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| "From the director of Apocalypse Now..." |
Francis Ford Coppola is responsibly for some of the greatest films of all time. His late-career fade-out is also unmatched, but it inspired what is one of my favourite pieces of film criticism of all time. It's by Jim Schembri, a critic I once admired, and its meta-mix of review, in-joke and analysis is something I've thought about for over two decades.
I couldn't find it anywhere online, but being the hoarder that I am, I kept the centrespread from The Age's EG liftout, circa November 9, 2001, and reproduce it here for educational purposes.
***
Every man has a breaking point
JIM SCHEMBRI risks life and limb in search of the truthA line of palm trees erupts in flame. Helicopters pass back and forth in slow- motion to the sombre chords of The End by the Doors as the camera slowly pans across the burning foliage.
These are the unforgettable opening images of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the definitive film about the Vietnam conflict and one of the most powerful films about the nature of warfare.
Released in 1979, and for which Coppola risked his house and his sanity, Apocalypse Now has endured as a work of cinematic brilliance that seems ever more fresh with each viewing.
Now, after 22 years of legend-building, Coppola has delivered Apocalypse Now Redux, his greatly extended version of the film. The original ran 153 minutes. The new one, sporting 49 minutes of new footage, runs 202. It's a mess. A sad mess.
To devotees of the film, and of Coppola, it's an utterly confounding mess.
We know Coppola's been off the boil for more than a decade, but was that any reason to mangle his own masterpiece?
Why did Coppola do this? What happened to that great career? Can we, and should we, forgive him?
With my mind abuzz with thoughts of Coppola. I find myself drifting into an altered state of consciousness, sucked into the images and dialogue of Apocalypse Now. I must embark on my own journey to review his career, to analyse Redux and, ultimately, to locate and confront Coppola, who sits in a ramshackle bamboo hut at the end of a long, winding river...
I must find him... to ask questions... to seek answers...
Saigon. Shit.
I'm still only in Saigon.
The walls of this room are closing in on me. In my mind I'm trying to defend the new version of Apocalypse Now, trying to convince myself Coppola has improved on his brilliant original. But the more I do, the closer the walls get and the louder the terrible truth becomes. And the truth is this: watching Redux is like watching Leonardo da Vinci go back to the Mona Lisa and retouching it with crayon.
I must find out why.
Saigon. Shit.
I'm still only in Saigon.
The walls of this room are closing in on me. In my mind I'm trying to defend the new version of Apocalypse Now, trying to convince myself Coppola has improved on his brilliant original. But the more I do, the closer the walls get and the louder the terrible truth becomes. And the truth is this: watching Redux is like watching Leonardo da Vinci go back to the Mona Lisa and retouching it with crayon.
I must find out why.
—
On a small patrol boat, I chug up-river to confront Coppola. I wonder how it is that one of the greatest movies of all time - one the American Film Institute ranked 28 in its top 100 American films - should find itself the victim of such an ill-conceived reworking by its creator. Could it be a simple grab for former glory? Knowing he now churns out mall-fodder, perhaps this is his way of reminding us of the heights he'd hit. But if he wanted to do that, surely he would grace us with Godfather IV. There's still that final chapter left to be told, the one hinted at in Godfather II, about the Corleone family exerting influence in the White House. Surely that's the swansong he deserves, not this exercise in padding.
The boat makes a turn in the river and I sit on the bow, setting off purple flares and throwing them into the jungle as I reflect on the 49 minutes Coppola's added.
The 1979 film, based on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness, involves Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) travelling in a patrol boat up a river to locate and kill a renegade commander, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). There are memorable encounters with a gung-ho colonel (Robert Duvall) who loves the smell of napalm in the morning, a bridge under siege, a Playboy bunny concert and a sampan full of civilians whom the crew massacre by accident. But the heart of the film is the tension built by Willard's internal dialogue as he tries to understand the war he's in, and the man he's been told to kill.
In its original form, the film was exciting, lush, seductive, engrossing. Apocalypse Now Redux is simply too long and boring, losing all its tension due to all these new encounters for Willard and the crew.
Compounding this, Willard's now a lot more chummy with the boat's crew, robbing the journey of that delicious icy chasm between the grunts ("rock-and-rollers with one foot in their graves") and the aloof officer.
