Tetro

Tetro may be the "best" film Francis Ford Coppola has made in over 15 years. Whether this speaks more to the quality of his present state of direction as an artist or on the relative hits and misses of his career in the dregs of Hollywood (be it aiming high and just missing the mark with Godfather 3 and Dracula to stuff that went over people's heads like Youth Without Youth to even crap like Jack) is a combination. He's someone who attained financial success at a time, but then lost nearly all of it and along with it, arguably, some of his artistic merit. But after years of laying low and making wine, and making a whacked-out experiment that people either dug as an abstract piece or hated to hell ('Youth'), he comes out with Tetro like a porn star with a five-foot erection. He's got something to prove, if not to his audience then himself, and he proves it with a story that is personal and a film-making technique that recalls other masters but never too directly.

Tetro is about family, a subject Coppola is, of course, well-versed in being it the notorious kind (of course, the Godfather) and the more low-level and oddly intimate (Rumble Fish). It's a story, as with Rumble Fish, told in crisp black and white widescreen with flashes of color for flashbacks which may or may not be real, and as homage to operas like The Tales of Hoffmann. The title character, wonderfully and intensely portrayed by Vincent Gallo, is in a creative exile in Buenos Aires, a once promising writer living with his doctor-wife (Maribel Verdu, great as always) who is paid a visit one day by a young man, his brother Bennie (baby-faced newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) who hasn't seen him in years. There's secrets withheld by Tetro, not least of which about their parents, and soon an unfinished, longhand written play by Tetro (real name Angelo) is discovered by Bennie in a suitcase. He'll finish his brother's play, but at what cost?

The damaged, almost bi-polar writer, the insistent and impressionable brother, the strong but uncertain woman, these characters are fully realized by Coppola, and then on top of this comes a sort of terrific puzzle that is constructed through Tetro's unfinished play: what about their father, a famous composer (Klaus Maria Brandeur) who split them apart, possibly, or possibly not? What about their mother, who died in a car accident? What about the bond between Tetro and his former mentor, "Alone", the dubbed "most important critic in South America" who has created a pretentious empire around herself? Questions arise, and Coppola rises to the challenge of giving the audience answers but not spoon-fed. It's first and foremost a story of family, of brothers who love but have to find ways to contend with their damaged selves(inspiration being Rocco and His Brothers mayhap), and it's here that it's just about classic, on par with Rumble Fish if not even deeper and wiser about the effect of parents, or lack thereof, in lives spent and possibly wasted.

The writing is immensely interesting, always, even when Coppola may fall into over-indulging in his fantastic self-indulgence as an artist, such as with the operatic flourishes towards the end (this may not make sense, but compared to the WAY over indulgence of the hard-to-defend Y. W. Y it will). If anything the little imperfections, those brush strokes that go so high with the colors and shadows and impressionistic lighting that he and DP Mihai Malaimaire Jr engage in (one who hopefully will be getting more work following such spectacular work on a mix of 35mm and HD) along with Walter Murch's dependable editing, make it an even stronger work. It should feel a little messy here and there, because its subject matter is about finding a sense of purpose, in each other and in one's art. One feels Coppola working through a history of close but torn family ties, of losing loved ones (i.e. His own son), and at the same time a love of them all and of cinema peeking through in nearly every scene, even the ones where it doesn't look like much is going on.

Tetro is the antidote, basically, for this month's Transformers sequel. If you need to find the polar opposite of a picture based practically on just making money and reeling in the crowds with its dumb giant robot battles and preposterous and shallow theatrics, look no further than a picture which cares about its characters, its multi-faceted story and themes, and about projecting a technique that hearkens back to cinema of the 50s and 60s while sticking to an originality by its filmmaker. This will likely stay with me for a while, which is what Coppola's most profound works have done.

17 year-old Bennie works as a waiter on a cruiseship. When the ship suffers engine difficulties and docks in Buenos Aires, he uses the opportunity to attempt to reconnect with his estranged brother Tetro, a once promising writer. He is welcomed with open arms by Tetro's girlfriend, Miranda. She longs to know the truth behind her boyfriends past and what made him the misanthrope he is today. Tetro is hostile towards his brother, his plan was to never see any of his family again, and so keeps him at arms length. Bennie discovers an incomplete play, written in code whilst his brother was undergoing psychiatric treatment. He decides to finish the play and enter it in a festival run by Argentina's most powerful critic, Alone. Faced with this upheaval, Tetro is forced to come to terms with his relationship to his younger brother and his father, a famous conductor.

