Tetro (Click for Official movie trailer)
Francis Ford Coppola has made yet another film about father-son tensions – but this one is a self-indulgent mess
Francis Ford Coppola's latest film, which he has both written and directed, is not badly acted – not at all. But it is laboured, massively implausible, excruciatingly self-important and really quite staggeringly boring in the way only a deeply personal film from a deeply important film-maker can be. It's an Oedipal-lite fantasy, brooding on the nature of art, fatherhood and creation. Its message could be: those who resent the stultifying influence of a celebrated father-figure can exercise the Freudian prerogative of parricide, but they may then have to shoulder the terrible, fatal burden of patriarchy themselves.
In its opening act, Tetro has the feel of something by Tennessee Williams, and in fact it looks like the live TV transmission of a stage play. Bennie is a teenager, working on a cruise ship, who one hot summer night shows up at the ramshackle Buenos Aires apartment belonging to his long-lost, deeply beloved older half-brother Tetro, who ran out on him years earlier. Tetro was a promising writer once, who suffered a breakdown and whose talent was apparently consumed by bitterness and unspoken family secrets; he is now living with Miranda, the beautiful woman who nursed him back to health.
The mercurial, charismatic Tetro is deeply nettled and suspicious at Bennie's reappearance, and his resentment and rage grow when the young sibling goes through his private papers and reads the unfinished play he has secretly written about their overbearing father, an egomaniacal musician and conductor who did something awful to Tetro long ago. Bennie takes things further, forcing a psychological and existential crisis by actually writing an ending for the play and putting on a performance as a way of getting at the truth about Tetro's disappearance, and inducing his brother to confront his responsibilities and exorcise his demons. Bennie is played by newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, looking like a young DiCaprio, Maribel Verdú plays Miranda and Vincent Gallo is a relatively restrained presence as Tetro himself. Their maestro father, Carlo, is played in flashback by Klaus Maria Brandauer.
What might itself have made an interestingly old-fashioned, well-made play is opened up by the contrivance of having Tetro's lost masterpiece entered for a deeply unlikely literary festival in Patagonia, presided over by a critic and impresario who wears dark glasses indoors and is known only by her enigmatic pen-name "Alone", played by Carmen Maura. This bizarre, contrived character really is very odd, taking the movie away from realism into some stylised alternative universe of its own. "Alone" might appear to represent an arrogant literary establishment, infatuated with prizes and prestige but indifferent to real genius. And yet when "Alone" praises Bennie's play to the skies, we are clearly supposed to take that very seriously, and Tetro even has an awkward, dead-straight line to "Alone", saying how he has always respected her. So it is a puzzle.
Bennie, Tetro and Miranda travel to the Patagonia festival along with some other attractive female company members, there to provide a sexual awakening for Bennie. The main actors and technicians have presumably gone on ahead for a last-minute rehearsal and technical run-through; if the play is indeed to be performed there, although this is not quite clear, and Coppola's idea of this "festival" is perhaps governed by his experience of film festivals.
It is certainly a strangely conceived event where, incidentally, some product placement lands with a thud. The festival's trophy happens to be designed by the jeweller Swarovski. And it is here that the final revelatory twist is unveiled, a twist that is actually less interesting than what had gone before. Entering a "competition" is a pretty hokey plot device, one more associated with urban dance movies, but this movie's bigger problem is being weighed down with what it evidently considers to be its sheer mythic potency, but is frankly overwrought, baffling and unexciting. The flashbacks to their father, are in colour, whereas the rest of the movie is in monochrome, but the switch is not particularly effective. Very disconcertingly, Carlo's fatter, bespectacled brother Alfie is also played by Brandauer, and yet it is not clear that Alfie is Carlo's twin. The effect is almost like Alec Guinness playing different D'Ascoyne family members in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Famously, Coppola has done better with father-son and quasi-father-son relationships in the past. Compare the dullness and pedantry of the characterisation in Tetro with Vito and Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies or Willard and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The very redundancy of the motif points to an evasive fictional rendering of the director's own issues, a kind of public family therapy, and it is frankly uncomfortable to notice that the second-unit director here is Coppola's son, Roman, a talented film-maker whose feature film CQ made a real impression at Cannes almost 10 years ago, but has not been very prominent since then. The way ahead could be for Coppola père et fils to stay away from personal themes. Family isn't everything.
Tetro
Production year: 2009
Countries: Italy, Rest of the world, Spain, USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 127min mins
Directors: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Carmen Maura, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Maribel Verdu, Maribel Verdú, Vincent Gallo
guardian.co.uk, Peter Bradshaw © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
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