Friday, December 21, 2007

Movie review: Youth Without Youth

By Alex Bentley

Youth Without Youth

A professor's life changes after a cataclysmic incident during the dark years before WWII. Becoming a fugitive, he is pursued through far-flung locations including Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Youth Without Youth

Francis Ford Coppola -- the man’s name itself conjures up thoughts of film greatness, no? He won an Oscar for writing Patton, directed and co-wrote perhaps the best Vietnam movie of all time, Apocalypse Now, and, oh, yeah, in between wrote and directed two of the best movies of all time, The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. The problem with this thinking, though, is that all of those movies were made in the 1970s, when he was obviously at the peak of his artistic greatness. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he’s gone on to make such dreck as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack, and, oh, yeah, The Godfather: Part III.

So, how long can a director coast on the reputation of his best work? And how far can he go artistically before he starts being called a crackpot? For this critic, that line has now firmly been drawn between all of his previous films and his latest, Youth Without Youth. Other perhaps more erudite critics may see the value of Coppola musing on the meaning of reality, philosophy, and other scholarly pursuits, but from a purely storytelling perspective, Youth takes one baffling turn after another with hardly anything to keep the film together as a cohesive unit.

"Hmm, not sure what's going on in this scene. I'll just give an intense look and maybe it'll mean something."

Youth starts out in an interesting enough manner: Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is presented as an old writer in 1938 Romania who’s despondent that he’s never completed the book he was writing when the love of his life, Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara), died. So despondent, in fact, that he’s determined to commit suicide; alas, just as he’s set his mind to that task, he’s randomly struck by lightning in Budapest. Inexplicably, he not only recovers quickly from the ordeal, but he also starts to become younger, aging backward from 80 to around 40. News of this miracle leaks out thanks to a mysterious (both in the film and for the viewer) encounter with a sexy spy simply named “The Girl in Room 6,” and it’s not long before the Nazis catch wind of it and naturally become interested in him.

Now, up to this point, despite some long-winded pontificating and strange situations (Dominic chatting up a dual personality chief among them), the movie was still holding my interest, mostly because I figured this was just a long setup for the big payoff at the end. But what Coppola chooses to do instead is take a massive right turn and introduce Veronica (Lara again), who just happens to look exactly like Dominic’s beloved Laura. Like Dominic, she gets struck by lightning, only instead of growing younger, she starts spouting out archaic languages thanks to an ancient Egyptian named Rupini inhabiting her body at various times. When Veronica enters the picture, the film loses any semblance of coherence and delves deeper and deeper into a story that makes sense only in Coppola’s head.

She's covering her mouth not because she's shocked but because she can't believe she's saying such nonsense.

I’m all for filmmakers challenging their audiences and not spelling everything out for them. But it’s one thing to do that as part of an otherwise lucid film and another to just throw out an indiscriminate hodgepodge of plot points and call it art. The first two Godfathers and Apocalypse Now are good examples of the former; Coppola has firmly gone the latter route with Youth Without Youth and in the process has proven to be almost completely bereft of the skills which won him such acclaim 30 years ago. Oh, his technical skills are still apparent – the framing and execution of various shots throughout the film aren’t indicative of a lack of ability. But the story does not support this talent, and the film suffers mightily because of it.

Roth and Lara do their best with the material they’ve been given, but it’s hard to judge their performances when the actions of their characters are so perplexing. A viewing of the documentary companion piece, Coda: Thirty Years Later, may be necessary to fully comprehend what drove Coppola to make such an impenetrable film. Perhaps the best way I can describe the complete bizarreness of Youth Without Youth is by pointing out that the first two pages of the press packet for the film are Coppola conducting an imaginary interview … with a Martian. Take that as you will.

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• New on DVD: The Great Debaters and Youth Without Youth (May 13, 2008)

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• Arts > Movies / Film > Independent Films