finish his brother's play seems less a validation of art as a means to link people than simply the latest spiral in the cycle of appropriation and plagiarism in the family (their father Carlo having achieved stardom by ripping off his older brother).

As in The Red Shoes, the characters of Tetro define worth through artistic talents -- the composing father, the writing sons, the singing first wife and dancing second -- but they do not find much pleasure in them. Wünderkinds battle it out for supremacy while the older generations rot in the wake of their own power struggles. Amusingly, the Tetrocini family resembles a liberal arts version of the Corleones, waging an internal war in which soldiers are decorated with grants and caporegimes win Pulitzers. The mediating voice in this conflict is the critic, personified by a garishly self-absorbed woman known only as "Alone," the biggest critic in South America. Alone has constructed a warped empire of half-analytical, half-gossipy tabloids, and her carriage and fashion suggests what Anna Wintour might be like if she insisted that Vanity Fair promoted "serious" criticism without sacrificing its glitzy side. Tetro seeks her validation so that he can throw it in Carlo's face, and Coppola has a grand time sending up the academics who so dearly loved him in the '70s before treating him like a leper and forcing him into a 10-year hiatus.

All of this makes for a melodrama that recalls, of all people, Pedro Almodóvar -- Carmen Maura, who plays Alone, is one of the Spanish director's regulars. Among the artistic flourishes in the film are a drag/striptease version of Faust that Tetro ruins by heckling. And if anyone still thinks that this is a gritty look at a broken family, lines like "Do you know what love is in our family? It's a stab in the heart" should adjust one's thinking to the proper perspective. In Gallo, Coppola has a deliciously aloof figure who seems most at home when he's at his most uncomfortable; when Bennie sustains an injury and winds up in the hospital, Gallo believably sells a joking moment where he slyly insists that he's only visiting his brother because they shared the same hospital room. Verdú is, of course, gorgeous and radiates grace, the only party who can stand outside the action and attempt to salve all the opened wounds.

The true find, however, is Ehrenreich. Looking like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, Ehrenreich with his first major role also proves that he can tap into the same well of simmering, brooding talent that the older DiCaprio now exhibits regularly. I wonder if Coppola saw the young man this way, too, placing him in a cruise ship uniform at the start to play on Ehrenreich's heartthrob looks by way of a vague Titanic reference before scuttling him away from the ship and letting his chops take over. Some fault the film for not being emotionally plausible or resonant, which misses the point but is an understandable error when Ehrenreich's mere presence makes one invest in him.

Enamored as the camera is with Ehrenreich, however, Coppola never loses focus, even if the film has a broad thematic makeup. Tetro opens suddenly on an extreme close-up of a light bulb humming as a moth flutters about and bumps into the lamp, and bright lights routinely hypnotize both brothers. When they head to Alone's festival in Patagonia, the light reflecting off the mountains resembles the flashes of adoring cameras, and Tetro stares at this sight with such intensity that an epileptic fit looks imminent. Bennie, too, is drawn to bright lights as he digs deeper into his family history, and thankfully Tetro snaps out of his own fixation in time to help his brother. "You can't look at the light," he tells Bennie, and in that moment Coppola takes a unique approach to art. Most films present the light as the escape from the horrors of life, the filter that allows us to confront reality; for the director just now getting back to work, focusing too intently on the spotlight or the beam of a film projector simply blinds us. With a vision like that, Coppola might yet prove to be a fresh, emerging talent of 70.

The Godfather Part II

If The Godfather served as a haunting eulogy for the American nuclear family, its sequel charted the death of the American Dream, ironically through those who unquestionably achieved it. Irony and cynicism pervades its narrative and its aesthetic, the golden hues of its tinting a comment not only on our sepia-toned nostalgia but America and its amber waves of grain. The Godfather Part II is a portrait of a tragic hero who is neither tragic (in that he is not deserving of a sliver of pity) nor heroic; though the film bifurcates and splits focus with another character from another time period, it is ultimately about the fall of Michael Corleone.

Its predecessor closed with a baptism juxtaposed with a killing spree, and The Godfather Part II opens with violence set to a communion, showing a young Vito barely surviving the murder of his family by the don of Corleone, Sicily and escaping to America, before Coppola cuts to Vito's grandson, about the same age as the Vito we just saw, coming into symbolic manhood just as Vito did with the dissolution of his family. Illustrating the progress of Vito's family is the sharp contrast between the two: Vito must become a man because he's lost everything. He watched his family murdered one by one and narrowly escaped to America with literally the clothes on his back, and he commemorates this radical shift by sitting in quarantine for tuberculosis, making the first noise he's made thus far by singing quietly to himself. Young Anthony, compared to the bloodbath his grandfather endured, accepts symbolic blood and flesh (the Eucharist) to confirm his adulthood, and where Vito sang quietly to himself, the boy is sung to. His father, Michael, orchestrates a celebration that seems more a coronation than communion, a boys choir praising the young lord among them while powerful men -- politicians, even -- come to pay their respects to King Michael and to thank him for his patronage.

