Credit: Tri-Star Pictures/American Zoetrope
by Zach Lewis Featured Film Retrospective

Gardens of Stone — Francis Ford Coppola

October 3, 2024

If every Coppola movie is also a documentary of its making, Gardens of Stone is the most haunted. One year before its release, Francis’s oldest son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, was killed in a boating accident with actor Griffin O’Neal (son of Ryan) at the helm. Gian-Carlo had been slated to play a role, Pete Deveber (which went to Elias Koteas), in this film. His only non-background performance in one of his father’s films would remain Cousin James in Rumble Fish (1981). Fittingly, Gardens of Stone is about the dead.

Perhaps most famously known as Coppola’s “other Vietnam War movie,” Gardens of Stone is somber and reflective, offering no grand statement about Vietnam in a year that would also see the release of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. James Caan plays the lead, Sergeant Clell Hazard, after a five-year break from acting; James Earl Jones plays his immediate superior and drinking buddy; but both steer clear of the stereotypical shouting, re-lived trauma, or general hardassery that’s associated with no-nonsense army men. Instead, they both express a natural reserve that lightens the work; for them, the army is a 9 to 5.

That’s because they boss the “toy soldiers” of the Old Guard who maintain Arlington National Cemetery. There’s no rush to get any young men ready for immediate combat, and there are few stakes in the daily funerals — upwards of 20 a day — outside maintaining proper decorum. In fact, this could have been a buddy tragicomedy were it not for a kid named Jackie (D. B. Sweeney), the son of Clell’s friend who died in Korea, actively seeking deployment and confronting Clell about his laissez-faire attitude to the war effort. Now, the film is about an older man attempting to stop his surrogate son from dying, all while standing in the real Arlington and performing mock burials. Ghosts abound.

Jordan Cronenweth, who had lensed Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married just one year earlier, abstains from the flashy photography Coppola had played with in his high-energy pictures from earlier in the decade. He frames characters in medium-shot or two-shot, with the intense backlights one might associate with the more interesting moments of courtroom dramas. Pans and tracking shots exist but are rarely manipulative; if there was less cross-cutting, an adventurous commentator might call most of it “Brechtian.” Gardens of Stone is a movie that trusts its actors and the words they’re saying, but, compared to the energy of Peggy Sue or the following year’s Tucker, it feels a bit like a funeral.

And why shouldn’t it? Caan’s Clell sees over the rites and rituals of burying America’s not-quite-children and finds himself helpless to do anything about it. He’s a more interesting veteran than Hollywood’s usual stock character: he opposes the war thanks to his direct experience in fighting it, but he continues to serve and believe in the military. Coppola includes plenty of scenes with Clell’s girlfriend Samantha (Anjelica Huston), a Washington Post journalist and sometimes-protester, to provide an emotional friction that mirrors his struggles about his place in the war. Clell is likely the most common type of veteran: one who feels disrespected by the protestors, still feels positively about the values of military service, and feels responsible to stop the kids all hopped up on Gunsmoke and jingoism from entering this portal to Hell. The end dedication to the service hints that even the military itself, which permitted the production at Arlington, likely agreed.

With that, Gardens of Stone works as a Rosetta Stone for Coppola’s relationship to politics in his movies. Most critics felt that, for better or worse, this movie was relatively apolitical. And that’s nearly true: most political discussions are sidelined for more personal, emotional ones. But Clell is vocally against the war effort. His reasons come from his direct experience, which couldn’t be further from the experiences of the protestors. He also has the political wherewithal to know that no gung-ho army kid is going to care what a bunch of doped-up hippies and academics have to say about it, but they would care what he, a man in uniform and still serving, had to say. He continually asks to be transferred to Fort Benning in order to talk to deploying kids directly, but instead, he’s trapped on top of those kids’ graves. Clell, then, is not devoid of politics. He’s a patchwork of contradictory ideals and values and experiences, just like that mythical creature, the average American.

Coppola has not been shy about his politics. Even recently, he revealed that his dream project, Megalopolis, was based on the works of left-leaning anarcho-anthropologist David Graeber. But the sympathy shown to Clell reveals why Coppola collaborates with everyone across the political spectrum. To not do so would be too easy, and Coppola doesn’t do easy.


Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.