Opening Today: Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 19, 2009 6:40PM

Tetro, featuring Francis Ford Coppola's first completely original screenplay since 1974's Oscar-winning The Conversation, has to shoulder an awfully heavy burden. But for the first two-thirds anyway, it carries itself impeccably.

Vincent Gallo plays Tetro, a man who has divorced himself from his family, especially his brilliant but ruthless father, a renowned symphony conductor (Klaus Maria Brandauer). He now lives in Argentina with his wife Miranda (Maribel Verdú), whom he met during a stint in an asylum. He's given up writing, his life's passion, because it's simply too painful. He seems to have achieved a kind of balance. But when his teenaged brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) comes for a visit from out the blue, his fortress of disengagement from the past rapidly crumbles. Against his wishes Bennie adapts Tetro's abandoned writings into a play, which becomes wildly successful.

Up to this point the movie is an insightful character study, just off kilter enough to keep us guessing. And Coppola's decision to use black & white for most of the action lends the story a stripped-down intimacy. It's like a beautifully balanced string quartet. But then all at once it decides to become an opera, complete with ill-executed CGI sequences, a Felliniesque party, and a disruptive plot twist. Which is a shame. The movie goes off the rails and never fully recovers, although there's a moving final scene between Tetro and Bennie.

If Coppola's new film is not quite successful, it still dares to be original. Who else (except perhaps Robert Altman) would use a stylized ballet as a way to exorcise family secrets? No one else could have made Tetro; and at age 70, when many filmmakers are content to rehash the same old clichés, Coppola should be commended for wending his own eccentric path.

Tetro screens at Landmark's Century Centre