Youth Without Youth.

"Youth Without Youth may not fully 'work' as a commercial film, but it is a fascinating veering off from the director's usual track," writes DK Holm in a survey of Francis Ford Coppola's career for the Vancouver Voice. "But that is to be expected from a director with a robust appetite for films as vehicles for ideas and observations of lived life. If some of Coppola's work-for-hire films failed to live up to his ferocious talent, those projects in which it gains full sway are among the greatest films ever made."

"Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune—and having a hell of a time—with the material," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Coppola takes a subject that once would have made him gaga and explores it with tenderness and lucidity."

Updated through 12/17.

"Imagine if Peter Parker discovered he had the proportionate strength of the spider, shrugged his shoulders and went right back to working on his science fair project," suggests Matt Singer at IFC News. "Though Coppola would almost certainly never couch it in these terms, he's made a comic book flick, albeit one that looks like a beautiful old Italian movie and is based on a Romanian novel." And Aaron Hillis talks with Tim Roth, who tells him he's got two projects in mind he'd like to direct.

And Sean O'Hagan (Observer) and Peter Hartlaub (San Francisco Chronicle) profile Coppola.

Earlier: Last week's roundup.

Update: "Simply put, it's a Faustian romance about the reversal of time and transmigration of souls which, shot mainly in Romania, adds a soupçon of Balkan chic and anti-Nazi iconography to its rich stew of twaddle," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "From its charmingly retro credits through its Third Man atmospherics to its bingo-bongo decade-collapsing climax, Youth Without Youth is a cinematic time machine - at once sillier and more desperate in its convictions than such kindred trips to the mystic East as Bertolucci's Little Buddha or Scorsese's Kundun. Variety has predicted that Youth Without Youth will translate to 'cinemas without audiences,' as if that were the point. This is hardly Coppola's greatest movie, but it's far from his worst - its bid for a new beginning is one from the heart."

Updates, 12/13: "Youth Without Youth could only be the work of a seasoned master," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "In fact, opaque and challenging though it may be, and even if it was shot cheaply and on the fly in Romania, Coppola's new film isn't so unlike many of the director's other works in terms of its radical visionary charms. Even at his admittedly small moments, Coppola can't help but think big, and Youth Without Youth is nothing if not an eloquent expression of the director's grandiose dreams for a philosophy of cinema, inextricable, of course, from time, consciousness, and memory."

"It's a Twilight Zone-meets-Jack movie: half-sci-fi speculation, half-love story," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Excusing Youth as Coppola's plea for a rejuvenated career is beside the point. Unless Coppola achieves mature perspective - or regains the human touch of the Godfather films and The Outsiders - he's doomed himself to out-of-town techno-tryouts and brainy debacles."

"It progresses from abstruseness to absurdity," grumbles the San Diego Reader's Duncan Shepherd.

To hear Coppola and Lucas tell it, the Godfather and Star Wars franchises derailed prospective careers as experimental filmmakers. Blogging for the Guardian, Shane Danielson isn't buying these late plaints.

"Strikingly shot and art-directed, the widescreen movie is a very European-style art flick in the tradition of vintage Resnais - beautiful, immaculately crafted, semi-abstract, a bit remote," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "If Youth Without Youth is greater by far in leap-of-faith reach than viewer reward (though Coppola advises it should be seen more than once for full effect), it nonetheless feels the work of a genuinely re-invigorated rather than near-senile 'old master.'... I can't exactly recommend Youth Without Youth - opaque, ornate, emotionally removed and 124 long minutes long as it seems. Yet it gives one hope for Francis Ford Coppola, who'd laid off movies too soon and returns equipped to surprise us for at least another decade or so."

"It's telling that Francis Ford Coppola described the third installment of his legendary Godfather crime saga (in which the formerly stone-cold Don Michael Corleone is forced to reckon with the last vestiges of his spirit) as a 'coda': For better and for worse, he's been making codas for years now," writes Keith Uhlich at the Reeler.

"This is a comeback and a personal project, and from the very opening frame - a gorgeous opening-title tableau - I could see Coppola straining very hard to make it count," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Every beautifully conceived shot, every camera pivot, every deployment of ultra-Romantic music by Certified Real Composer [Osvaldo] Golijov, seems to bellow 'Look at me! Do you feel the fantastic emotional and/or metaphysical effect I'm trying to convey?' It becomes a bit oppressive after a while — like chasing a fettuccine alfredo with a lasagna with a tiramisu in the space of five minutes, and then doing it all over again."

Updates, 12/14: "[B]y turns bewitching, inspiring, enervating and confounding," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:

Not long ago Mr Coppola - whose greatest films have long been holy places for some of us - wrote that his adaptation of Youth Without Youth is "all about" consciousness. ("The reality in which we live is beyond our immediate perceptions.") I think it's all about movies, the pre-eminent mind-machine of the modern age, and the desire of an older, established, long-dormant director to tap into creative (metaphoric) youth by exploring some of the same cinematic concerns that possessed modernist filmmakers like Antonioni. In this film Mr Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he's just waking up.