For about 40 minutes the film is untouched. Only after the classic helicopter attack on the Vietcong village does the first new bit trickle in.
Colonel Kilgore, standing on the beach he's so keen to surf, ushers a Vietnamese mother and child on to his personal helicopter for medical attention. This, after his helicopters have strafed her village. It highlights the contradiction in Kilgore, the conflicting warrior impulse to kill and to save. It turns out to be the only new scene in Redux that's worthwhile.
What follows is a knockabout comedy sequence about Kilgore's surfboard, which Willard steals with the help of the other men on the boat, Chief (Albert Hall), Clean (Laurence Fishburne), Lance (Sam Bottoms) and Chef (Frederic Forrest). As the boat hides under trees on the banks of the river, Kilgore's choppers go in vain search of the board.
Like the other new scenes in Redux, it adds nothing good to the film and distorts its original shape, throwing off-balance moments that were beautifully poised. "Some day this war's going to end," was Kilgore's original, memorable exit line. Now it's lost in the jumble of misjudged comedy that follows.
The Playboy bunnies, who appeared only in the concert scene in the original, now feature in meaningless, fumbling trysts with the boat's crew when they stop at a run-down US medivac station. As objectified, unattainable sex symbols in the original, their fleeting, teasing appearance underscored the youth of the soldiers, many of whom may have been seeing a woman for the last time. By reducing them to easy lays, the original point is sacrificed for the unremarkable statement that these boys are horny. We really didn't need to see the girls again.
Easily the most contentious addition, however, is the French plantation sequence. This is where, shortly after Clean is killed, the boat encounters a group of French people who have been in the jungle for generations and who were fighting the Vietnamese for decades before the Americans got involved.
In Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the excellent 1991 documentary by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, on the tortured making of the film, Coppola is asked about the sequence. He says without reservation that he was unhappy with the entire segment because he didn't get the cast he wanted. We even see footage of him telling the cast the scene "no longer exists".
Now it's back, in its entirety. What are we to make of Coppola reinstating something he openly declared was mediocre? Are we supposed to disregard what he said and declare what a great bonus it is? Does Coppola think we all have amnesia?
The boat chugs on, snaking its way past an enclave of film critics who have gone native. One wades through the water holding a suitcase, trying to reach the boat, but I gun the engine and outrun him. Safe again, I steady the boat and increase speed as my desire to confront Coppola grows. I grab the folder stuffed full of press clippings, tear through the "TOP SECRET" seal and examine the contents.
The dossier on Francis Ford Coppola's career is the tale of a once-great artist in a tailspin. A genuine visionary who left indelible stamps on modern cinema in the 1970s, he appears to have lost both his nerve and his touch. Redux is a sad symptom of that decline.
At first glance it's hard to believe such a career could go so far off the rails. The man has enough major awards to support a king-size mattress and base, including a clutch of Oscars: best director, film and screenplay for Godfather II; best screenplay for The Godfather, best screenplay for Patton, et cetera et cetera. Among his larger triumphs are smaller works that reflected the level of his personal and artistic commitment. The Rain People (1969), a moving domestic drama about a housewife who goes on a road trip to sort out her life, began shooting without a finished screenplay. Coppola put his faith in his cast to complete his vision. The Conversation (1974), with Gene Hackman, about a paranoid surveillance expert, took Coppola years to make. It, too, went into production before the script was done. The result was a classic example of Coppola's artistic instincts paying off.
In the late 1960s, after showing promise with the flop musical Finian's Rainbow (1968), the comedy You're A Big Boy Now (1967) and the horror film Dementia 13 (1963, for Roger Corman), Coppola sensed the creative dangers of working in the Hollywood studio system and saw the need for his own independent studio, American Zoetrope.
The first two Godfather films earned him Oscars and millions, giving him the clout to get production started on Apocalypse Now, which had been simmering since the late 1960s. The film still stands as the quintessential expression of Coppola as visionary, the man who puts himself on the line for his art. As Hearts Of Darkness vividly documents, Coppola nearly went nuts making Apocalypse Now, for which he put up his own assets to cover the $16 million needed when the film ran over budget.
