Tetro
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
Rating: 2.5
American Zoetrope
127 Minutes
Disappointing as a follow-up to his great, criminally underrated Youth Without Youth, Tetro is nonetheless another fascinating step for Francis Ford Coppola in this new and exciting phase of his career as an independent filmmaker. The Conversation has been mentioned in the same breath as Tetro a lot lately, due to its touted status as the only other piece of original material in Coppola's filmography. It's one of a handful of titles I pick from when asked to name a favorite movie; consequently I carry a bit of blind devotion for Coppola, even if he doesn't always merit it. His virtuosity as a filmmaker can hardly be denied, though, and it is what helps carry this movie beyond its limitations. As it is, Tetro is a really neat failure, totally worth watching and increasingly palatable based on your ability to not laugh at lines like "He's like a genius but without a lot of accomplishments," when they're delivered straight-faced.
Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich) arrives in Buenos Aires on shore leave looking for his brother, Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who ran away from home 10 years prior. The man he finds seems nothing like the brother that left him behind, along with a letter promising an explanation later on. It is clear now that he has no intention of ever following through on that promise; he's too torn up and gone, while Bennie's just confused and lost. Tetro's attendant common-law wife Miranda (Maribel Verdú) serves as the barrier between them, protecting him from re-treading familial traumas and Bennie from his brother. In his new life, Tetro inhabits an unusual theatrical world, occasionally working the spotlight for plays at a tiny bar. His writing is what's really eating at him, and I don't think it's too big of a reveal, given the expected trajectory of the film's story, to tell you that he's writing about the secrets he doesn't want Bennie to know.
It's his writing, his status as a great artist, which really makes the movie tough to stomach at moments, because it's never believable. A lot of the narrative isn't believable at all. Tonally, Tetro is bizarrely inconsistent, flitting between heightened drama and naturalism. The weaknesses come mostly from the writing, lines like the genius one above. Genius is referenced a lot in this movie; everyone in the Tetrocini clan appears to be one, and refers to themselves as such. The familial tensions that Tetro has run away from partly stem from a rivalry between his father and his uncle, both played in an over-the-top, telenovela style by Klaus Maria Brandauer, who is at one point made to say the line, "There's only room for one genius in this family." The theatricality is part of the intent, of course, given the setting and operatic dimensions of the story, which are also literalized at times via elaborate color dance sequences, mostly set in unfortunately tacky CG worlds. The problem is that there are several moments where the stylized heights it reaches for aren't quite within its grasp, unfortunate moments that delve into camp.
On the other hand, there are sequences in this movie that are utterly stunning and technically flawless, moments that feel like they're straight out of a Fellini film. All of the points of reference in Tetro are kind of old-school - Fellini, noir, Powell and Pressburger - and the resulting movie has a similar feel, like it came from another era. The chronology of the film is rather tough to place, it doesn't make any reference to a year and all of the costumes, cars and settings are mostly timeless, though the modern age does eventually come aggressively to the fore in a late scene that overwhelms with its assault of cameras and monitors. It's an interesting moment, the movie's timelessness being willfully shattered around it, a tension that is always present throughout the film due to the subtly disconcerting effect of knowing that this time-capsule of a film has been shot on HD; that old-school black and white techniques have been translated into a digital format. This associative style of making meaning is what gave Youth Without Youth its intoxicating depth, buoyed the success of The Conversation, and when it's at the heart of what's on screen, it's a great source of strength for Tetro as well. The alternate tension between the heavy-handedness of the narrative and Coppola's abilities as a filmmaker being stilted by it is what unfortunately weighs it down.
by Andrei Alupului