Last weekend before leaving for vacation, Mom and I debated a number of art films to see, and I’m glad I held out, bad, for Tetro, Coppola’s newest film, and his second effort (Youth Without Youth was first) to self finance films outside the studio system. Tetro is astonishing film making – a singular accomplishment that shows why an independent vision, and a willingness to fight the urge towards mass mediocrity is worth fighting for.
Tetro is also, easily, the best, most ambitious film I have seen all year. And while I have refrained from noting the Motion Picture Academy’s foolish decision to open up the Best Picture Oscar to ten nominees, my disgust should be apparent; what ails the Academy doesn’t need more nominees, it needs the honesty to admit that a film as small and against the grain as Tetro may indeed be what’s best.
Tetro’s strengths lie in its simplicity – a young man named Bennie arrive in Buenos Aires in search of his long lost brother, who left him in the hands of their difficult father, a music conductor, promising one day to return. Tetro, the older brother, is a mass of volatile emotions and hidden truths, and as those truths unfold, everything we see is revealed for what it really is – from the complex family relationships, to the deep polls of emotion they uncover.
To say more is ro reveal too much; it’s always with the films one loves that one is hardest pressed to write what’s needed to encourage people to see them. You don’t need to know much about Tetro… you need to go see it.
Coppola, working in a dense black and white photo scene, conjures up brilliant, evocative imagery. This is a film that evokes the best of Europe’s Golden Age of Foreign Film – there are echoes of Fellini and Bergman, Almadovar and Truffaut… but the effect is not self conscious or overdone; it is brilliantly subtle, and honestly American. And the film is passionate, bringing in opera, dance and theatrical elements that do not distract or seem superfluous, but add layers and textures to the richness of the storytelling. The dance sequences, especially, remind us how one art form may better convey emotion than another at a given moment.
In his leads, Coppola has found acting on a level rarely seen: Aiden Ehrenreich as Bennie is the new DiCaprio, with all the baby-faced promise Leonardo showed in his early, more daring roles… but also with a depth of performance DiCaprio has rarely shown. Even more daringly, Coppola takes on Vincent Gallo, surely the most eccentric film presence of his generation, and pulls out a passionate performance on par with the best of Al Pacino – reaching for the rafters, without falling into overacting or melodrama, as Pacino seems to do, lately.
In all this, it bears remembering what Coppola’s real achievement was when he made The Godfather – grand storytelling of great ambition, done on a modest budget, and focused, especially, on the gifted performers in his ensemble. Coppola’s always dreamed bigger, and more passionately, than his peers, and it’s refreshing to see that he can realize those passions on a modest scale, without losing sight of the audience as he does it.In lesser hands, Tetro could be a pretentious mishmash, too concerned with amusing itself and leaving us out of it; instead, Coppola let’s the story unfold and engage and dare us to join the ride. Those who do will be richly rewarded. Does Tetro inform us about some deep psychological revelation in the human psyche? I think not. Nor is Coppola doing, as so many fashionably do these days, the job of his inflicting his personal demons on the rest of us. What makes art, what makes artists passionate… these questions, as he examines them, aren’t meant to punish us, but to engage us. Tetro – the character and the film – dreams big, and lives small. That’s a rare, and special gift. And we should celebrate it. Go, see it. I insist.
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