Then things went truly pear-shaped. With the legendary failure of One From the Heart (1982), Coppola overreached by a long shot. Attempting to make a musical comedy-romance with meaning, he recreated massively expensive Las Vegas settings in the studio.
The film was also meant to demonstrate Coppola's concept of "electronic cinema". This was where extensive pre-production, rehearsals on videotape and storing the screenplay on computer disk to allow for easy restructuring was meant to result in huge savings of time and money.
It backfired. The film's budget shot into the stratosphere - $25 million was a lot in 1982 - and its troubled production was regular news. In the end, Coppola produced a technically dazzling film, but one so dogged with well-publicised financial problems and bad reviews ("One of the worst movies I've ever seen," said Judy Stone, of the San Francisco Chronicle, "It's cold and mechanical... the heart is missing," wrote Pauline Kael, of The New Yorker) it bankrupted him and sank Zoetrope. Still, it showed he had balls.
By the time Coppola got to the overstylised juvenile-delinquent drama Rumblefish (1983) and the beautiful-looking, messily directed The Cotton Club (1984), he was still leaving his mark but was clearly beginning to slip. Gardens of Stone (1987), a drama set in a cemetery where the dead of the Vietnam War are buried, was the first Coppola film that didn't bear his fingerprints.
With Tucker: The Man and his Dream (1988), Coppola's fluid visual style and love of strong performances were back on track in his loving tribute to legendary car maker Preston Tucker. It was a box-office dog whistle.
Alas, Godfather III (1990) is the last known sighting of Coppola's unmistakable style.
The 1990s showcase Francis Ford Coppola the multiplex filler, not the artist and visionary of yore - Dracula (1992), John Grisham's The Rainmaker (1997), the comedy Jack (1996), in which Robin Williams plays a 10-year-old boy. If you didn't see Coppola's name on the credits, you never would've dared guess they were his films.
In the dossier I find a host of reviews that concur.
After seeing Dracula, Christopher Sharrett of USA Today wrote: "The last nail in the coffin... for a director whose sagging career has been of much speculation and concern for more than a decade."
Gene Siskel of The Chicago Sun-Times. "Jack is anything but vintage Coppola. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to point to a single image that is distinctive.'
Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune said Jack was "... sunny, humane and high-spirited, done with real technical finesse. But from Francis Ford Coppola? It's like watching Rembrandt sit down to labor over an elaborate doodle for two hours".
As for The Cotton Club, The New York Times' Vincent Canby declared the film demonstrated "no special character, style or excitement".
It's depressing reading, and one by one I rip the reviews and drop them into the wash of the boat as we near Coppola's compound at the end of the river.
Then, as the sunlight glints off the river into my eyes, a thought strikes me.
We mourn when an artist dies before their time, before we feel they've given us their best. By that measure, surely we should at least be grateful that an artist in decline, sad as that is, has nonetheless graced us with their best work. They may now wallow in financially successful mediocrity (Jack, Dracula, Rainmaker were all money-makers), but we can still cherish the time when these artists risked all to give us their soul. So, as the boat enters the compound, I think perhaps we should forgive Coppola this indulgence with Redux, however misguided we believe it to be.
Before I have a chance to swing the boat around, however, his minions swarm aboard, tie me up and carry me off to meet him.
I'm taken into a hut and thrown down near a dark corner. It smells like slow death in here. I look around. Posters of his Oscar winners, once resplendent and glorious, now faded and cracked, peel off the walls. There are film canisters everywhere. The labels say they contain offcuts, deleted scenes and alternate takes from Coppola's greatest movies.
A dark thought passes through my mind. Is he going to "redux" those films, too? The six-hour Godfather? The four-hour Conversation?
There's heavy breathing in the dark corner of the hut. I strain to see a figure shrouded in the gloom. In the half-light I glimpse the outline of that trademark beard and glasses.
He looks at me. He knows what I think of Redux. He knows what I've been thinking about him, what everyone who loves him is thinking: that he's had it, is over the hill, past his prime. Finally, Coppola addresses me.
"Are you an assassin?" he asks in a low, guttural voice.
"I'm a journalist," is all I can say.