The continuing juxtaposition between Vito's rise to power in America from 1901 through the mid-'20s and his son's ultimate consolidation of that power in 1957-58 illustrates how these initially vast differences belie a terrible unification, and, for all its leaps back and forth, The Godfather Part II presents a story with a completely logical progression. Sepia colors the story of Vito Corleone, who lost his identity upon arrival at Ellis Island when the immigration agent mistakenly identifies his city as origin as his surname, a clerical error that ironically ties him closer to his heritage; as such, Coppola and Puzo establish the character as the ultimate immigrant, literally named for his homeland, allowing the director to completely subvert the American Dream by charting Vito finding prosperity through nightmarish actions.

The first few times I watched this, I saw the difference between Vito and Michael was Vito's ethical code, his attempts to preserve his heritage and his method of creating a Family that worked doubly as the family that Vito lost. Now, the only particularly noticeable discrepancy between the two is that Michael, a vision of pure evil, merely lacks his father hypocrisy. Vito Corleone, like his youngest and favorite son, is soft-spoken and contemplative; he speaks so rarely that his voice rarely rises above in a whisper in either of first two films. Yet his actions are no less brutal than Michael's; they simply lack the scale. He kills Don Fanucci not for intimidating and extorting the Sicilian community in New York but the personal annoyance of being directly affected by the mobster's hold over the community. His first friendships -- with Clemenza and Tessio -- are forged with exchanges of favors, placing a physical value on their bonds instead of emotional connections or solidarity. Only after years of looking out for each other does some level of trust and appreciation emerge. Perhaps the greatest clue to the truth of Vito lies in the casting: he was played by Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, two of the most dynamic and intense actors to grace the screen. These are not the people to play a gentle man who brings ethics to organized crime: these are men fit for tyrants and warlords, and any genteel feeling we glean from them is nothing more than shrewdness.

The ironic sepia of Vito's bloody rise is counterpointed by the overpowering gold of Michael's story: his father slowly gained control of New York, but Michael is poised to conquer America. He's bought a senator (G.D. Spradlin) to help clear him of a Senate committee investigation, exonerating him publicly to fulfill -- in his own mind -- his promise to Kay in the last film, that he would make the Corleone family a legitimate business. Michael has wormed his way into the upper rung of American's power ladder -- that of the wealthy, not of the politicians -- and he realizes that the only difference between a legit business and a criminal organization is public perception -- when Senator Geary tells Michael how deeply he despises the Corleones and their attempts at decency, Michael responds, "We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family," a statement that shows how Michael cannot fathom just how deeply he's dragged his family down with him and the sick optimism of his attempts to clear their name. The golden color tinting in Michael's scenes reflects how he's become richer than God; the frame brightens so much at times I recalled Danny Boyle's Sunshine, a film about astronauts headed to the sun. Michael meets with other high-ranking businessmen in Cuba just before its fall to the revolutionaries, and we see that the representatives of corporations came closer to conquering Cuba than the United States government ever did.

Michael's arc reveals the pitfall of the American Dream: if we're meant to work hard and make better lives for ourselves than our parents, where does that leave the children of those who reach the top? Vito came to America with nothing and built an organization which Michael has turned into an empire, and references to Rome and its rise and fall are scattered throughout the picture (the Catholic imagery, Tom subtly guiding caporegime Frank Pentangeli to commit suicide in the old Roman fashion, and of course Part III would directly involve the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church). Michael's life follows the borderline Randian subtext of the capitalist dream: born into riches, he sacrifices what ties Vito did have with family -- his touching affection for his wife and children, best evidenced when he picks up his infant son and says, "Your daddy loves you, Michael -- for the sake of pure material gain.

If The Godfather dealt a crippling blow to the concept of family, Part II delivers the coup de grâce: Michael and Tom's plan of securing Geary's loyalty involves drugging him and killing his prostitute, thus leading him to believe that he killed the girl. Tom arrives -- thank God Mike's brother Fredo (John Cazale, who very nearly walks away with the film) owned the hotel -- and assures Geary that the Corleones will make it all better. "She's got no friends, no family," he soothes the senator, "It'll be like she never existed." At the start of the film, we get to meet Vito as a boy without friends nor family; at the end, Michael loses everyone he holds dear. He ahas Fredo whacked for accidentally selling out Michael to his conniving business partner Hyman Roth, and he throws out Kay when she tells him that she aborted their son because she so hated the monster Michael had become and refused to continue the cycle. In the penultimate scene, Coppola flashes back to Michael's decision to join the military, an action that both underpins the tragedy of his downfall from a man who wanted to lead a good life to the most terrible criminal in America as well as showing how far back his attempts to rid himself of family go. When Vito gets his start, he barely exists to a country that doesn't particularly want him, in a community that barely registers him, and at the end Michael sits alone in contemplation, king of everything and nothing.

As long as time remains, a debate will rage over which is better: Part I or Part II. When Kang and Kodos conquer this world, they will force their slaves to debate the collective merits of each and decide who lives and who dies based on their answers (of course, one will love the first and the other the second, so everyone shall lose). And while it is a pointless argument, I must confess that I will cast my lot with this every time. Never have I seen a performance as compelling as Pacino's; his eyes in the scene where Kay reveals her abortion can tell prospective actors more about the craft than a lifetime of classes at Julliard. His is but the tip of the iceberg, however, as Part II gets better performances from all of the actors carried over from the first while extracting equally superb ones from newcomers like De Niro. Aesthetically, Coppola, cinematographer Gordon Willis and editors Barry Malkin, Peter Zinner and Richard Marks craft an epic eulogy for America, a deconstruction of our social and political infrastructures through juxtaposition and irony without losing feel for its doomed, twisted characters.

