"Tetro"

By David Hudson on 06/10/2009

[Updated through 6/15]

"Is this the one--a long-awaited new classic from the master?" asks Keith Uhlich in Time Out New York. "Close enough. 'Tetro' expands on the buoyant sensations of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola's previous film - the origins-of-language love story 'Youth Without Youth' (2007) - even as its twists and turns feel less spontaneous, more pro forma. This is a straight-hewn sins-of-the-father tale (a Coppola old reliable) that is at times dulled by its narrative inevitabilities. But though there's less improvisatory wonder, it's a small price to pay for the sight of a revivified artist expressing his lifelong obsessions with supreme control and confidence."

"Old-fashioned, if not anachronistic, in its aspirations, this is an art film that might have been made in 1965 - the period when the UCLA-educated Coppola first broke into production," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The presiding deities are Orson Welles, Carol Reed, and early Fellini - the absurdist Roman Polanski of 'Cul de Sac' would be an analogue - although, in interviews, Coppola has been eager to reference Pirandello, Tennessee Williams and Greek tragedy.... However overwrought, 'Tetro' is neither a project nor a package; it exudes enthusiasm and love of cinema. Coming from the 70-year-old who once bestrode Hollywood Boulevard like a colossus, Coppola's new movie offers best possible evidence of youth without youth."

"Aimless young Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) crashes with his storied artist family's estranged older brother, blocked writer Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who lives in backlot Buenos Aires," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Drama, mostly shut into Tetro's apartment (with girlfriend Miranda, played by Maribel Verdú) and other airy but artificial-feeling spaces, simmers through the younger sib's quiet goading and Tetro's cultivated mythology of resentment and realization.... Like the family patriarch of the film improvising flourishes at the piano, Coppola can conjure up bits of movie magic, such as an ethereal car ride past mountains, but the ultimate grand gesture of success eludes him here."

"Though 'Tetro' is too frenzied a film to be made or broken by a single performance," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "its star delivers unexpected pleasures. Love him or hate him, nobody says 'Go ahead, put your pants on,' quite like Vincent Gallo."

"'Tetro' feels supremely like the work of a director making exactly the film he wants," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Creating his own slightly surreal, self-contained world, supplementing the black-and-white HD photography with sequences which not only break out in color but switch up the aspect ratio as well, introducing dance numbers and plot absurdities with an equal lack of self-consciousness, Coppola is not only utterly in control of his medium, but fully willing to enrich his basic chops with an appealing and lightly worn experimentalism. It's a fascinating ride."

In the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris sees the influence of "such B&W classicists as Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. For scenes set in the past or as fantasies, he turned to the vivid color palette of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger... [D]espite all its longueurs and extreme aggravations, 'Tetro' deserves to be seen as the late work of one of the cinema's most accomplished masters of mise-en-scène."

Larry Rohter talks with Coppola for the New York Times.

Interviews with Ehrenreich: Kyle Buchanan (Movieline) and Logan Hill (Vulture).

Online viewing tip. David Poland talks with Coppola and Ehrenreich.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 6/11: "Eschewing the inexorable forward thrust of most contemporary studio products, Mr Coppola, working from his own screenplay - his first original one since 'The Conversation' in 1974 - drifts and circles around his themes much as Bennie and Tetro amble around town," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "A story of sorts emerges, though mostly what rises to the fore are moods and feelings and the heavy silences that drive wedges among even the closest of intimates. The sense of heaviness is partly due to the dark imagery as well as the intentionally artificial, somewhat leaden sound work by Walter Murch, Mr Coppola's longtime editor and sound guru. Resolutely nonrealistic - or, rather, nongeneric Hollywood - the audio adds greatly to the movie's unreality, to the sense that we're watching (experiencing) someone else's dream or nightmare."

"Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously, and when it went gleefully over the top into something like meta-melodrama in its final half hour, I enjoyed it even more."

"'Tetro's' New Wave flourishes, Fellini-esque digressions, silent-film exaggerations and student-film blocking are equal parts charming and cloying, and won't make the New Coppola many friends among those who dismissed his beautiful 2007 disaster 'Youth Without Youth' out of hand," writes ST VanAirsdale at Movieline. "But for all his stylistic rebirth, Coppola did revert to his master's knack for casting, and Ehrenreich, Gallo (gloriously de-skeeved) and Verdú add weight to all but the most airless scenarios. At their best, Coppola and Co. make fantastic partners; at their worst, they make sublime victims. But in either case, prepare the welcome party. It's great to have a real filmmaker - whomever he decides to be - back at work."

For IFC, Stephen Saito has nabbed "a few brief moments to talk to Coppola and Ehrenreich, who was said to have been discovered by Steven Spielberg at a bar mitzvah, about Coppola's decision to self-distribute and why film is a still a young art form."

"As a filmmaker," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club, "Coppola is once again at the height of his powers; as a dramatist, he's considerably less engaged, as if merely seeking a classical hook on which to hang his fussed-over images. But oh what images!"

Update, 6/12: "[I]f the film momentarily falters at the beginning of its climax," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical, "it ends in bravura form, with Bennie's cathartic exposure, repudiation and destruction of paternal control, and his heartfelt reconciliation with Tetro amidst a blinding chorus of separating and conjoining headlights, imbued with a manic, sweaty fury and poignancy that typifies Coppola's sweeping epic, and confirms the director's triumphant return to form."

Update, 6/14: "Francis Ford Coppola's 'Tetro' is nuts," writes Glenn Kenny. "One reason it works is that for some reason, Coppola owns the craziness here, in a way he couldn't quite muster with his prior film, the sometimes dazzling but largely moribund 'Youth Without Youth.'" At any rate, in one scene, "our wide-eyed hero... gets to cavort in a hot tub with two very attractive young women. And watching the little scene, I was reminded of having breakfasted with Francis Ford Coppola many years ago."

Updates, 6/15: Reid Rosefelt recalls hooking Coppola up with Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver - and has thoughts, too, on "The Rain People."

Online listening tip. Coppola is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

[Photo: "Tetro," American Zoetrope, 2009]

Tags: Alden Ehrenreich, Francis Ford Coppola, Maribel Verdú, Tetro, Vincent Gallo