Before anything else, before any talk of its “uneven narrative” (per the otherwise complimentary Rotten Tomatoes critic’s consensus), it’s worth considering the contours of Francis Ford Coppola’s 2009 undertaking, Tetro. In an August 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, Coppola had this to say about his 21st-century output, specifically Tetro as well as 2007’s Youth Without Youth: “People said, ‘You fell off the map. Those films were not successful.’ They weren’t meant to be successful. They were meant to teach me what making movies really was.”
Indeed, the Coppola who, back in the ’70s, made The Godfather and the cinematically opulent, resources-devouring Vietnam war nightmare Apocalypse Now, quite possibly the defining American film about Vietnam, is positively not the same Coppola who decided to give up on Hollywood filmmaking after the 1997 release of The Rainmaker. It’s also the work of a student, unmistakably so: clumsy, earnest, all over the place emotionally, uncomfortably personal, and not to mention saddled with a(n un)healthy dose of daddy issues.
As indicated by the director’s statement, contrasting Tetro, a film about a young man, Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), traveling to Buenos Aires in search of his older brother (Vincent Gallo) whose adopted moniker gives the film its title, with his better-known, sometimes legendary work is a fool’s errand. His own characterization of his post-Hollywood work does, however, underplay the fact that, even as a student, he remains Francis Ford Coppola.
Like many late works, Tetro too is haunted by the past, the kind of hauntedness that only comes from a life lived. Based on an original script co-written by Coppola and Mauricio Kartun, the small-scale drama is shot mostly in stark, digital black-and-white, a decision that immediately sets up a tension between the monochrome past and the high-def present. There are color flashbacks as well as fantasy sequences, the latter inspired by the films of Powell and Pressburger, though the distinction between memory and fantasy grows more incidental as the film goes on, adding another complex layer through which the film threads its way.
Tetro‘s narrative spans decades, generations, but is grounded in the digs of Tetro and his sweet-natured girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdú) and their go-to spots, such as a theater run by Tetro’s friend José (Rodrigo de la Serna). Bennie crashing their togetherness eventually spirals into grand revelations that go back to the brothers’ gifted but difficult conductor dad (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Things really kick off when the younger discovers the older’s unfinished play, which works itself through several autobiographical nodes before tearing off without an ending. Seeing his brother’s struggles laid out before him — Tetro’s artistic inclinations were routinely stifled by his father, who not only insisted on being the only genius of the family but also acted as a sexual competitor to his son, vying for the affections of young Tetro’s teenage girlfriend, Naomi (Ximena Maria Iacono) — awakens his own artistic ambitions as he sets out to finish the play.
It’s the kind of film one imagines Yasuzō Masumura would’ve made had he lived to see the new millennium — a kind of cinematic stupor drenched in melancholy, pitched somewhere between an abstract haze and infectious, overwrought melodrama, though Coppola handles the psychosexual elements far less luridly. (To illustrate the Masumura comparison, imagine the sentiment of 1957’s The Blue Sky Maiden, the mysterious black-and-white photography of 1961’s A Wife Confesses, and the rambling psychodrama of 1972’s Music.) It can be a lot like getting a glimpse at a rough first draft, one where the subconscious looms large, felt in every free association, every unpretty rendering of parent–child anxiety, every biographical detail pulled apart in unflattering detail (does Coppola see himself in Tetro? The father? Both?).
As is typical of films of this kind, the performances run the gamut between the operatic (or soap operatic) and ones that suggest a kind of Brechtian awareness — as it happens, the latter is also true of the brother’s play once it performed, yet another tension arising when the film cuts back and forth between the ongoing performance and the pronounced melodrama of the brothers’ conversing outside the festival where it is performed. Gallo is an obvious (and somewhat easy) standout, and he plays up his wounded-dickhead-who’s-a-secret-softie shtick to surprising effect. Ehrenreich and Verdú play well against the combustible provocateur, with Ehrenreich even praising him as “fascinating.” (It’s worth noting that, though Gallo didn’t cause any of them, it wouldn’t be a late Coppola production without some production problems, in this instance concerning a dispute between Coppola, in his capacity as producer, and union actors supposedly working without a contract.)
Much like Tetro’s play, the film’s story seems to have existed without an ending for a while too, but the ending the screenplay lands on (the entire coda, in fact), does, in spite of some critical complaints, feel like the only possible conclusion to the fugue-like mess of time periods, emotional states, and even filmmaking styles. Concluding at a somewhat implausibly staged literary festival, over which an enigmatic critic identified only by her moniker Alone (Carmen Maura) presides, more family secrets are spilled and the true nature of the brothers’ relationship is revealed. Years of secrecy, whispers, and intrigue finally dissipate into nothing — but it isn’t about that at all, ultimately. The familial twists don’t tear open an abyss, but rather form scar tissue over an old wound that wouldn’t heal — an avenue for a new kind of love to blossom.
Tetro offers an odd balancing act that the New Hollywood giant lulls himself into, and it eludes conventional categorization. The film reflects Coppola pushing against the constraints of the medium, finding new ways of approaching it while being touchingly reverential to the works that made him fall in love with the form in the first place. It’s Coppola at odds with himself, his stature, his way of doing things — his skill and his desire to deliberately shed his creative skin — and of course his changing role in his own family. It’s a beautiful work of art to bear witness to, a beauty of the rarest, strangest kind.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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