The Godfather

No director epitomized the rewards and the pitfalls of New Hollywood quite like Francis Ford Coppola. All four of the feature films he made in the '70s -- the first two Godfathers, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now -- are masterpieces. Above his contemporaries -- above Spielberg, Cimino, Lucas, even Scorsese -- he used the freedoms afforded by Hollywood's bizarre social experiment of entrusting young, barely proven talent with heaps of cash to greatest effect, but he also became a symbol of New Hollywood's collapse, one of many directors who never punched through its bloated, distended corpse and continued to make meaningful films (I've got my fingers crossed until I see Tetro, though).

Indeed, The Godfather, Coppola's fifth feature length film after his start working for Roger Corman -- did he just discover everyone? -- in '63, was the film that definitively proved that New Hollywood was a lasting phenomenon after its "official" inception with '67's Bonnie and Clyde. Made with a budget of $6.5 million, not inconsiderate but far from the bank-breaking allotments that would arise in the near future, The Godfather started as an adaptation of Mario Puzo's hit novel, meant to be nothing more than your average gangster picture to cash in on a bestseller. However, with the involvement of Puzo himself and an Italian-American director -- über-producer/coke fiend Robert Evans was sly to insist that an Italian-American helm the picture -- The Godfather became a cornerstone of American cinema and a permanent mainstay on lists of the greatest films ever made.

The Godfather opens with a wedding and closes with a baptism, normally times of celebration (and both tied to religious ceremony), but they are both undercut with currents of extreme violence. As the iconic first notes of Nino Rota's theme rise over a black frame, we hear a man say, "I believe in America." He continues to speak of the promise America offered to him (and apparently fulfilled), before spinning a tale of his beloved daughter, a beautiful and moral girl beaten to a pulp by a group of boys for refusing to have sex with them. His American dream becomes a nightmare, as social institutions -- the police, the courts -- take no action against the men. We then see (the camera has been gently zooming out from the man, Bonasera, for three minutes before revealing another person) that he's appealing to Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), head of the Corleone crime family, for justice. Vito criticizes the man -- whose harmed daughter is the godchild of the don's wife -- for keeping his distance from the family: "You never invite me over for coffee," says Vito, subtly placing himself into the role of a wounded friend, not the fearsome mafioso that intimidates Bonasera. The man makes amends for his lack of hospitality, and Don Corleone agrees to have the boys themselves mangled.

This almost quaint argument about, agreement on and assignment of brutality clashes with the end of the film, which cross-cuts between a baptism and actual glimpses at violence. The Godfather is, at its core, all about the transition from that dialogue-driven, perversely idyllic opening and its bloody finale, not in the sense of moving a narrative from A to B but in its psychological and sociological evolution: more than any film, The Godfather captures the shift between between rustic, ethical "mom and pop" business and growing economic homogenization. You couldn't make a better film about the transition between economic feudalism and mercantile capitalism if you set in in the Industrial Revolution; that Coppola and Puzo frame a commentary on this change around the modulations of organized crime is one of the film's -- and it's sequels' -- countless ironies.

Compared to Part II, The Godfather works in an intimate setting: nearly all of its scenes are set in New York City, headquarters of the Corleone family. The opening wedding brilliantly establishes the world of the gangster with tons of expository dialogue packed into scenes that do not themselves seem plot-heavy. Coppola gives us a clear understanding of this world through the interactions of all the gathered mafiosos, assuming that how they behave in recreation reveals their true nature: wedding photos prove a hassle because everyone there is trained to trace any bulb flash back to its source and destroy the camera; the men are unapologetic in their sexism and patriarchy; and the reverence in which the Italian-Americans treat their Sicilian heritage takes precedence over all else.

Positioned as a symbol of a dying -- literally and figuratively -- way of life, Vito is wisely kept out of frame for the majority of the film, appearing only sporadically after the 20-minute opening to better allow his legend to grow in the minds of the audience. Everyone, including -- especially -- his enemies, speaks of him with a reverence befitting a king, which is certainly what he is, albeit one with visibly human characteristics: Vito built his empire on a river of blood and sand made of crushed bones (Part II fleshes this out in greater detail), but he also adheres strictly to a set of morals, regardless of how skewed and perverse those morals are. Sollozzo, "The Turk" (Al Lettieri, who was related to actual gangsters and invited Brando over for dinner to let him get a feel for the people informing his character) comes to the city looking to push heroin with the support of the Five Families and use of their police and political protection; he promises massive returns on initial investments, and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Vito's consigliere (adviser/lawyer), notes that drugs are the financial future of organized crime, away from the relatively lightweight organization of prostitution and gambling. But Vito declines the offer, believing practically that selling drugs would cost him his political allies and morally that it steps over some line even he isn't willing to cross.

I've said in the past that Brando's performance has been somewhat exaggerated, though I did so in my salad days when my idea of good acting owed directly on the amount of time one occupied on-screen (I still think, though, that he should have been nominated for Support Actor, not lead). Now, I can understand the appeal: with limited screen time, he casts a presence that covers the entire film -- a good contemporary corollary can be seen in Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight. Some of his choices are exaggerated, such as stuffing cotton balls in his mouth, but he's as naturalistic and identifiable as ever: he genuinely looks annoyed when someone speaks out of turn, and one can feel his love and gratitude when his beloved Michael visits him in the hospital (after Sollozzo extracts vengeance for his refusal to help) and assures him "I'll take care of you now."

