Francis Ford Coppola’s “Youth Without Youth” didn’t do his career many favors. At least not from audiences and critics that were confounded by the seemingly incomprehensible nature of the film’s metaphysical doppelganger-type themes of everlasting life, etc.
However, it facilitated Coppola’s return after a ten-year sojourn tending to his vineyards and struggling to complete his ambitious and still-uncompleted magnum opus “Megalopolis” (the semi-similar ‘Benjamin Button’ with its similar looming clock might have killed it all together), and we welcomed his return.
For the unimaginative stiffs that couldn’t hang with ‘Youth’ (which wasn’t as convoluted or cryptic as some thought), “Tetro,” seems more appealing, a family drama about a young man (Alden Ehrenreich) who travels to Argentina to find his estranged brother (Vincent Gallo) who has changed his name, become a poet and has seemingly done everything in his power to separate all ties from his family. Shot mostly in black in white, the goodwill buzz engendered with the trailers (from the lyrical and amusing qualities) and scenes showcased so far all indicate a second point of entry for his cinema homecoming.
We digress… Charming, scrappy and ultimately uneven, reports calling Coppola’s “Tetro,” not a return to form and not as unsuccessful as “Youth Without Youth” (again, if a failure, an interesting one) are pretty much on the money, but still as frustrating as its theatrical flourishes can be, there’s many endearing qualities to the film, including moving resonance in the complicated family fabric.
Neither the Fellini-esque whimsy or the Italo-comedy hinted at in the trailer, while the film does contain those qualities, at its core, it’s a family drama about a man (Gallo) who’s acrimoniously divorced himself from his family and cannot reconcile his buried affections with his bilious bitterness. Characterized by scenes mostly shot in black and white, color flashbacks, stylized daydreams and existing footage of old school cinema (remembering scenes of watching Powell & Pressburger’s “Tales Of Hoffman,” and references to the Archers’ “The Red Shoes”), “Tetro,” sometimes takes on more style than it can chew and the mixed medias don’t necessarily strengthen the picture.
When cruise ship waiter, Bennie (Ehrenreich) arrives in Buenos Aires unexpectedly, his ship moored in Argentina for a week due to engine difficulties, he tracks down and finds his perennially irritable brother Angelo (Gallo) now going by the name Tetro (which fittingly means brooding and gloomy in Italian) and refusing to discuss the past despite Bennie’s myriad questions. He’s a writer of respect, but known as someone who hasn’t fulfilled the promise of his talents, he’s a “genius without accomplishment.”
While Miranda (Maribel Verdu), Tetro’s live-in girlfriend, is welcoming to the naive 18 year old, perhaps eager to know his curmudgeonly older sibling, she too is in the dark about the past and hints to Bennie that deep discovery might be a lost cause. On his first evening Bennie, who clearly looks up to his brother, reveals his heartache, a tattered leter from his youth written by a then 20 year old Tetro apologizing for abruptly leaving home, but signing off with a promise–obviously never fulfilled–to come back one day and “rescue” him from their overbearing and unctuous famous composer father.
Despite Tetro’s “rules” and insistence at stonewalling his brother’s queries, the ever-curious Bennie keeps burrowing for more and goes as far as to rifle though Tetro’s personal things, and finding a coded, cryptic story about their father, which reveals how the patriarch learned everything he knew from his older brother, Alfie. After he became famous he treated him like diseased deadweight.
As Bennie digs deeper into his past–the knowledge of which he feels entitled t0, “it’s my story too,” he protests to Tetro–the more vexed the querulous and outraged Tetro becomes. “Love in our family is like a quick stab in the heart,” he spits with venom when Miranda asks if he loves his family. Without giving away too much, serious injuries, major miscommunication and a revived Tetro story with a now completed ending come to pass (against his wishes of course) and Bennie soon discovers a deep, dark family secret that leaves him completely disarmed.
Some have already called Ehrenreich a revelation, which is on the mark, he’s the heart of the picture’s nostalgic and wistful tone, but Gallo is equally impressive, conveying a wonderfully complex and wounded man who carries a burden of anger, emotional scars and yet has a generous, loving heart beneath the baggage. Coppola says he wants to tell personal stories, yet he slightly undermines his intentions with the impersonal, almost fantastical operatic flashbacks cum dream sequences that while seemingly part of the grand nature of the story, feel a little alien. In its final act, the picture takes on elements of a Greek tragedy, but fortunately Coppola reigns its conclusion in saving itself from wanton melodrama that it threatens at. Again, the venerable filmmaker has said the film is not autobiographical, so its to his credit that most of it does feel so warm and very personal.
A solid cast of Spanish all stars including Carmen Maura (“Volver”) and Maribel Verdu (“Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”), plus Argentinian actors like Rodrigo De La Serna (the best friend of Che Guevara in “The Motorcycle Diaries”), the performances and players are certainly the film’s greatest strength and lesser actors might not have been able to sell every scene with such palpable emotion and passion.
Still, while largely uneven, there’s a spark and charm to Coppola’s “Tetro” that some will unlikely dismiss, while others will hopefully see it for what it is, a flawed little jewel, hopefully pointing to a fully realized vision gem sometime in the near future. [B]