Vincent Gallo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, 2009

“It’s now or never,” says Francis Ford Coppola, explaining why, at the age of 70, with one of the most legendary bodies of work in the American cinema to his name, he decided to shoot a low-budget drama on high-definition video in Argentina with a mostly unknown cast. Vincent Gallo is the one familiar face in Tetro, Coppola’s poignant, voluptuous new movie about the ties that bind several generations of a creative family. Ingeniously cast for his wounded, otherworldly aura, Gallo plays a reclusive writer hiding out in Buenos Aires bohemia until the arrival of his little brother Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) dredges up secrets from the past.

A movie about legacies, expectations, and the anxiety of influence, Tetro was a family affair in more ways than one. “I took an education from my own children,” says the father of Sofia and Roman Coppola (who served as second unit director on Tetro). “They were making films that were modestly budgeted, and the more modest your budget, the freer you are to explore ideas and exotic stories that might not fly with a big mass audience.”

Set primarily amid the city’s theater scene, with numerous flashbacks, performances, and dreamlike heightenings of reality, Tetro explores blood ties and creative partnerships in a way that feels, for all the exoticism of the film’s milieu, intensely autobiographical. Indeed, it’s Coppola’s first original screenplay since1974’s The Conversation. Why this story about theater and family? It goes back to the beginning, the filmmaker says. “I was a theater major as a college student and wanted to be a playwright. And, for me, the great American theater idols, or gods, were Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Clifford Odets. Their work was personal; their drama came out of things they experienced. Even if it was fictionalized, it was fueled by the experiences of their own lives.”

The Coppola family shrink could have a field day mining Tetro for clues about Poppa Coppola’s relationships with his children and elders. “My family has been involved with the arts for several generations,” he says. “My uncle was an extremely successful conductor and my father was a musician. So one thing that was of interest to me was how rivalries that may have existed in the previous generations get handed down with the DNA or psychology. Whenever you have a family with many talented people in the arts, there are rivalries and people who are more successful than others. It’s inevitable that there will be reverberations of competitiveness. And in a family where it’s complicated by tremendous love, things get really interesting.”

That’s not to suggest that Tetro is memoir. Pressed to specify to what extent any of the film’s characters represent him, Coppola is quick to claim affinity with all of them. “You tell a story that may be based on real things or real figures in your mind, but you inhabit all those characters when you write it.”

Indeed, the film is nourished by the enveloping sympathies and operatic imagination of its maker. Tetro’s bewitching energy comes from its ability to synthesize opposites with masterful command: it’s a digital production steeped in old-Hollywood narrative traditions, an epic saga on an intimate scale, and an elder statesman’s movie that tenderly captures the verve and drive of youth. That freshness is reflected in the filmmaking itself, with its digressive but purposeful narrative arc and unapologetic embrace of digital storytelling. Tetro’s lush black-and-white images are a delight to behold, though some may be disappointed that the director of The Godfather has chosen to turn his back on 35-millimeter. Yet Coppola insists on the vitality of new techniques. “People misunderstand technology, and fear it. Heart and human talent are always at the center of things. The bottom line is the technology doesn’t replace the old, beloved forms, it just joins with them and you have the option of both. I’ve experimented every which way, but what I’ve come to is the old adage of Napoleon: you use the weapons at hand.”

Cynics may dismiss Tetro for its old-fashioned romanticism and unabashed vulnerability, but the film’s generosity of spirit feels right on target for these anxious but hopeful times. By drawing on his deep well of experience without smothering his inspiration, Coppola has delivered a classic “late movie”—sure of itself, indifferent to fashion, suffused with easy grace and hard-won mastery. A young movie from an old master, you could say.

“The cinema itself is perpetually youthful,” Coppola observes. “Because just being involved in the art form, you realize how much there is to learn, and that makes you a young person. Obviously the cinema is only a hundred years old, and there are so many great masterpieces, and yet you realize, ‘My God, it’s only just beginning! Who knows what you can do?’ In the face of what there is to know and learn in the cinema, we’re all young.”

TETRO IS OUT IN JUNE FROM AMERICAN ZOETROPE
WWW.TETRO.COM

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY AMERICAN ZOETROPE