Brando's Vito is literally soft-spoken, a shrewd reader of men whose small-scale aspirations reflect more his narrow narcissism than his sense of ethics. After Sollozzo, with the help of the Tattaglia family, orders the hit on Vito, he impresses upon a kidnapped Tom the need to rub Vito out: "Ten years ago, could I have gotten to him?" he asks to prove his point that Vito is slipping, and indeed the don makes some questionable decisions, such as asking Luca Brasi, a thug so dumb he couldn't even make through a preplanned sentence thanking Don Corleone inviting him to Connie's (Talia Shire) wedding ("I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding") to approach the Tattaglias undercover to spy on them. But these are only outgrowths of his trusting and fatherly nature: in his final scene, he even reveals a certain innocence, chasing his grandson merrily through their miniature orange grove with an orange slice in his mouth to make himself into a jolly old monster before suffering a heart attack and dying, amidst all of the violence, in a moment of peace and happiness. His loving interaction with his grandson reveals a humanity that, by all evidence, is completely absent in his favorite son.

We meet Michael Corleone, as with nearly all the characters, at the wedding at the beginning. A war hero who served valiantly in the Marines in WWII, he returns a legitimate figure in a family that cannot distinguish between family and Family life. Compared to the hot-headed, entitled elder child Sonny (James Caan) and the jealous, soft middle child/black sheep Fredo (John Cazale, criminally underrated in his work across the first two parts of the trilogy), Michael is level-headed and views his father's throne with distaste, not lust. He relates horror stories of his father's "business" dealings to his girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), and insists, "That's my family, Kay, not me." Yet we see Michael slowly drawn into the Family, at first reluctantly, then with cold ambition: when he heads to the hospital to protect his father, a crooked cop (Sterling Hayden) attempts to send him home in order to clear a path for rival gangsters to kill Vito and breaks his jaw when Michael calls him on his corruption. The injury puffs out Mikey's cheek and gives him a bit of a lisp, allowing him to physically resemble his father before he begins to truly work in the family business.

He kills the police captain and Sollozzo and hides out in Sicily for the heat to dissipate, and there he meets Appolonia, a vision of classical beauty. The two marry, and Michael appears genuinely happy, until his bodyguard betrays him and unwittingly kills Appolonia with a car bomb. So, Mike returns home again, this time cold and distrustful of everyone except his family. He marries Kay, as she's the only person he knows would not hurt him, and promises to make the Corleone family legitimate within five years. Away from her, however, he proves to be more ambitious, and more ruthless, than his father ever was. He plans to acquire a casino and hotel in Vegas, a starter kit for the expansion of the family's empire, and plots to tie up all the loose ends of those who betrayed the family, right down to Connie's abusive, jealous husband Carlo. That final montage, an ironic juxtaposition between the baptism of Michael's nephew and godchild, in which the priest asks him "Do you renounce Satan?" as his minions execute the heads of all the rival families and the dissidents within his own, shows Michael capable of decisions that his pragmatic, ethical father would never make, a thread Puzo and Coppola would explore fully in the sequel.

If, by current count, I've only devoted 1713 words thus far to what many believe to be the greatest film ever made, it's because it was not my intention to watch this today: I'm still trying to finalize a list of the best films of the decade and to catch up with as many '09 films as possible before I finalize my list of the films of the year sometime in January (as I have to wait longer than the critics to see most of the potential heavy-hitters, there's no point in putting one out before I see and gauge them). But I received the remastered and restored trilogy on Blu-Ray for Christmas, and -- with my Band of Brothers Blu-Ray set missing a disc and my complete series of The Shield scratched all to hell from its terrible packaging, I had little else new to watch; I'm expecting replacements for both -- I decided to pop in the first film to compare its look to my old DVD set. That I emerged bleary-eyed three hours later restraining myself from calling friends and interrupting their shopping sprees or days of rest to badger them about the staggering beauty of its restoration is as ringing an endorsement as I can provide.

The prints of Parts I and II were so damaged with time and poor preservation that Robert A. Harris, head of the restoration project, had to work on them digitally because they could not be read by an analog machine; not helping the matter was cinematographer Gordon Willis' decision to make the prints as tamper-proof as possible. Harris worked with Willis, and the result is perhaps the closest we'll ever come to seeing the film as it was as a pristine 35mm print in '72 (though even the filmmakers admit they no longer remember what it looked like originally and that their color correction may or may not be entirely accurate). Even if it does change the color tinting slightly, the change in picture quality is more plainly seen in its striking clarity: The Godfather trilogy is filmed in amber hues and blacks, but this looks like the film was printed onto actual gold. I would not hesitate to call it one of those films one should buy a Blu-Ray player simply to own, alongside Baraka and perhaps Blade Runner (having seen the latter in all three formats -- DVD, HD-DVD and BD --- I don't think the leap between standard and high definition is as jaw-dropping as the other two, though it's still mesmerizing in and of itself).

