Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.

The Conversation (1974)

USA, 113 minutes

Director/writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Photography: Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler

Music: David Shire

Editor: Richard Chew

Cast: Gene Hackman, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth MacRae

“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.

The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.

The Beguiled (2017)

The latest from director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola won her a Best Director prize at this year's Cannes. It's a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie of the same name directed by Don Siegel—or, at least, it's based on the same literary property, the 1966 novel A Painted Devil by Thomas P. Cullinan. I don't know the novel, or the '71 movie, but obviously this is focused more on the women's point of view. It's a spooky Southern gothic by all the signals, or wants to be, a period piece set in Civil War Virginia full of hysterical women and violent men. I was never strongly persuaded by the story about a wounded Yankee soldier behind enemy lines. He may or may not be deserting from the war, but anyway he is injured and comes to find himself in the care of the seven Southern women and girls left eking out a life (and education) at Martha Farnsworth's boarding school for girls. It's 1864 and the fog of war is banked thick—those still at the school have lost people, or everyone. Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) is a no-nonsense schoolmarm and Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) is the last teacher left. For some reason, they don't want to turn the wounded soldier over to their own. They treat his wounds and keep him out of sight. The two single women and five adolescent girls deliver random charges of undirected sexual energy, especially with a handsome, dashing, and vulnerable soldier in the house. They are all drawn to Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) in many different ways. Elle Fanning is a sexualized adolescent with a powerful crush and Oona Laurence is an endearingly sincere botany nerd. Miss Farnsworth and Edwina have their own histories and feelings about the situation. Inevitably there's some Virgin Suicides chemistry in the many scenes with the girls in groups, and in the strange group psychologies too, as strained through Tennessee Williams. The presence alone of a man among these women and girls works old-fashioned alchemy on them—they dress up a little more, sneak into the room where he rests to visit, each with her own agenda, and nervous jealous spats erupt among them. McBurney is hard to read, an Irishman recently come to America, and a substitute who accepted money to take the place of a Northerner in the war. He may or may not be a rogue, but he's certainly a man alone with women with nothing to do besides rest, recuperate, and study. He appears to have no particular loyalty, in love or war. Things in The Beguiled are generally going in one direction and then with a single incident suddenly shift to another, opening the picture and momentarily promising to take it to unexpected places. But then it shifts smoothly back to less surprising precincts. That could be a problem with the novel. Or it could be my problem with Tennessee Williams. The performances are hothouse great, with lots of skillful ensemble pieces, but I came away a little underwhelmed. I'm scoring The Beguiled as more of a miss.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

#26: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Apocalypse Now has always been preceded by the legendary stories of its troubled production, one of those cursed film enterprises (The Exorcist is another) whose backstories are almost as entertaining as the final product itself : in this case, weathering a typhoon that wrecked the sets, earning condemnation from the Animal Humane Society for filming the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo, attempting to direct Marlon Brando at this stage in his career, various haphazard budget overruns and casting adventures (e.g., Harvey Keitel dumped at the last minute for Martin Sheen, who subsequently suffered a heart attack during the shoot), and continuing delays in its release that ultimately earned it the nickname Apocalypse Later. All of this and more are detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which makes a worthy companion piece for a night of Apocalypse Now.

The final result is hardly a flawless picture. Attempting to transpose Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to America's Vietnam adventure, the whole thing is very nearly torpedoed by Brando's arguably unbearable performance in the final hour, and it's often marked by an almost narcissistic tendency to amp up the drama of scenes beyond what they can support. Yet for all that it contains numerous unforgettable sequences, such as the mission led by the Robert Duvall character to take the point of a river and drop Willard's boat past a point of danger on his mission upriver. Watch for the Coppola cameo as a TV news producer in this sequence, attempting to direct the visuals of the military action, and look for how much is going on in any one of these scenes, with their tracking shots and explosions and helicopters diving into the action and amphibious vehicles leaving the water, and Duvall calmly striding through all of it. In those moments, it is riveting as spectacle. (A clean clip of this sequence in the original English is what I wanted to point to but couldn't find, so instead I'm going with the fine opening.)

The Godfather (1972)

#36: The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

The Godfather remains for me still the quickest three-hour movie I know, a picture that moves in almost stately fashion but is never less than compelling. The sweep of the story is epic, proceeding from an extravagant wedding sequence as expertly handled as it is vivid, setting everything of importance in motion all at once.

The story and the manner in which it is told are warm, rich, and bursting with life and poignance. It's all dressed up in the garb of a gangster movie but with deep family dynamics and tensions propelling the narrative—lean and muscular with few indulgences yet rarely cutting away too soon from even the smallest details that advance its themes. Even when it threatens to become ham-handed and obvious, as in the baptism scene near the end (trivialists note: the baby is Sofia Coppola), it never entirely boils over because it always seems to understand exactly what it's about and what it can and can't do.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

USA, 202 minutes (Redux, 2001)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Joseph Conrad, John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
Editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch
Cast: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, Harrison Ford, G.D. Spradlin, Francis Ford Coppola, Scott Glenn, Jack Thibeau, Herb Rice, Christian Marquand, Aurore Clement

Apocalypse Now has long been preceded by the legendary stories of its troubled production, one of those film enterprises that appears oddly cursed (The Exorcist is another), whose backstories may be nearly as entertaining as the final product itself: in this case, weathering a typhoon that wrecked the sets, condemnation from the Animal Humane Society for filming the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo, Marlon Brando at this stage in his career, and various haphazard budget overruns and casting adventures (e.g., Harvey Keitel dumped at the last minute for Martin Sheen, who subsequently suffered a heart attack during the shoot). All this and more is ably detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which makes a worthy companion piece for a night of Apocalypse Now.