"You're neither," he says. "You're a film critic, sent by editors to collect a bill."
He eats a pistachio, swallows a bug, then continues.
"You saw Redux?"
At first glance it's hard to believe such a career could go so far off the rails. The man has enough major awards to support a king-size mattress and base, including a clutch of Oscars: best director, film and screenplay for Godfather II; best screenplay for The Godfather, best screenplay for Patton, et cetera et cetera. Among his larger triumphs are smaller works that reflected the level of his personal and artistic commitment. The Rain People (1969), a moving domestic drama about a housewife who goes on a road trip to sort out her life, began shooting without a finished screenplay. Coppola put his faith in his cast to complete his vision. The Conversation (1974), with Gene Hackman, about a paranoid surveillance expert, took Coppola years to make. It, too, went into production before the script was done. The result was a classic example of Coppola's artistic instincts paying off.
In the late 1960s, after showing promise with the flop musical Finian's Rainbow (1968), the comedy You're A Big Boy Now (1967) and the horror film Dementia 13 (1963, for Roger Corman), Coppola sensed the creative dangers of working in the Hollywood studio system and saw the need for his own independent studio, American Zoetrope.
The first two Godfather films earned him Oscars and millions, giving him the clout to get production started on Apocalypse Now, which had been simmering since the late 1960s. The film still stands as the quintessential expression of Coppola as visionary, the man who puts himself on the line for his art. As Hearts Of Darkness vividly documents, Coppola nearly went nuts making Apocalypse Now, for which he put up his own assets to cover the $16 million needed when the film ran over budget.
Then things went truly pear-shaped. With the legendary failure of One From the Heart (1982), Coppola overreached by a long shot. Attempting to make a musical comedy-romance with meaning, he recreated massively expensive Las Vegas settings in the studio.
The film was also meant to demonstrate Coppola's concept of "electronic cinema". This was where extensive pre-production, rehearsals on videotape and storing the screenplay on computer disk to allow for easy restructuring was meant to result in huge savings of time and money.
It backfired. The film's budget shot into the stratosphere - $25 million was a lot in 1982 - and its troubled production was regular news. In the end, Coppola produced a technically dazzling film, but one so dogged with well-publicised financial problems and bad reviews ("One of the worst movies I've ever seen," said Judy Stone, of the San Francisco Chronicle, "It's cold and mechanical... the heart is missing," wrote Pauline Kael, of The New Yorker) it bankrupted him and sank Zoetrope. Still, it showed he had balls.
By the time Coppola got to the overstylised juvenile-delinquent drama Rumblefish (1983) and the beautiful-looking, messily directed The Cotton Club (1984), he was still leaving his mark but was clearly beginning to slip. Gardens of Stone (1987), a drama set in a cemetery where the dead of the Vietnam War are buried, was the first Coppola film that didn't bear his fingerprints.
With Tucker: The Man and his Dream (1988), Coppola's fluid visual style and love of strong performances were back on track in his loving tribute to legendary car maker Preston Tucker. It was a box-office dog whistle.
Alas, Godfather III (1990) is the last known sighting of Coppola's unmistakable style.
The 1990s showcase Francis Ford Coppola the multiplex filler, not the artist and visionary of yore - Dracula (1992), John Grisham's The Rainmaker (1997), the comedy Jack (1996), in which Robin Williams plays a 10-year-old boy. If you didn't see Coppola's name on the credits, you never would've dared guess they were his films.
In the dossier I find a host of reviews that concur.
After seeing Dracula, Christopher Sharrett of USA Today wrote: "The last nail in the coffin... for a director whose sagging career has been of much speculation and concern for more than a decade."
Gene Siskel of The Chicago Sun-Times. "Jack is anything but vintage Coppola. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to point to a single image that is distinctive.'
Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune said Jack was "... sunny, humane and high-spirited, done with real technical finesse. But from Francis Ford Coppola? It's like watching Rembrandt sit down to labor over an elaborate doodle for two hours".
As for The Cotton Club, The New York Times' Vincent Canby declared the film demonstrated "no special character, style or excitement".
It's depressing reading, and one by one I rip the reviews and drop them into the wash of the boat as we near Coppola's compound at the end of the river.