But back to the film itself. I've withheld some points of discussion to save for a review of Part II, which will almost certainly be longer because A) I wrote a paper on it (and Chinatown) for a college course and therefore have an existing basis of argument that I can take from the comparative essay and B) it is my preferred installment of the series. Some of the my notes, actually, remark on scenes pointing to the next film, such as Don Tommasino lamenting to Michael (ironically) that kids don't exhibit the respect they used to and that "times are changing for the worse," as well as the scene in which Michael heads to Vegas to check on Fredo's progress with schmoozing the casino owners, only to find that his older but less mature brother has spent his time partying and carousing rather than establishing business ties: Fredo even defends his new "friends" against Michael when the new don speaks of buying out Moe Greene, owner of the hotel and casino Mike desires. This prompts Michael to tell his brother, "Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again," a grim foreshadowing of the next film but also a reflection of an earlier exchange between Vito and Sonny, wherein Vito chided his son for speaking out of turn; Vito's chastisement was swift and forceful, but softened by the dynamic between father and son, a dynamic that doesn't exist in Michael's murderous utterance to his brother. Already we see his icy inhumanity, before he fully assumes the role of godfather at the end of the film, closing the door on Kay (who realizes that he really did order the death of Connie's husband and that Michael isn't going to pull the Corleones out of crime) and, with her, the last vestiges of whatever made Michael the kind and legal member of the family.

As I am busy with my aforementioned catch-ups, I likely won't return to review the rest of the Godfather series, which first expanded its themes of the coldness of modernization on a national level, then finally an international one, for a while, at least until mid-January. Until then, I urge all those with Blu-Ray players who do not own this set to purchase it, and I thank all of you for reading. And may your first child be a masculine child.

Apocalypse Now

The real stars of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled epic are not Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando. They're not even Coppola or writer John Milius. No, the real people behind the success of the film are cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound editor Walter Murch. Murch's fluid, deeply troubling sounds pervade the film, bleeding into one another seamlessly. Indeed, he grabs you in the first shot, when the sounds of helicopter rotors fade into the dull hum of a spinning fan. For the rest of the film, he skillfully combines Carmine's haunting, ethereal score with diegetic sound, to the point that you can't trust your own ears, much less the hell that unfolds on-screen.

If war is hell, then Apocalypse Now is as much an adaptation of Dante's Inferno as it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Some may complain about its disjointed nature, particularly in the final chapter in Kurtz's compound, but Coppola isn't out to give us a simple story. He doesn't even want to make a film about the effects of war. No, Apocalypse Now is a film about the deepest, darkest levels of human conditioning, the kind we've spent our thousands of years on this Earth attempting to outgrow.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still in Saigon," Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) growls in the first lines of the film. He signed up for a second tour and wants to head back into the jungle, but not for the clichéd gung-ho reasons. He's been back home, but Vietnam so changed him that he could not re-assimilate into society. His restlessness leads him to get high and destroy his hotel room, eventually cutting his hand on glass and smearing himself in the blood. In the very first scene, the notion of the poster boy multiple-enlistee has been viciously perverted, shown to be the victim of war, not the ideal man who stands above it.

He eventually gets a new mission, classified like all his others. A general invites him to lunch and assigns him the task of assassinating decorated colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who disappeared into the jungle after accusations of murder and built his own empire of natives to take the fight to the North Vietnamese without the setback of arbitrary rules of engagement.

Willard heads upriver to Cambodia in a PBR with a motley crew consisting of the surly Chief (Albert Hall), tripped-out surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), New Orleans saucier "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and 17-year-old "Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Apart from Chief, these sailors are all just kids, all spit and vinegar, ready to take on Charlie anytime, anywhere.

Their picaresque adventures through Vietnam are by turns horrific, absurd, hysterical and deeply, deeply unsettling. The film's centerpiece, an Air Cavalry assault on a NVA-controlled village, is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Led by the certifiably insane Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in a show-stealing performance), the sequence, famously set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," must be the largest set piece ever constructed. Now, CGI fills the screen, and entire wars can be waged in a single scene, but the sense of placement, of meticulously construction, camera set-ups, and stunt co-ordinations required for this one 10 minute stretch demonstrate the true craft of filmmaking.

And Kilgore is more interesting than any of it. With a handful of lines, Duvall crafts the craziest SOB you'll ever see. Shells fall all around him and he doesn't flinch, and only when they come within inches does he react, and then only with annoyance. When Willard's boat runs into an operation already in clean-up, the captain can't get the colonel to pay attention long enough to relay orders from COMSAC, but the Kilgore perks up when he learns that Lance, his surfer idol, is among them. With only a small hunk of screen time, Duvall gets two of the three most memorable lines in the film: the hysterical call to arms "Charlie don't surf!" and the insane, poetic rant that starts with, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." As he commands his soldiers to break out their surfboards to ride waves that are still under fire, as mortar shells burst around him, he says with sadness in his voice, "This war's gonna end someday." We look on bewildered, but Willard knows the truth, that life will never be the same for any of them.

Elsewhere, Willard and Chef take a stroll through the woods looking for mangoes, only to be ambushed by a tiger. In the middle of the river, the USO erects a garish stage to host a couple of Playboy bunnies, and it appears to double as a thriving black market. The bunnies so rile the cheering men that some storm the stage and attempt to possibly rape the women, who run back to their helicopter and depart. In the scene that ensures that no member of the audience can mistake the movie for some fun epic (many point to the Valkyries scene as exciting over horrific), Chief orders a Vietnamese boat stop for boarding, and confusion leads to accidental massacre of all aboard, shattering the young boys and forever turning the Chief against Willard.