Tetro is, at its core, a film about family, in particular the relationship between brothers and their Father. A theme Francis Ford Coppola has immersed himself in before, most notably in The Godfather and Rumble Fish. Through a series of flashbacks we are given a glimpse of major events in Tetro's youth, his relationship with his father (played by Klaus Brandauer) and his subsequent departure. There are huge family secrets known only to Tetro and revealed to Bennie in an ending which echoes great literary and operatic works. Coppolas love of opera and theater is stamped all over the script and the city of Buenos Aires seems to be the perfect background in which to set this story.

Shot stunningly in digital monochrome with colour flashbacks, it has some aesthetic similarities to Rumble Fish. Coppola and cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. reportedly site On The Waterfront and La Notte as big influences on the films visual style. There are certainly elements of both here, with the film also retaining its visual sense of self. It is operatic in both its narrative and its mise-en-scene. The idea of cutting between colour and monochrome as well as changing aspect ratios sounds as if it would be jarring, and it typically is. But for the purposes of Tetro it works perfectly.

Seen as a controversial choice by some, Vincent Gallo brings an edge to the titular character that some other actors may have lacked. However it is newcomer Alden Ehrenreich who steals the show as Bennie, a wayward teenager looking for guidance and approval. Maribel Verdu, as Miranda, provides the conduit between the two in a typicaly solid performance.

Hollywood is littered with once great directors who have fallen from grace, which makes Tetro all the more remarkable as a return to form from one of the greatest, Francis Ford Coppola.

I can see a lot of connection between Copolla's 1983 Rumble Fish and this 2009 Tetro. Firstly there's that same inky black monochrome that's as dark as night and with the occasional splash of colour. Then, there's the brotherly relationship, here between Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich.

It's a while since I last watched Rumble Fish but the brothers there were Mickey Rourke (a rare good film for him at that time) and Matt Dillon. It's about street gangs and pool halls and how an older brother can be very impressionistic on a younger sibling. I'll say no more, except it's a blinder of a film and better than this.

I would have to say that the monochrome cinematography here, though, that everybody drools over is just too dark and contrasty, for this subject and film. I'm a photographer, so hopefully know and whilst Rumble Fish looked superb, that was full of geometric angles and angular paradoxes. Here, the screen is often plunged into almost darkness much of the time.

There is a balletic beauty to much of it though and we veer away from Rumble Fish and on to his works of epic greatness. The Godfathers and Apocalypse Now all share with this, an operatic build up of artistic and emotional tension that is mesmerising. Tetro has this toward the end at the Festival and we start anticipating something big and great. Do we get it? You'll have to see it yourself...

Others have touched on the actual storyline and I'm going to leave that to them. That said, the cast are all good but oddly, Vincent Gallo, as Tetro seems to short-change us. Not performance wise but in that we just don't seem to get to know him, which is part of the whole story, of course. Clamming up into a shell is nature's way of protecting us, emotionally, which is what Tetro did - and still does.

One major plus to this, very bog-standard DVD, was the sound quality - I 'felt' the sound as much as heard it. It prickled my eardrums with a tactile clarity, certainly Hi-fi standard, plus. OK, it was through separate amp and speakers but is as all my TV watching is.

Is Tetro a film for you? That's a difficult one. Art-house cinema lovers probably will and those who like a drama that is quite complex also but those who want action and something akin to Apocalypse Now, no. It is long, visually rich and dark (like plain chocolate) and accordingly, not for everybody but for those who do, it holds many strengths.

One thing that's clear from 'Tetro', Francis Coppola's beautiful, disturbing, very personal new film (a great improvement over his 'Youth Without Youth' of two years ago) is that whether its themes are autobiographical or not, they show a man who still has strong feelings about family and a wealth of artistic ideas about how to act them out. Family seems a poisonous and irresistible thing. When Vincent Gallo tells Alden Ehrenreich at the end of the film, "We're family," it sounds as haunting as "Forget It, Jake - It's Chinatown" at the end of Roman Polanski's movie. Family, like Chinatown, is a place of mysterious trouble, of rivalries that come back to haunt you, of resentments and terrible deceptions.

There's a lot of pain about failed ambitions too. Tetro (a mean, brooding Vincent Gallo;"tetro" means 'sad' or 'dark' in Italian), a would-be writer, is hiding away in Buenos Aires, the birthplace of his father, when his younger brother Bennie (excellent newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) appears one night in the pristine white uniform of a cruise ship employee. The action thenceforth is an off-and-on wooing of Tetro by Bennie. Bennie wants to recover his childhood when he worshiped Angelo, as he was then. "Angelo's dead," Tetro repeats. Bennie has felt abandoned for a decade. He is almost eighteen, and ran away from military school and lied about his age to get the job on the ship. Now Tetro does not welcome Bennie at all and keeps saying he ought to stay with someone else or return to the boat, which is docked for repairs.

