Tetro (2009)

Francis Ford Coppola strode the Hollywood landscape during the 1970s like a demigod, acclaimed worldwide for bringing to the screen stories and personalities as outsized as his own persona and reputation. After his first Oscar for co-writing Patton, he gave audiences a double knockout with the first two Godfather films, then spent the latter half of the decade in a jungle hell largely of his own creation to deliver the epic Apocalypse Now. His career seemed to collapse into fragments during the ’80s and ’90s, careening from large-scale misfires like One From The Heart and The Cotton Club to diverse and uneven projects such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Godfather Part III, and Michael Jackson’s Disneyland 3D film Captain EO.

Throughout his lengthy and illustrious career, Coppola has occasionally demonstrated a particular knack for smaller scale, more intimate drama. Before Patton he made a haunting three-character road trip film, The Rain People. Between the first two Godfather films he wrote and directed The Conversation, a quiet thriller with Gene Hackman that is a true masterpiece of cinema. His adaptations of the S.E. Hinton young adult novels The Outsiders and Rumble Fish were widely acclaimed. Now Coppola has filmed his first original screenplay since The Conversation 35 years ago, an intimate portrait of family relations, simply titled Tetro.

The title is short for Tetrocini, a family of Italian origin but with deep roots in Buenos Aires. Generations of the family are buried there, and Angelo Tetrocini (Vincent Gallo), a brooding failed writer, has retreated there from his family in the U.S., holed up with his Latin therapist and paramour Miranda (Maribel Verdú) and languishing with a small struggling troupe of theatre people who know him only as “Tetro”. He doesn’t want anyone to know about his famous conductor father, Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), nor does he want to preserve any connection at all to the rest of his family. So it’s very difficult for him to accept the presence of his teenage half-brother Benjamin (Alden Ehrenreich), who has run away from military school to work on a cruise ship, and who pays Angelo — sorry, Tetro — a visit while his ship is being repaired in the Buenos Aires harbor. At Miranda’s urging, Tetro allows Bennie to stay with them for a few days, showing him around and introducing him to his theatre friends. But he refuses to discuss family, giving few answers to Bennie’s questions. Bennie and Tetro had two different mothers, and Bennie’s inquiries about them as well as his feelings of abandonment by his older brother only seem to close Tetro off even further. When Bennie discovers a stash of Tetro’s scrawled writings, he takes it upon himself to shape them into a play, and Tetro’s discovery of Bennie trying to produce art from Tetro’s hidden writings sends him into a rage.

Rivalry is mentioned as a prevailing theme within the family, and the sibling rivalry of Tetro and Bennie is mirrored in flashback scenes of father Carlo with his brother and rival conductor Alfie (also played by Brandauer, under makeup), as well as glimpses of Carlo’s rivalry with his own son. “There’s room for only one genius in this family,” Carlo self-centeredly tells Tetro at one point, helping to deflate his artistic passion. Negative comments from a famous Latin American literary critic (Carmen Maura, star of many Pedro Almodovar films) have further bruised his artist’s ego. Bennie’s pursuit of Tetro’s art, and his desire to do what his brother seemingly cannot, leads to a showdown and some surprising revelations for both Tetrocini men.

Coppola filmed Tetro on location in Argentina with the most beautiful black-and-white photography I’ve seen in years, courtesy of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. Many of the interiors, such as Tetro and Miranda’s apartment, feature shadows of rich and natural depth, and some of the exterior shots are simply dazzling. A driving sequence past the snow-capped Andes mountains, the sunlight reflecting off the icy peaks, is breathtaking and fascinating to see in widescreen monochrome. Punctuating the film’s chiaroscuro throughout are sequences in vivid color, including flashbacks and several mesmerizing opera and ballet scenes.

Vincent Gallo is effective as Tetro, though sometimes he seems too restrained as an actor and is consequently less compelling to watch. Maribel Verdú, on the other hand, has a wide and engaging smile and brightens the screen with her every appearance on it. The real star and true find of this film is newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who bears a resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio and, based on his fantastic and confident performance here, deserves an illustrious future career.

The movie teeters on the edge of pomposity occasionally, with its “tortured artist” central character loathing fame and success, its references to artists “living up to their potential,” and the grandiose glitz of those artists who have achieved success in their fields. Those moments of grandiosity, particularly toward the end, are the weakest points of the film. However, these awkwardly staged moments are few, and more than compensated for by the honestly depicted emotions of the many smaller, more interpersonal scenes. Tetro is an imperfect movie, but it’s about troubled men in a dysfunctional family, so that seems appropriate. It’s also a nicely made and welcome return to the small scale for a living legend of cinema. Bravo, Mr. Coppola.