Storaro manages to make each segment look entirely different without losing visual flow. The reason so many of us love that Air Cavalry scene is that it's filmed from the POV of the soldiers. One must step outside of the film for a moment to look at it objectively to see how terrible it all really is. That scene with the tiger is funny in retrospect, but Storaro makes the lead-up as frightening as anything in a proper horror film. My personal favorite piece of the film, the Do Lung sequence, strikes me as being shot from the perspective of Lance, who drops acid shortly before the boat pulls up to this nightmare. As a result, light flows in and out, as flares arc over the trees, momentarily blinding before all is plunged back into darkness. Willard searches for the commanding officer, finally asking one of the entrenched soldiers, "Who's in charge here?" to which the manic kid replies, "Ain't you?"

Storaro's cinematography at Kurtz's compound alone earned him his Oscar: Marlon Brando got the job after convincing Coppola that he'd read Heart of Darkness, only to show up having read neither the script nor the book, as well as 40kg overweight. Already guaranteed $1 million even if fired, Brando created a dilemma for the director, which Storaro fixed by covering Kurtz in shadow. The night shots of the compound are bathed with a jaundiced yellow, reflecting the sickness and "slow death" of the camp and its leader. Shadow, in cinema, naturally reflects the moral complexity of a character, but Kurtz and even Willard are so enshrouded in these scenes that they're practically invisible. Willard remarks in his narrations throughout the film that the colonel's methods actually display a brilliance and ingenuity, and he's certainly got a number of deaths on his conscience, and he does not yet know whether he will kill Kurtz or join him.

Brando, difficult as he was, really was perfect for the role. In a mixture of scripted and ad-libbed dialogue, Brando captures the manic insanity of Kurtz. No, not insanity; I read an interview once -- I can't remember who said it, perhaps Grant Morrison -- that discussed the Batman villain the Joker. In it, the interviewee described the Joker as possessing not a madness but a kind of "super-sanity," one that worked on a level that was utterly mad but made sense on a level no normal person could process. Kurtz reached this level after witnessing the VC hack off the arms of every child in a village that his Special Forces team inoculated, simply because they refused that the children receive aid from the enemy. "If I had 10 divisions of such men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly," he intones. Kurtz, a decorated, respected officer who'd seen combat in Korea and in a previous tour of 'Nam, snapped not because of war but because the jungle brought out his primal behavior, the kind that resides in all of us.

There's no truly satisfactory way to end such a film, one that mixes the visceral here-and-now of warfare with metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of two ritual sacrifices, one of tribesmen killing a water buffalo and the other of Willard slaying Kurtz, the bloated, weakened king so that he might die with dignity, is brilliant. Willard emerges to a tribe of warriors already willing to bow to him, but he simply heads back to the boat with Lance and sets off, as Kurtz's immortal "The horror. The horror" plays over a shot of a stone face of the compound. While he's been completely broken by the experience, forever haunted by what he did and what happened to him, he stands as the better man, for he did not lose himself in the jungle.

According to some, Apocalypse Now stands as the last great American film (those who disagree cite Scorsese's Raging Bull). While I would venture to say that 2007's one-two punch of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood changed that, you could certainly argue that no other films in the interim combined the epic scale of Coppola's final masterpiece with its personal and psychological themes. Coppola began production on the film in 1976, seven years after John Milius completed the first draft of his screenplay. Three years, one heart attack, a hurricane and numerous other production delays later, it finally reached screens.

"What must people have thought then?" I often wonder when seeing a film ahead of its time. I know that Gene Siskel famously gave it a negative review when he first saw it, only to later perform a mea culpa and give it a positive review. Mainstream Vietnam movies had only just started getting releases, and they tended to convey how the war affected its soldiers, who were always brave and cruelly destroyed by a pointless war. Apocalypse Now dared to suggest that this war simply brought out the worst in us, that its soldiers were by and large terrified and looking for any chance to get home, that we were still responsible for our actions even if the government forced thousands to fight.

The film netted Oscars for Murch and Storaro, but it's safe to say that it was robbed in every other category in which it received a nomination, and how Duvall didn't get a nod for Supporting Actor will keep me scratching my head for hours. Apocalypse Now is more than the greatest Vietnam film ever made, more than the best war film period; it is a document of a part of man that no amount of conditioning and evolution will ever fully eradicate, and it's a beast that can emerge with only a strong push.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

A tragically lesser-known work from once-masterful director Francis Ford Coppola (let's just leave the post-70s work out of it, shall we?), The Conversation's only flaw was in its release. Coppola made the film after the success of The Godfather, and the film premiered in the same year as The Godfather, Part II. The man could have defecated diamonds at a press conference and we'd be talking about that less all these years later than the first two Godfather entries. However, The Conversation stands as perhaps Coppola's tautest film, and one of the best thrillers ever made.

Gene Hackman gives the performance of his career as Harry Caul, a legend in the surveillance industry so revered by his peers and so self-confident that it took me nearly all of the film to realize how terrible he is at his job. He manages to record an adulterous couple in a park using a brilliant microphone set-up that no-else would have dreamt up, only to get personally involved with the case and even lose the tapes. He triple-locks his doors, yet his landlady manages to get in to leave him a present.

