TETRO (Francis Ford Coppola 2009)

[Chris Knipp]

I'm not sure yet if Tetro is one of the year's best American films, but it's Coppola's best in some time, with a fascinating mise-en-scene, beautiful images, a striking interplay of black and white and color, good acting, and an exciting new talent in Alden Ehrenreich. Besides being his most personal film and his first original screenplay since The Conversation it's far superior to his 2007 Youth Without Youth -- Metacritic 63 vs. 43 for Youth Without Youth. People will have to see it for themselves, hopefully on the big screen where it deserves to be seen, and it's far too complex to get much insight into it from a few reviews, but I wouldn't take exception to Ebert's saying it shows "Coppola's back" and Todd McCarthy's saing it's an "angst-ridden treatment of oedipal issues." True on both counts.

Even though Coppola has been "calling Buenos Aires home" for a couple of years while working on this new film, I think he's still very much involved with the Bay Area and his Napa Valley estate and winery and even made a video about Tetro from his Napa Valley workshop to introduce the film, showing how all his projects are being worked on there. (Incidentally, on the page with that video you'll also see one where Vincent Gallo nicely elucidates the father-son theme of the film in relation to his own and Francis' Italian-American family backgrounds.) Coppola is clearly involved in his winery, so much so that ads for Tetro also advertise the wine. An article indicates Copola's move to Argentina is relatively recent.

I was going to mention the fact that Coppola's Buenos Aires house was burglarized two years ago, resulting in the loss of computers with work on Tetro and other equipment, an event that deeply disturbed him and led him to beg for the return of the computer files. This disaster was reported right around the time I saw Youth Without Youth in Rome.

Coppola has a history of far flung and local projects, some of which don't work out, or come and go, like his magazine in the Seventies, or the fancy restaurant Rubicon in SF that closed last year. He owns a hotels in Guatewmala and Belize and still apparently owns the old flatiron shaped Sentinel building in SF with Zoetrope offices and a cafe. And he has a newer literary magazine. Some of his projects are profitable, since by reports he put up the $15 million for Tetro himself. A man of extraordinary variety and energy, hard to pin down. He must have spent quie a lot of time in Eastern Europe, chiefly Bulgaria and Romania, when he made Youth Without Youth, and his move to Argentina partly reflected a search for another place with lower production costs, perhpas more simpatico than Eastern Europe, since Argentina has the added attraction of all the Italian families who emigrated to Argentina, like the Tetrocinis of the film.

My Imdb User Comment on Tetro that you give a link to here is not "more lengthy and in depth"; it's the same review I posted here.