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FILM COMMENT
March/April 2002
Apocalypse Now Redux
By Wesley Morris
Last May, Francis Ford Coppola underwent a bit of therapy. He returned to the Cannes Film Festival armed with a new cut of Apocalypse Now. It was called Apocalypse Now Redux - the title declares that even mayhem deserves a refurbishment. Complete with additional footage, it was a mightier, funnier, more vociferous, maybe even more inscrutably complex enterprise than the original: protracted, deepened in meaning, widened in scope, and enhanced in its beauty, after having marinated in the world's collective consciousness for 22 years.
Redux was a changed movie made by a changed man. The film and its maker's return to Cannes was all the more striking because it marked a return to a sort of primal scene. Cannes '79 had been a charged event. Not long after his 40th birthday, four-plus infamous years of production had culminated in a circus of an unveiling/press conference. Coppola was visibly punch drunk but still ready to drop some perspective on a crowd seeking to dig his unprecedented spectacle: The film wasn't like Vietnam, he corrected an interrogator, "it is Vietnam." It was classic Don King-style hyperbole that transcended metaphor and went straight to the heart of the matter.
Cannes '01 was a more sedate affair. The defensively weary hubris Coppola exhibited at the close of the Seventies was now informed with humility. This time he wasn't the wunderkind who made the first two Godfather films and The Conversation back to back and then, in an unprecedented feat, conjured a consecutive fourth major work of art. In 2001 he'd come back as the maker of less rapturous, less "important" work. He'd come back as the director of Jack.
In the 20-odd years between Apocalypse Now and its redux, Coppola had become an enterprise himself-mogul, restaurateur, publisher, winemaker. Post-Apocalypse Coppola wasn't interested in world-altering ambition, yet his filmmaking remained constant, if quieted in its impact: the dozen or so movies that came after his four masterpieces are lesser mostly in comparison-but then, so are most everybody else's. Popular culture is full of living legends compelled by psychological drives or market forces to squeeze themselves back into the embrace of the mainstream with either hype-driven or hype-derived work. Coppola's Cannes redux demonstrated his desire to share his doggie bag of Apocalypse Now extras - not as superfluous trivia but as a reconstitution of the old film with extant necessities. (This includes the French plantation sequence which he excised from the original cut out of idiosyncratic spite.) The result is now more Homeric, and Altmanesque, rather than purely Conradian. The film's hard-won craftsmanship was already virtuosic, replete with flights of sadomasochistic grandeur worthy of Werner Herzog (what else was Willard's existential journey if not Aguirre with a homegrown political fury?) and a longing for punishment reminiscent of Buñuel's characters (the plantation sequence comes across a little like a downbeat Buñuel party farce).
Apocalypse's subsequent re-release last year induced what seemed like a time warp, not to mention critical anxiety. The best picture of '79 is also the best film of 2001? It appeared to confirm what we'd known 20 years before but had denied because the truth is just too depressing: American cinema's platinum age had come to an end. The personal and the political, the formal and the aesthetic, the irrational and the reasoned, triumph and failure, fury and calm: the fusion of opposites or the juggling of dialectics had simultaneously worn Coppola out and set him free. American cinema had been compromised and has been in retreat ever since, all the more so when viewed through the kaleidoscope of Apocalypse Now - or, for that matter, Coppola's entire career.
Most filmmakers have a monkey on their backs; Coppola had a gorilla. His name was Orson Welles. And Coppola slipped into his robust silhouette the way Hitchcock eased into his own at the end of each Alfred Hitchcock Presents. For Coppola, the Seventies, most significantly the 1,600 or so Philippines-bound days of Apocalypse Now, were a decade-long, implausibly fruitful exorcism of Welles's spirit. In Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Coppola gives his great on-screen performance as a manic-depressive version of himself, daring to mount the adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness that Welles wanted to make before he opted to do Citizen Kane. In the documentary, Coppola's wife Eleanor, sublimating her spousal duties to the role of acolyte, surreptitiously recorded a conversation in which she tried a variation on the "it's only a movie" argument.
"You finish your term paper and maybe you get a B instead of the A-plus that you wanted. You get a B -" Coppola interrupts: "I'm gonna get an F!"
By surmounting suicidal tendencies and pervasive fatalism, Coppola beat his own odds. It's hard to say whether the movie Coppola finished amidst self-loathing and jungle-induced delusion is Citizen Kane (the movie that changed the course of movies) or Touch of Evil (the one that ended an era). But where Welles spent the rest of his career desperate to outclass himself, Coppola was henceforth free to do as he pleased.