The 'Godfather' films are full of brother and father rivalries too, but because this film is about waywardness and is in coldly beautiful digital black and white with moments of intense color, it more strongly recalls Coppola's similarly color-highlighted black and white version of S.E. Hinton's 'Rumblefish,' where Mickey Rourke played the dangerous, disreputable but romantic older brother and Matt Dillon the younger one who has missed him.

This certainly isn't Tusa, though. It's Argentina, but also an alternately windswept and mountainous Patagonia, and a world of pure cinematic imagination highlighted by trips into intense Fifties Technicolor with The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman and Copola's own strange evocations of that lushly artificial style. Flashbacks in less intense color recall the father -- perhaps one should write "the Father" -- Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer), born in Buenos Aires of Italian family, a composer and orchestra leader hailed as a genius. Carlo has stifled the ambitions of another musical composer brother (played by Brandauer in heavy makeup) and seems to have driven Tetro (Gallo) mad. Tetro lives a bipolar, cosmopolitan life with a warm and sexy Spanish lady called Miranda (Maribel Verdú: we know her from 'Y tu mamá también' and 'Pan's Labyrinth') who discovered him when he was in an asylum and she was a visiting entertainer. Tetro has all but abandoned his magnum opus, a play he can't finish, and works in a theater where he does the lighting.

One can hardly attribute the resentment of the father to Coppola himself; his own father was a minor musician best known for composing music for Coppola's films. Perhaps he himself is the evil father? But then what to make of Sofia Coppola, the acclaimed and successful daughter, a fine director in her own right? The Oedipal themes that arise may be more universal than autobiographical. The mother in Tetro however, is partly missing from the equation, a shadowy figure who who died in a car accident when Tetro/Angelo was driving. There are so many references to accidents one begins to fear one every time somebody goes out. And indeed walking a dog proves dangerous.

Bennie discovers Tetro's hidden manuscripts, which, like hidden memories, are written in mirror writing he says is "military school code." Among various Argentinian friends the youth meets "the most famous critic in Latin America," a woman who calls herself "Alone" (Carmen Maura, another Spanish actress, whom we know from films by Pedro Almodóvar). When Benie first arrives, Tetro has a broken leg. Later he breaks a leg himself, and while recovering he transcribes the MS. into normal writing and adds an ending. "Alone" runs an arts festival in Patagonia, and he has the unwitting collaboration translated into Spanish and enters in the festival competition, which it wins. Tetro rejects all this. Gallo's evocations of depression, anger, and hostility are extremely realistic. His final revelations and eventual warm acceptance of Bennie, whose accident causes him to miss his boat, are perhaps less convincing, though his performance is strong. Ehrenreich, who sometimes resembles a young, but more physically solid Leo DiCaprio, is touching and appealing.

It's not clear at first what the Powell/Pressberger 'Red Shoes' and 'Tales of Hoffman' have to do with the story, except that Tetro took Bennie to see them. But they illustrate a sensibility so steeped in cinema that it can't evoke emotion without remembering films. Everything in Tetro is highly artificial, or simply cinematic, but also convincingly emotional. The tensions between the brothers have been compared to those in Kazan's 'East of Eden,' and Coppola indeed thought of Kazan in making this film and has spoken of a felt rivalry with him. The Patagonian arts festival sequences recall both Fifties comedies and Fellini. For all this artificiality, the film stirred up plenty of discomfort in me. One can perfectly well awaken painful emotions by mimicking old films, as Todd Haynes did in his odd pastiche of Douglas Sirk, 'Far From Heaven.' 'Tetro' doesn't feel resolved; it has a little of the rambling incoherence of 'Youth Without Youth,' except that it is so much more intensely felt. Above all it is a unique work that is beautiful to look at and keeps one guessing. Coppola has said this is the kind of movie he wanted to make when he was young. Very well, it's a bit late for that; but why not?

Enthralling, captivating. Buenos Aires, maybe? Black and White scope mostly, the limpid soul and devastating smile of Alden Ehrenreich. Coppola enjoys his freedom and so do we. At the base of it all, a juicy melodrama but the master flies over it with a tireless, youthful zest. Vincent Gallo seem a bit of an odd choice to play the title role and in fact I just found out that Matt Dillon was supposed to have played it. It certainly would have added up the romanticism and the sensuality that runs through it but, never mind. Alden Ehrenreich as Bennie is, quite simply, fantastic. Maribel Verdu another stand out as Tetro's loving if long suffering companion. Karl Maria Brandauer is horribly perfect, a character that emanates the kind of debauchery fame and rotten ego can provide. "There is room for just one genius in this family" I saw the film last night and it hasn't left me for a moment. I can't wait to see it again.