Tetro

I feel bad just tossing out a scathing review of this film, mostly because of how sincere Francis Ford Coppola comes across when you read practically anything he has said or written about making this film - which he counts among the most enjoyable experiences he has had making a movie over the entirety of his career; and yet I can’t help thinking, “Man, if you had followed The Conversation with this picture (Tetro), you might not be working today. Or else you’d be lighting scenes for Martin Scorsese, something along those lines.”

It’s not that Tetro is a bad movie; there are elements of technical filmmaking in the picture that are actually quite good, and I’m sure that the many, many allusions and homages make the film considerably richer for serious students of film (the only one that I picked up was to Charles Foster Kane, and I haven’t even seen that movie) - but what the film has to recommend it in terms of style and technical merit doesn’t really outweigh the weaknesses in the story and the acting that detract most from the film. As the director, Coppola is partly to blame, too, because the film just goes on way too long; there should be a rule that a director is limited to a certain amount of running time, if that director is planning to cast Vincent Gallo in a role containing anything other than incidental speaking parts.

Gallo is Tetro, a going-on-middle-aged guy who is estranged, it would seem, from all of humanity - but particularly from anyone to whom he is directly related. He lives in present day Buenos Aires with his live-in lover, and he’s something of a hapless gadabout, if you can get your head around a Bizarro, negative version of the traditional gadabout. He occasionally runs the lights at the local playhouse, but most of the time he just hangs around and looks angry and defeated and grizzled. His back story starts to come out when his brother Bennie turns up on his doorstep one day, and the rest of the film is basically two parts - the brothers catching up on their ten year estrangement, and then some natural progression of their relationship now that their lives have intersected once again.

Coppola describes the things that take place in the film in this way (the quote may not be verbatim, but the gist is there): “Nothing in the film actually happened, but it’s all true.” The domineering father in the film doesn’t quite match up to what is known about Coppola’s own father, but there are similarities; and you can pretty easily see Talia Shire in Miranda (Tetro’s lover)'s eyes; but though there are shades of autobiography in the story, the film clearly plays like Coppola is trying to make a grand movie from the old studio days, an über-melodramatic chronicle of what might have happened in his own life if things had not gone so well for him. It might even be the kind of melodrama that could have worked under other circumstances, one of which would be if Coppola had not chosen to stack even more melodrama at the end on top of the already shaky melodrama on which the story is built. Unfortunately, the story does, in fact, go in that direction, and it largely falls apart by the end; but that’s not the biggest problem with the movie.

That would be Gallo. I haven’t seen him in anything else. He might actually be a genius, I don’t know. Based on Tetro, however, I would seriously doubt it. He does angry and brooding awfully well; but like George Gervin and the finger roll, that would appear to be all that he can do. Well, no wait...he can smoke cigarettes, too. I don’t think he smokes quite as many as John Mellencamp does in real life, or as many as Billy Bob Thornton did in The Man Who Wasn’t There - but it’s a lot. Beyond that, though, Tetro the character is pretty much the same at the end of picture as he was at the beginning. There’s a reveal, and an obligatory reconciliation sequence; but the reveal is unnecessary, and because the reconciliation is dependent upon the reveal, that also feels out of place and ineffectual. Tetro - both the character and the film - fail to develop sufficiently to the point that the ending is believable. Tetro the character is the key to Tetro the film, but he lacks the essential humanity that would allow the audience to invest any kind of emotion or interest in the character. I just didn’t find Tetro authentic as a person, and when the character can’t connect with the audience in any meaningful kind of way, it’s awfully hard for the story to gain any traction.

Stylistically, though, the film is sort of nice to look at. Coppola shot in digital, and parts of that were in high definition. You can pick up some of that high definition, even in a 35mm print projected non-digitally, largely because of how well lit and shot the film is. There is so much contrast in so many of the black and white shots that some of the scenes and images approach the point of chiaroscuro. On the other hand, color flashback sequences, shot on grainy home-video stock, are a little bit distracting - and they do a disservice to Tetro the character by letting us see into his memory rather than forcing him to talk about those memories and thereby reveal his deeply barricaded humanity.

I was talking to Heather at work the other day, about the novels of Chuck Palahniuk and what might be the reason that I don’t get how those novels have achieved the level of cult appeal that they have achieved. Heather’s opinion was that I am too old, and that may well be true. I get that they’re funny, and I laugh at the jokes; but the translation to film is awkward (especially for something like Choke), and for all of Palahniuk’s considerable skill at breathing perverse life into a cast of characters, his ability to tell a story with those characters is not nearly so polished. The reason that I didn’t fully appreciate Tetro, in the spirit in which it was intended to be appreciated, might run to the opposite extreme - I might be too young. It’s certainly true that I could have done a much better job of studying film to this point in my life than I have done (the last two months of writing about the movies I have watched - 34 films in July and August - notwithstanding); but it is not possible for me to have been able to study the films and filmmakers Coppola references here when those films were current - and at the end of the day, I get the feeling that Coppola, who says he wishes he could have been making this kind of movie all along, has made this film less for the modern audience in toto than for his own contemporaries specifically.