Both men had obsessive work ethics that were as galvanizing as they were daunting. But where Welles, always the professional, was his own American culture, lost in the landscape of himself, Coppola was a student of his surroundings. Coming of age in the early Sixties, he had the best mentor: Roger Corman, for whom the 24-year-old USC grad would make a slice of horror cheese.
Dementia 13 (63) followed the nudist romp Tonight For Sure (61) and preceded more uncredited work for Corman (on movies like The Terror). And then in 1968 came Coppola's major studio debut: the buried camp treasure of Finian's Rainbow, a glee-filled romantic musical about science, segregation, and love, touched off by leprechaun Fred Astaire. For all Corman's appreciation of camp, one thing he instilled in each of his charges was a clear modernist bent toward clarity, precision, and passion - rarely could you catch Coppola winking at you. What's remarkable about his early films is how they demonstrate his sincere love of movies - not as a medium for telling jokes but for storytelling. The same holds true of The Rain People (69), but here Coppola attaches a feminist strain onto his narrative about a pregnant woman (Shirley Knight) who's fled her husband, ostensibly for existential reasons, and who befriends and eventually exploits a brain-damaged football player (James Caan). It was a formally modest, if politically pioneering movie: It helped kick off a Seventies in which every woman in the movies and on TV seemed to be in crisis, unable to fulfill her allotted social role.
Coppola's decidedly modernist leanings allowed you to see a lot of the modernization of America through his movies. The Godfather films are not a metaphor for family: they are family, and the movies eloquently denote how the Corleones came to power in a rapidly-shifting America. This, Coppola suggests, is what the drive for American success begets: betrayal, distrust, corruption, heartache - the lurid byproducts of the American dream. The opera-lashed final installment in 1989, despite its structural lapses, still manages to send the hulking, lethal, and wounded Corleones off on a high socio-artistic note. The family that brought Coppola cultural prominence and even more cultural currency was laid to rest with dignity.
The Godfathers looked like John Singer Sargent oil paintings, moving portraits of an evolving America. Set largely in the first half on the century, the first two films didn't have the luxury of nostalgia that the Eighties would bequeath Coppola. Like Huston, Altman, Polanski, Mazursky, Pakula, etc. - but maybe more pointedly than they by virtue of his youth - Coppola spent the Seventies becoming increasingly disillusioned by the uncertain state of things. Said disillusionment grew exponentially in The Conversation - about a wire-tap artist (Gene Hackman) who eavesdrops his way into a pollutive conspiracy that taints everything it comes into contact with - and reached critical mass in Apocalypse Now.
His first post-Nixon, post-Vietnam film was One From the Heart (82), a misty-eyed love story that was too sincerely despondent and maybe too sincerely sincere to surmount its wistfulness. With Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle doing the crying on the soundtrack and Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr doing the crying onscreen, the movie was a downer that didn't know how to be anything else. It was critically dismissed as an indulgence. But Coppola wasn't simply indulging himself, he was acknowledging a Seventies hangover at the outset of the Reagan era. Aware that the electric Now of the previous decade had dissipated, Coppola seemingly could no longer bring himself to face the present head on, so he turned toward a bygone America. Even Rumble Fish (83), with its video arcades and vague sense of racial integration, is set in a moment that's only semi-modern, artfully photographed in a black-and-white that could easily have belonged to Welles.
None of the features that followed Rumble Fish were set in a present tense. Coppola was a post-traumatic survivor making movie statements about a pre-disillusionment era. His first swing at an S.E. Hinton book, The Outsiders, was a gorgeous frat-house melodrama that looked like it had snuck out of 1955. It was the Civil War dressed up as West Side Story - greasers versus socs, with Coppola trying new formal techniques like saturated colors and deep, prolonged fades. The Cotton Club (85) looked even further back - to a Prohibition-era Harlem, lit up with white gangsters and black entertainers who keep invading each other's turf. Coppola conjured refractions of Jimmy Cagney, Cab Calloway, and Gloria Swanson while trying to use the story to bring a sense of parity and period realism to the proceedings. All in all, it was a fantasia - a love story between Coppola and the era's jazz standards and an elaborate pretext to get Duke Ellington's "The Mooche" into a movie. It played in a limbo between authentic modernity and authentic nostalgia, and was thus easy to let go of as it floated off in a well-thunk thought bubble.
But One From the Heart's infectious depression had lifted and a relaxed, almost revisionist optimism took hold of Coppola's Eighties work. In spite of the nature of their respected subject matters and their period locales (or maybe because of them), his post-Seventies films, with their italicized pasts, carried a political charge precisely because politics (and Reagan) were conspicuously absent. These movies are almost ambitious in their very mildness - as though their restraint had an epic dimension. Seriously, what's a bull to do when it's done razing china shops?