The final result is hardly flawless. Attempting to transpose Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on America's Vietnam adventure, it's very nearly torpedoed by Brando's performance in the final hour, and it's often marked by an impulse to amp up the drama beyond what its fundamentals can support. Yet for all that it contains unforgettable sequences and, in its totality, becomes unforgettable itself, using Heart of Darkness as its ticket into an even deeper American story, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is also set on a river (only going in the other direction), also episodic, also with an unsatisfactory ending—and also somehow vastly bigger than the sum of its parts.

The Godfather: Part II (1974)

USA, 200 minutes
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Nino Rota
Editors: Barry Malkin, Richard Marks, Peter Zinner
Cast: Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Talia Shire, Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Gastone Moschin, Tom Rosqui, Bruno Kirby, Frank Sivero, Francesca De Sapio, Morgana King, Marianna Hill, Leopoldo Trieste, Dominic Chianese, Amerigo Tot, Troy Donahue, John Aprea, Joe Spinell, James Caan, Abe Vigoda, Tere Livrano, Gianni Russo, Maria Carta, Oreste Baldini, Giuseppe Sillato, Mario Cotone, James Gounaris, Fay Spain, Harry Dean Stanton, David Baker, Carmine Caridi, Danny Aiello, Joseph Medeglia, William Bowers, Roger Corman

As someone who has struggled most of my adult life to maintain a healthy weight, I'm well aware of one of the knottiest problems of all involving some of the best things available in life: the desire for seconds. And thirds. The irresistible idea that more automatically equates to better. If one is good, two is better, and three even better than that.

The Godfather: Part II, Francis Ford Coppola's large-scale sequel to The Godfather, followed the original by a couple of years and comes with more of everything: more minutes, more cast members, more locations, more budget for more production values. It's bigger in just about every way imaginable. "More, more, more," as Andrea True sang. "How do you like it? How do you like it?"

The Godfather (1972)

USA, 175 minutes
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Nino Rota
Editors: William Reynolds, Peter Zinner
Cast: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Richard S. Castellano, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard Conte Al Lettieri, Diane Keaton, Abe Vigoda, Talia Shire, John Cazale, Al Martino, Morgana King, Lenny Montana, Salvatore Corsitto, Alex Rocco, Simonetta Stefanelli

I had some idea how contentious director Francis Ford Coppola can be, but I never understood until recently what a supremely embattled production this debut foray into the Mario Puzo material came to be. It was budgeted at under $3 million dollars, a paltry sum even then; bringing on the 31-year-old mostly unknown Coppola to make it was probably just more of the producers' efforts to conserve costs. (In a foreshadowing of the rest of his career, Coppola managed to end up spending over $6 million, although that's still not much—he has compared shooting some parts of it to a makeshift, on-the-fly UCLA film school project.)

Most of the fights centered on the casting. At the time, arguably the only "hot" actor associated was James Caan. Marlon Brando was in the most severe doldrums of his career, with a reputation for troublesomeness on set, and the rest—Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Diane Keaton—were largely unknowns, certainly in Hollywood. Abe Vigoda was someone with almost no experience who showed up at an open casting call. But the problems were hardly confined to casting.

Lost in Translation (2003)

USA/Japan, 102 minutes
Director/writer: Sofia Coppola
Photography: Lance Acord
Music: Kevin Shields
Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris, Fumihiro Hayashi

I suppose it's easy enough to be distracted by the case for nepotism against Sofia Coppola, who may well have never had the opportunities to get her feature film projects off the ground if she didn't have the last name, and father (and, face it, gene strands), that she does. And I will acknowledge not caring much for what else by her I know, her third film, 1999's The Virgin Suicides. But this moves in mysterious ways, in large part out of a weird yet electrifying chemistry between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson, who are both not only first-rate, but positively swimming with grace and poise in an affluent only felt and barely seen clearly or understood. The setting is Tokyo, where Charlotte (played by Johannson) has repaired on a working vacation with her husband of two years, who is a celebrity photographer far more interested at the moment in his work and its perks than in Charlotte. She spends most of her days by herself in the hotel room or wandering the city. Bob (played by Murray) is a fading movie star who made his bones in action pictures, and he's easily twice her age. He is in Tokyo to shoot commercials and photos for the ad campaign of a whiskey brand, and while there gets roped into more promotional chores. Bob and Charlotte are both staying at the same hotel, both miserable and lonely, both unable to connect with their partners. (Bob's wife Lydia appears as a tinny voice on the other end of phone calls and a name at the end of snippy messages or on fax cover sheets, which always seem to arrive on the machine in Bob's room at 4 a.m.) Gradually, recognizing one another in the hotel lobby and elevators, Bob and Charlotte begin to fall into each other's orbits. Coppola does a nice job of keeping the spaces across which these figures must navigate somehow unbearably huge, setting them in a foreign city full of strange sounds and sights, where even the alphabet is all wrong, which has the effect of making them seem that much more tiny. They are bitter, cynical, snappish, suffering from insomnia and a kind of homesickness that is much larger than simply wanting to be home again. They don't necessarily want to be home again. But they want desperately to be somewhere else, anywhere, away, and in each other they find something that might resemble that fleeting place. The smartest thing Coppola did with this, of course, was keep the relationship strictly chaste. Abstracting out that element of the desperate clutch is enough in itself to move mountains, as the tiny details of the connections and disconnections between Bob and Charlotte—a night at a karaoke bar (the music throughout has a lot to do with making this movie work), a night in Charlotte's room, a night watching TV in Bob's room, a bad lunch—slowly build into something that, if not monumental, nonetheless might stay with you forever.