The Essentials: The Films Of Francis Ford Coppola

“The Godfather Part II” (1974)
The anxiety of following up a huge success (and we should remember ths is long before the time when sequel-izing a hit film became standard practice) seemed only to fuel the creative juices in Coppola, and so after already knocking the first film out of the park, he ambitiously doubled down on the scope and storylines for his second and completely definitive look at the Corleones. As unassailable a masterpiece as “The Godfather” was, Coppola crafted an even-better sequel, and scooped an armful of Oscars for his trouble. In many ways, ‘Part 2’ was the precursor to the kind of prequel approach that has become a lot more prevalent since, yet Coppola was smart enough to realize that simply giving the audience an origin story is not enough. And so it goes with this, still the reigning king of sequels, that Vito Corleone’s (here portrayed by a young, brilliant Robert De Niro) backstory plays out concurrently with that of his son and heir, Michael (still one of Al Pacino’s greatest performances), tracking in parallel and occasionally in counterpoint Michael’s descent into darkness and masterfully evoking the inescapability of personal destiny, family and legacy. There’s a beautiful novelistic quality to this chapter in the eventual trilogy, arguably even more so than in Puzo’s original book, which is more of a pulpy summer read than an immersive saga. A lot of that comes from the structure, which allowed Coppola and his three editors to move seamlessly between different eras in a single edit, each sequence commenting on the past and foreshadowing the future. This is serious, bold and arty cinema on a huge scale, unafraid to deal with actual consequences and fearlessly concluding on an extremely dark note. It’s been forty years since the film hit cinemas, but in those four decades nothing, not from Coppola nor from anyone else, has come close. [A+]

“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
After his one-two punch in 1974, very probably the greatest single year for a single director in movie history, Coppola went deep into his own heart of darkness and just so happened to create the definitive Vietnam War film. Yet it came at a great cost. “Apocalypse Now,” for all its cinematic wizardry, massive scope and ambition, and hallucinatory, batshit lunacy, seemed to take something out of the at-this-point already-legendary filmmaker. It’s another masterpiece, a more unwieldy one than his previous three films, but as tremendous a union of on-and-offscreen themes, of filmmaker conflating with subject and of adversity forcing both compromise and creative expansion as Hollywood filmmaking has perhaps ever given us. With time passed since Martin Sheen‘s endless, soul-sucking voyage down that interminable, sluggish, evil river, we can say now that it marked the end of the great Coppola period, but oh boy did he end with a bang. At this stage, Coppola was making and breaking his own rules and discovering that out there, so far ahead and apart from everyone else, madness lay. The sacrificial killing of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz at the film’s climax is even more haunting today; a fitting metaphor for what Coppola gave to complete the film. And if you think we’re being overly melodramatic, well, sure we are, but as the also-great making-of documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” shows, the film did become this almost living entity, a mammoth adversary that almost bested the director. His subsequent filmography shows that, while there’s some good, occasionally even impressive, work to be found, he never again approached the dizzying heights of the ’70s again. “Apocalypse Now” is the last truly great film Coppola has made to date. [A]

“One from the Heart” (1982)
This was the film that proved to be such a costly boondoggle that Coppola claimed to work much of the two decades that followed the film’s release just trying to repay the debts he incurred during the film’s production. As far as boondoggles go, though, this one is fairly interesting —a stylistically bold, richly imagined riff on the classic musicals of yore (Coppola even shot the film in the boxy Academy format of 1.37:1). It’s the story of a pair of tumultuous lovers (played by Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) who split up and find new lovers (played by Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski), only to come back together once again. That’s literally the entire narrative. Some of the cast, particularly Garr, who is sexy and adorable (sample line of dialogue: “I want to go out with a lot of guys; I want erotic things to happen!”), give their performances the arched oomph that Coppola’s deliberately artificial aesthetic requires, while others, principally Forrest, grate against that same aesthetic in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. And while there was a lot of lip service given to the fact that the movie was an honest-to-god musical, none of the performers actually sing all that much, and nobody even dances until almost an hour into the movie (the grumpy songs by Tom Waits aren’t exactly memorable either). While the movie is one of the more gorgeous Coppola productions, thanks largely to the dizzying sets (it was filmed entirely on the American Zoetrope soundstages in San Francisco) and velvety cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, which captures the action in a series of long, unbroken takes, it doesn’t add up to much, and oftentimes the overt stylization further distances the viewer from the emotional center of the movie. When the movie was released, it was an absolute disaster, making less than half a million dollars on a budget of more than $26 million. While there have been some half-hearted reappraisals throughout the years, the movie, oscillating between frantic and funereal, remains a gorgeously gilded lame duck. As Forrest says, towards the end of the movie, “If I could sing, I would sing.” This is a problem shared by the movie as a whole. [C+]