Then, as the sunlight glints off the river into my eyes, a thought strikes me.
We mourn when an artist dies before their time, before we feel they've given us their best. By that measure, surely we should at least be grateful that an artist in decline, sad as that is, has nonetheless graced us with their best work. They may now wallow in financially successful mediocrity (Jack, Dracula, Rainmaker were all money-makers), but we can still cherish the time when these artists risked all to give us their soul. So, as the boat enters the compound, I think perhaps we should forgive Coppola this indulgence with Redux, however misguided we believe it to be.
Before I have a chance to swing the boat around, however, his minions swarm aboard, tie me up and carry me off to meet him.
I'm taken into a hut and thrown down near a dark corner. It smells like slow death in here. I look around. Posters of his Oscar winners, once resplendent and glorious, now faded and cracked, peel off the walls. There are film canisters everywhere. The labels say they contain offcuts, deleted scenes and alternate takes from Coppola's greatest movies.
A dark thought passes through my mind. Is he going to "redux" those films, too? The six-hour Godfather? The four-hour Conversation?
There's heavy breathing in the dark corner of the hut. I strain to see a figure shrouded in the gloom. In the half-light I glimpse the outline of that trademark beard and glasses.
He looks at me. He knows what I think of Redux. He knows what I've been thinking about him, what everyone who loves him is thinking: that he's had it, is over the hill, past his prime. Finally, Coppola addresses me.
"Are you an assassin?" he asks in a low, guttural voice.
"I'm a journalist," is all I can say.
"You're neither," he says. "You're a film critic, sent by editors to collect a bill."
He eats a pistachio, swallows a bug, then continues.
"You saw Redux?"
"Yes, sir."
"Are my methods unsound?" he asks.
"Are my methods unsound?" he asks.
I think before I answer. "I don't see any method." I gulp. "It looks like self-inflicted vandalism."
"I once was a film maker who could walk along the edge of a straight razor," he says. "The thought of keeping that level of brilliance up all my life to please the likes of you, that is my dream. That is my nightmare.'
"I know what a nightmare is," I say. "I sat through Dracula twice."
He gestures to the guard, who takes me out of the hut and unties me. I'm free to leave. Back on the boat, as the warm tropical rain pelts down, I think. Should I call in the air strike and put him out of his misery?
Perhaps I'm being too demanding, too greedy. So much of film-making today is so bland and commercial, so governed by test screenings and accountants that we pine for the Coppola of old to return and turn things upside-down with his vision, his fortitude and his big, crazy ideas.
He was an auteur who stuck his dick in the wind. He set grand examples. The fact he no longer follows them isn't a crime. The crime is that the new crop of directors - who have the technology, the money, the studio support Coppola could only ever dream of - haven't followed his lead.
I turn the boat around and chug away. Coppola's given us his best. We shouldn't crucify him for downshifting into cruise mode.
I decide against calling in the air strike, at least for now. After all, he may still have one more left in him.
*A key source for this article was the unauthorised biography Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life, by Michael Schumacher (Bloomsbury).
"I once was a film maker who could walk along the edge of a straight razor," he says. "The thought of keeping that level of brilliance up all my life to please the likes of you, that is my dream. That is my nightmare.'
"I know what a nightmare is," I say. "I sat through Dracula twice."
He gestures to the guard, who takes me out of the hut and unties me. I'm free to leave. Back on the boat, as the warm tropical rain pelts down, I think. Should I call in the air strike and put him out of his misery?
Perhaps I'm being too demanding, too greedy. So much of film-making today is so bland and commercial, so governed by test screenings and accountants that we pine for the Coppola of old to return and turn things upside-down with his vision, his fortitude and his big, crazy ideas.
He was an auteur who stuck his dick in the wind. He set grand examples. The fact he no longer follows them isn't a crime. The crime is that the new crop of directors - who have the technology, the money, the studio support Coppola could only ever dream of - haven't followed his lead.
I turn the boat around and chug away. Coppola's given us his best. We shouldn't crucify him for downshifting into cruise mode.
I decide against calling in the air strike, at least for now. After all, he may still have one more left in him.
*A key source for this article was the unauthorised biography Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life, by Michael Schumacher (Bloomsbury).
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