The pictures that followed Apocalypse Now are unique: Coppola wasn't asleep at the wheel, he was a-dreaming. If he spent the Seventies holding up various reflective surfaces to America (its government, its culture, its activity) and asking whether it recognized itself in his movies, the Eighties were spent readjusting the rearview mirror. The present had become a negative space and-excepting Coppola's for-hire helming on the Michael Jackson/Disney World theme park tryst Captain EO-the future had been left to Lucas and Spielberg.
In Peggy Sue Got Married (86) and Tucker: A Man and His Dream (88), Coppola seemed to find extensions of himself and, in the case of Tucker, his predicament. At her 20th high-school reunion, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) falls unconscious in a pseudo-psychedelic pageant of middle-age self-congratulation. A dream-cum-flashback ensues in which she's whisked back to her senior year in 1960. Turner's Peggy is a dysfunctional Dorothy in a reverse Oz: Kansas is the fantasy. The woman, like the director, was turning the clock back not so much to see where things went wrong but to get a respite from the nagging present. A different, more comprehensive metaphor for Coppola, Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), the would-be automotive pioneer, saw his eponymous dream assassinated in the late Forties by the Big Three in Detroit and by bureaucracy in D.C. Tucker's idealism was an inversion of Coppola's crippling self-doubt, his swift decisiveness a correction of Coppola's cumbersome production process; and Tucker's cars were sleek, fun little numbers where Coppola's movies could be rough, epic challenges. The director identifies so closely with his subject that the film could pass for a WASP rendition of his own work ethic and family life. As metaphor, Tucker is poignant if entirely inevitable. As filmmaking, it's heartbreakingly good. Of course, the poignancy enhances the movie's glossy, dreamt-up beauty. Belief in Tucker is, by extension, belief in Coppola. And if the math holds, one of Coppola's dreams does come true: he gets to star in a live-action Norman Rockwell painting.
Most of Coppola's later work had been characterized by a certain faith in order. But if chaos had been bottled up since Apocalypse, there was still a part of him that wanted to experiment with pulling out all the stops and with Bram Stoker's Dracula (91), he did. Having mounted the final panel of his Godfather triptych, Coppola tore into an obscene distillation of Bram Stoker's horror gothic. The result is wildly uncharacteristic: a mess born of sensationalism and luridness. He'd reacquainted himself with his old Corman ways and had come up with an unparalleled trash-terpiece.
The movie-with its campy juxtaposition of a centuries-old Gary Oldman, a suddenly nubile Winona Ryder, the power-walking Steadicam, and an atmosphere of heaving horniness-is not about sex; it is sex. The film is also about the chance encounter between Coppola and Pastiche. The two meet. She takes him to her place and turns on the Vivaldi. (Given whose house it is, it sounds like the Kinks and the Clash, too.) And Pastiche spends 40 days and 40 nights rocking a famous movie director's world.
The film is a handcrafted power-ballad to excess, stitched together into a comic, erotic, semi-porno love story. It's as though pages had been ripped out of Lawrence and Duras, scenes and moods cribbed from Argento, Franco, and Castle. Yes, Dracula: In which Ryder, heretofore a professional outcast, gets a reform school education in lust from Sadie Frost. The jugular here is used like a garden hose, and the blood flows like Kool-Aid. The movie's also a department store of pestilence, destruction, and disgust: rats, conflagration, bestiality.
It's also an addictive revisionist assessment of desire and its consequences. Old-school technique (including an homage to the shadow-puppet theater Coppola performed to entertain himself in his polio-stricken youth) is fused with un-Victorian stances on fidelity and fornication, and it's all bound up in a crimson-stained soap opera poised on a tightrope between the ludicrous and the sound of mind.
After Dracula and the ill-received, I-wasn't-made-for-these-times precocity parable, Jack, Coppola returned to his senses, and thus to form, in 1997 with The Rainmaker. Essentially, Dracula was about discovering some Dionysian self; The Rainmaker was about the restoration of a particular creative order. An unlikely union between Coppola and John Grisham, the film was a modest, handsome entertainment that wanted to be liked without striving to be.
This is also true of Coppola himself. He was trying to take American movies to another creative level without feeling compelled to top himself every time. We discuss him now with a sense of reverence and a sense of hope, as though he were a phoenix expected to rise perpetually from celluloid ash at our command. But parsing over the seminal body of work he's given us in only 30 years, does he really have anything left to prove?
Wesley Morris is a freelance writer. He lives in New York.
© 2002 by Wesley Morris