Caul also suffers from intense fear of people and a desperate need for privacy, ironic considering how me makes his living. When he's not pouring over his tapes, filtering out all the distortion and background noise. "All I want is a nice, fat recording," he says to his assistant Stan (John Cazale). Well, I say "assistant;" Caul never lets the poor man in on his methods, never shows him the tricks of the trade. I'm actually unsure what it is that he does; Caul's can't even trust the only man who has the slightest idea what Caul does and how he does it.

The two are hired to spy on this couple by the woman's husband, a wealthy business executive (Robert Duvall), who remains unseen for most of the film. Ergo, he entrusts his proxy Stett (Harrison Ford) to deal with Caul. Stett acts curt and sinister from the start, and only gets worse as Caul's neurosis begins to seep into the film. Caul refuses to give the tapes to Stett,and soon he sees the man everywhere he goes. On the recording, he notices the wife's lover tell her "He'd kill us if he had the chance," and he fears that the husband and Stett will murder the two if he relinquishes the tapes.

Late in the film, Caul attends a surveillance expo, where all the names in the biz meet and perversely discuss their profession as if it were any other business. His chief competitor, Moran (Allen Garfield) demonstrates a new bugging device that turns the victim's (let's just call a spade a spade) phone into a microphone without ever needing to modify that telephone. Stan works for him now after finally getting sick of Caul's attitude towards him, and Harry asks him to come back to work for him. Why I can't say. Moran somehow convinces Harry to bring him and some guests back to his workshop.

Here Caul comes alive for the first time; Stan brings up the park job and Harry beams at his own ingenuity. For a man who hates strangers, he sure does like to be the object of adoration. But he turns back into his usual self when he finds that Moran bugged him as a joke, and throws out all the guests except a woman who seduces him. When he wakes up, the tapes are gone.

The film then takes a step in a strange direction. Caul dreams of the adulterous woman he tries to protect, and divulges to the apparition revealing moments of his childhood. The word 'caul' means one of two things: a spider's web, appropriate for a thriller, and a thin covering that surround the fetus to prevent it from drowning. Caul tells his vision of a moment when he was very young where his mother left him alone in the bath and he nearly drowned. Caul also wears a flimsy, transparent raincoat throughout the film, regardless of the weather. From this dream we can figure out why Caul doesn't trust anyone, and why he's always so depressed.

As the film heads towards the conclusion, it suddenly kicks into overdrive, complete with downright hallucinatory visions. Caul heads to a hotel to try to warn the two lovers, only to hear terrible screams and see blood splash against the window of his adjacent room. He sneaks into their room later and flushes the running toilet, only for blood to surge out and flood the bathroom, sending Caul into a psychotic episode.

The film then ends on a shocking twist, one that hammers home Coppola's message, that simply spying on someone's conversation divorces it from context and, often, inflection. The entire film rests on which words are stressed in just one sentence and the dire consequences of misinterpreting them. Coppola wrote the script way back in the 1960s, but the film opened amidst the fallout of the Watergate scandal, and the parallels are just too good to simply dismiss as coincidence. Coppola surely didn't intend it, but The Conversation represents the paranoia and resentment created with the realization that someone could listen in on your most private moments at any time.

Ultimately, though, The Conversation is, apart from one of the most intelligent and unpredictable thrillers ever made, a attempt to capture sound: how we perceive it, how we interpret it, how it builds in our minds more than any other sense. Sound is probably the most difficult aspect of the movies to criticize and analyze, as it is the element that has to seem more natural than anything else. Even when disturbing and unexpected noises suddenly fill our eardrums, we believe them because the rest of the time we hear normal footsteps, normal insects, normal speech. The Conversation flips all that on its ear, and uses perversions of what we expect to hear to leave in a state of constant distress, begging for a release that only comes when the film has fully drained us of energy.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Of all the old monsters, Dracula was always my favorite. As a kid I thought he was too cool to be frightening, what with the ability to turn into a bat (I haven't grown out of being easy to please). Then, as I got older, I picked up on the overt sexuality of the character, his appearance and mysterious demeanor. Not to mention his method of feeding, which Bram Stoker extrapolated from its folklore roots into a take on the sexual repression of Victorian society. It gives the monster more layers, to me, than any other classic creature, more even than the notions of ostracizing, mob mentality, science and the issue of "playing God" that Frankenstein's monster conjured.

Gary Oldman does his best to capture the various aspects of this dense and allegorical character, but he's fighting an uphill battle: against the script, against the direction, certainly against the other actors. He might as well have played Sisyphus, because he has to keep dragging everything up with him until we break through with a moment of adequacy before Oldman pauses to get a moment all his own and the whole damn thing comes crashing down again.

We first meet Dracula as Vlad the Impaler, a warrior who marshals Romanian troops to a victory over a staggering invasion of Turks in 1462. He returns home triumphant, only to find his beloved wife dead from suicide upon receiving false news of her husband's death. Enraged that the Church he defended condemns her soul to hell, he vows to use all the powers of darkness to bring her back.

Four centuries later, law firm clerk Jonathan Harker is dispatched to Transylvania to settle Count Dracula's latest real estate acquisition. Keanu Reeves portrays Harker as an apparently-American man trying to sound British and failing. At least if I think of it that way Harker becomes a half-assed metaphor for a pressure to conform to one's surroundings rather than a showcase for terrible acting. When Harker arrives at Dracula's castle, he seems to accept the rather frightening creatures who populate the area and the bloodthirsty count with no reflection. The Pope doesn't have that kind of faith.

