Tetro 2009

     The week of his 18th birthday, Bennie is working as a waiter on a cruise ship that has a layover in Buenos Aires.  He looks for his older brother Tetro and he hasn't seen him in years.  Tetro lives with Miranda and he is a person that is burned out?  He's hot and cold toward his brother and he introduces him as a “friend?"  He refuses to talk about their family and he tells Bennie not to tell Miranda who their father is?  Thoughts about their father cast a shadow over both brothers.  Who is he and what kind of past has Tetro left behind?  Bennie finds pages of Tetro's unfinished novel.  He pushes both to know his own history and to become a part of his brother's life again.

     What result can come because of Bennie's pushing?  This is certainly a strangely conceived film where some product placements land with a thud?  The festival's trophy happens to be designed by the jeweler Swarovski.  It is here that the final revelatory twist is unveiled.  It is a twist that is actually less interesting than what has gone on before?   Entering a "competition" is a pretty hokey plot device and one more associated with urban dance movies?   But this movie's bigger problem is being weighed down with what it evidently considers to be its sheer mythic potency?   But it is overwrought, baffling and unexciting.  The flashbacks to their father are in color but the rest of the movie is in monochrome?  The switch is not particularly effective but instead it is very disconcerting?  Carlo's father and bespectacled brother Alfie are also played by Brandauer and yet it is not made clear that Alfie is Carlo's twin?  This effect is almost like one actor playing different family members in a movie without any explanation?

     Coppola has done better with father-son and quasi-father-son relationships in the past.  Compare the dullness and pedantry of the characterization in Tetro with Vito and Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies or Willard and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now?  The very redundancy of the motif points to an evasive fictional rendering of the director's own issues and a kind of public family therapy?   It is uncomfortable to notice that the second-unit director here is Coppola's son, Roman?  He is a talented film-maker whose feature film CQ made a real impression at Cannes almost 10 years ago but he has not been very prominent since then.  The way ahead could be for Coppola to stay away from personal themes.  Family isn't  always everything?

 
127 min, Drama directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola and and also written by Mauricio Kartun with Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Maribel Vrdu, Silvia Perez, Rodrigo De la Serna, Erica Rivas, Mike Amigorena, Lucas Di Conza, Adriana Mastrangelo, Leticia Bredice, Sofia Gala Castiglione, Jean-Francois Casanovas, Carmen Maura, Francesca De Sapio.

Imdb 6.8* out of 10 with 12,543 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 71% with 109 critic reviews 70% with 10,000+ audience scores, Roger Ebert 3*, The Guardian 1* out of 5* Peter Bradshaw, Metacritic 65 out of 100 with 26 critic reviews 6.7 out of 10 with 32 user scores, Amazon 4.2* out of 5* with 127 reviews.

Special Note:  Francis Ford Coppola claimed that this is the kind of film he set out to make as a young man before he became sidetracked by fame and fortune.  In September 2007, thieves broke into Coppola’s home studio in Buenos Aires and stole all the electronics.  This included his computer with the film's script but it didn't affect production.  Coppola said "Anyone who's gotten robbed, it's always depressing and I did lose some data but I didn't lose the script.  It was said that the script was gone but I had other copies.  Obviously, I had to send copies to actors and staff plus I was astonished that it got such news coverage.”

Mistake:  Early in the movie Tetro stumbles into the kitchen with a broken leg?  He knocks over some furniture while lighting a cigarette using a burner on the stove.  He ignites the burner by just turning the knob on the stove.  A few minutes later, Miranda must use a match to light a burner on the same stove-top?