Karina on SpoutBlog

“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

Tetro follows the reunion of Bennie (teen Leonardo DiCaprio lookalike Alden Ehrenreich), an 18 year old military school dropout-turned-cruise ship waiter, and his much older brother (Vincent Gallo), a once-promising writer who has cut off all ties with his Italian-American, New York-based family and established a new life in Beunos Aires. Calling himself Tetro (a bastardization of the family name and the Italian word for “gloomy”),  when Bennie shows up at his door and is reluctantly given a couch to sleep on the older brother is living with long-suffering girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu), running lights at a local theater, and has abandoned his plays and poetry. In an effort to uncover Tetro’s secrets, Bennie snoops and discovers his brother’s unfinished masterwork, a play about his relationship with their world-famous conductor father (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and Bennie’s dancer mother. When an accident leaves Bennie bedridden for a stretch, Miranda smuggles Bennie the scraps of Tetro’s abandoned opus, and the younger man sets out to restore his family’s creative legacy.

Though Tetro is too frenzied a film to be made or broken by a single performance, its star delivers unexpected pleasures. Love him or hate him, nobody says “Go ahead, put your pants on,” quite like Vincent Gallo. The odd combo of intensity and antipathy, smirk and menace. And yet, Tetro grounds Gallo’s talents in something like classical character acting. The movie makes you wish he’d take more roles that are motivated by something other than the relationship between his ego and his dick.

For the first half of Tetro, the characters have a bad habit of saying aloud what they actually mean; as soon as there’s a hint of subtext, somebody kills it by verbalizing it. But once the first act is out of the way, and the action of the black-and-white present day (if you can call it that — despite the presence of a cell phone or two, there’s little evidence Coppola is describing the world as it exists today) becomes increasingly twinned with Technicolor dance sequences and hazy memories in the palette of a sun-baked Polaroid, Coppola gets more visual with his exposition. Elements that initially grate are eventually boiled down into dream logic. Widescreen compositions increasingly include shadows and/or reflections, spotlights seem plentiful even when the action is off stage. The sometimes uninspired dialogue and mostly trite plot twists recede into the background, serving as a skeleton to support pure-cinema expressionism. Coppola seems to find the greatest clarity in his use of the ultimate cinema expressionism, filmed dance.

More than anything else, Tetro feels like a certain type of Vincente Minnelli musical — not An American in Paris, but The Pirate, or even better, Yolanda and the Thief. Visually sumptuous, with a script that vacillates between sufficient and insipid but is rendered virtually irrelevant by long, extra-narrative fantasy and/or scenes, which recast the whole of the narrative as taking place in the filmmaker’s dreams – and maybe destined to be hated upon its release. Those Minnelli films were eventually reclaimed by French critics and academics. In The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze waxes rhapsodic on the ability of dance in Minnelli’s films to offer an uncanny “passage between worlds.” This seems like the best way to understand Tetro: as a vehicle for transit between our world, in which Vincent Gallo is more than anything else a auteur of the art punchline who sells his sperm for seven figures — to white women only — on the Internet, and the world inside Francis Ford Coppola’s memory. There, the clock is stopped somewhere in the mid-60s, before he’s made his own significant films, the viral irony and collapsing of context that came with the Internet never happened, and Vincent Gallo is a romantic hero.

The tricky business with this kind of filmmaking is that it reads to most casual viewers as narcissism, and in the case of Tetro, there may not be a valid argument that the haters are wrong on that front. But history tends to remember narcissism well and as densely layered, intensely visual work of creative autobiography, Tetro claims a key place in the Coppola filmography. At least, for the first time in the last few decades worth of filmography, it feels like it’s got somewhere to take you.