Dracula spots a photograph of Harker's wife, who looks just like his own, and he departs for England to seek out the reincarnation of his beloved. To keep Harker from interfering, he traps the hapless clerk with his "brides" (Monica Bellucci, Michaela Bercu and Florina Kendrick), who leave him weak by drinking his blood and engaging in orgies. Now, I do my best to suppress my piggish man instincts, but sometimes I see something so shamelessly exploitative that I can almost identify with the thought the average guy will have watching this scene: "I'd let them drink my blood for that." I'm sure this scene is supposed to engender tension, but really it comes off as nothing more than pure titillation.

The rest of the film plays out as a sort of battle between Harker and Dracula for Mina (Winona Ryder), like a romantic comedy with a lot of blood. Mina herself finds herself torn between the two: on the one hand she loves her husband, and on the other Dracula uses all sorts of mysticism to awaken her past life. It creates a character in great sexual confusion set against the repressed Victorian ideals, a character that requires some serious chops. Sadly, Ryder isn't up to the challenge, though -- with the exception of Reeves -- I'm hesitant to blame any of the excellent cast for their work here. They're simply too boxed in by a terrible script that understands the themes of Stoker's novel, a script that the writer says he worked on since 1977. That's scarier than anything in the film.

Finally, there's yet more of Francis Ford Coppola's gradual descent into mediocrity. Now, the film does boast some incredible old-school effects; Coppola refused to use digital techniques, and the film has aged incredibly well because of it. However, he takes some big risks and they often fail; Dracula's story is of course soaked in blood, but Coppola literally dumps the red stuff around so much I began to wonder if I was in a modern art exhibition. At one point one of the vampire brides recoils at the cross around Harker's neck, only to wave her hand and make the cross disappear. Well what's the point, then? Why even establish the cross as a weakness if they can just banish it to the nether dimension? Coppola's life post-Apocalypse Now would make a far more interesting movie than anything he's cooked up since, and Bram Stoker's Dracula only stands out as one of the more noble failures of a once-great filmmaker.

Rumble Fish

It's a bit of a chore being a Mickey Rourke fan. I've been working my way through the man's filmography since I heard about The Wrestler, and he's quickly become one of my favorite actors. However, many of his best performances comes from downright mediocre films (The Pope of Greenwich Village, anyone?), so at times I have to struggle through a movie in order to get to the chewy caramel center that is Rourke's performance. Rumble Fish, sadly, fits in the trend.

Francis Ford Coppola's follow up to The Outsiders, Rumble Fish starts Matt Dillon as "Rusty" James, a high school tough guy challenged to a fight at the start of the film. His friends warn him that his older brother, the mysterious Motorcycle Boy, worked hard to establish a peace amongst the city's gangs and that Rusty would displease him for breaking the settlement. Rusty dismisses the warnings; the Motorcycle Boy's been gone for months, so what say does he have in things?

Rusty shows up for the fight and gains the upper hand only for the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) to show up, upset at his brother's actions. Rusty's foe Biff takes advantage of the moment and slashes Rusty, enraging the Motorcycle Boy, who sends his hog flying into the boy.

Up until this point, the film struck me as similar to Martin Scorsese's lead up to the music video for "Bad:" it's in black in white, it's somewhat laughably acted, and it involves a gang fight. But Rourke completely changes the game. His Motorcycle Boy is colorblind (which may explain the monochrome), partially deaf and aloof. One wonders if he took one too many punches to the head, and I couldn't help but think about Randy "The Ram" Robinson. However, unlike The Ram, the Motorcycle Boy is far from pathetic: Rourke plays him like a god, gently moving through the film, offering guidance to those who want to be like him but can never attain his level.

Rourke alone is, as always, reason enough to watch the film, but Coppola handles the abrupt shift in tone with some...questionable tactics, to say the least. Where the first 30 minutes played out like "Bad's" fight, now Coppola fashions the movie into an ode to the older brother, the primary idol of many young boys. Rusty looks up to the Motorcycle Boy's more hedonistic days, when he ran the streets and beat down all those who opposed him. However, it's this more angelic figure now before him who represents the true ideal, and it vexes Rusty. He eventually comes to think of his brother as crazy, which may or may not be accurate.

Ultimately, Rusty realizes too late that he should look up to his brother as he is now, and the Motorcycle Boy must meet an inevitable fate. Characters like that cannot really live, anyway; either the hero becomes corrupted or he must die, and Rusty comes to view the purity of his brother. A simple message, and one that might have been more powerful if it had been tackled simpler.

For a film that emphasizes time's ability to pass its characters by, it sure does drag out; I kept checking my watch every 5 minutes while watching the thing. Coppola tries to shove so much stuff into the frame at all times that you suffer from burnout before Rourke even shows up. It's cluttered and unfocused, and while I think that's what Coppola was aiming for, it doesn't work. Nevertheless, Rourke gives one of his best performances, one of those roles that turns an otherwise mediocre movie into a must-see. I don't know if, like The Pope of Greenwich Village, it's so good that I'd even sit through the film again, but it is yet another master class from an actor who should have been so much bigger.