Tetro

Legendary director injects "Tetro,'' a family melodrama, with charm

June 19, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Were it some unknown director’s first movie or some great director’s last, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro’’ would be either auspicious or loosely august. But alas, Coppola, who at 70 seems far from his beginnings and not terribly close to the end, brings with each new film the baggage of having once been himself.

It’s been duly noted that greatness has remained out of Coppola’s reach. For 30 years, his former brilliance has been the bane of his career, but not necessarily his directing, which, with a few exceptions (we’ll say it together: “Jack’’) has had exceptional moments. During the second half of “Tetro,’’ which has been digitally photographed in crisp, expressionistic black-and-white, Coppola resumes the voluptuous filmmaking that used to come so naturally to him. The movie begins as a mildly involving melodrama about the mostly housebound reunion of two estranged brothers, and it gets better as it goes.

The elder is Tetro (Vincent Gallo), a failed writer and occasional mental patient who’s run away from his father, a renowned conductor named Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Tetro has run all the way to Buenos Aires, where he and his former doctor, Miranda (Maribel VerdÃº), share an apartment. They get a visit from his younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), an itinerant young man with the face of a toddler (it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s squint and baby fat on younger apple cheeks). Bennie says he’s run off from military school and has been waiting tables on a cruise ship. While the boat is docked in Argentina, Bennie takes the opportunity to drop in and probe Tetro for information about their father.

For reasons that become clear much later, having needy little Bennie around exasperates Tetro, provides Miranda with something fun to do, and allows the story to flashback, in color, to the years when young Tetro lived to defy his father. What emerges from all of this earns only scant interest. Partly because, like Tetro, Coppola still isn’t much of a dramatic writer; though mostly because Gallo, while undeniably a drama queen, still isn’t much of a star. Coppola has allowed him to repeat his lines until, maybe, they start to mean something. (“You made changes? You made changes? You made changes? Changes? You made changes?’’) If Gallo is a method actor, he’s been home-schooled.

The black-and-white sequences make the movie look old, although maybe not as old as Coppola might have been going for. Its charm and loose whimsy are more early Jim Jarmusch than Vittorio De Sica. It’s neat to pretend that Coppola’s career could have begun on a shoestring in the early 1980s. “Tetro’’ looks more polished than an early Jarmusch film. It’s more inert, too.