"[T]hink of Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first new movie in ten years, as the jump-start equivalent of Steven Soderbergh's goofy Richard Lester tribute, Schizopolis," suggests Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "Both films are fascinatingly flawed, borderline incomprehensible, and deeply, almost embarrassingly personal. But Soderbergh's nutty experiment paved the way for Out of Sight and the various triumphs that followed; with any luck, Coppola's dose of insanity will prove similarly rejuvenating."

"A self-consciously ambitious riddle of love, regret, and cursed metaphysics, Youth Without Youth implicitly acknowledges Mr Coppola's anxieties as a great director, but, sadly, fulfills many of them with a murky folly of genre-blurring, scattered epiphanies, and wordy philosophizing that might sound better in French,"writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

"This is something Coppola has obviously put his heart into, but the result is a mystery-romance that succeeds in being not very mysterious and not very romantic," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Yet for all this, the film is not completely awful; it is often watchable in a barking way."

"Roth does an almost too credible job of playing a man living outside of time and his own identity, but there's something about the role that requires him to shrink back from the screen," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Ultimately, Youth Without Youth is more intriguing than it is satisfying. It hooks you, then lets you flounder."

Coppola's "renewed sense of discovery comes with a fatal lack of clarity, as if he finished without successfully paddling his way through a sea of abstraction," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It's somehow both incomprehensible and not experimental enough; the more Coppola hangs onto his stilted narrative, the less vibrant his free-wheeling ideas become."

"The ideas that underlie the film are both cosmic enough and abstract enough as to suggest utter bullshit - not unlike those in Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain - but Youth Without Youth is buoyed by the contrast between its artsy style and its many genre elements," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

"[I]t might as well have been written in Klingon," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "It's a fascinating train wreck in many ways, with flashes here and there of the painful disquisition on mortality it might have been. Salvaging much more was beyond me."

"In short, and with some regret, I have to report that this is a weirdly unsatisfactory movie, codswallop set before us with a strange lack of real cinematic conviction," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "Perhaps Coppola has been drinking too much of his own wine. But he's young enough yet to make another masterpiece."

Updates, 12/15: This "is a vast, lumbering white elephant of a movie - but I sort of love it," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "This film is stubbornly, almost insanely, itself, and the convoluted journey it makes - from age to youth, ignorance to omniscience, despair to bliss - can't help but evoke the filmmaker's long strange trip of a career, from Dementia 13 to the Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now, through Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Rainmaker, all the way to... whatever this is."

"I will have to see Youth Without Youth a few more times before I can begin to decode how, exactly, the film blends playful mysticism, political allegory, pulpy adventure, high-minded artistic inquiry, fairy tales, and unabashed romance into a sweeping dream of considerable mystery and beauty - but I'm looking forward to it," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"[I]'s far too astonishing and complex to be easily dismissed," argues Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "[L]ike Welles, Coppola's less-appreciated films tend to improve over time and multiple viewings. I saw a print of the restored One from the Heart in early 2004 and found it quite astounding, an amazing piece of work. But at the same time, I'm not sure I want to see Youth Without Youth again. Recalling it now, I think of a film lacking in energy, pulse and life-blood. But I have too much respect for Coppola to let that stop me. Perhaps a few more years will do the trick, when I'm older and wiser."

Early on, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek was still holding onto "hope [that] it might turn out to be a lush, nutty romantic melodrama. Instead, it's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery."

"I always figured eternal life would get boring after a while, and Francis Ford Coppola confirms my suspicion with Youth Without Youth, an inert thumb-twiddler," writes Robert Cashill. "On some level, Youth Without Youth is another take on his Dracula, warmed over for pedants."

Updates, 12/16: Deborah Solomon talks with Coppola for the New York Times Magazine, while David Colman watches him indulge in a hobby: "Long fascinated with the curious process that makes espresso the heady brew it is, Mr Coppola has, by his estimate, owned as many as 300 machines. Yes, 300."

"Some people will find this picture heavy going in its seriousness," concedes the Observer's Philip French. "Others may welcome the unfashionable boldness of its engagement with ideas. Quite a few I'm sure will be engaged by a sweeping romanticism that shares many of the elements of those Hollywood films of the Forties about encounters with revenants and ghosts, the product of yearning feelings from the war years. It is certainly made with considerable assurance and has a surprisingly convincing performance from Tim Roth."

Choire Sicha talks with Roth for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 12/17: "Youth Without Youth isn't intended to conciliate anyone," writes Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot. "It's a billowing, shapeless thing, ever flirting with disaster, but it passes my 'Is it Art?' litmus test just fine: upon leaving the theater, the objects of the world seemed briefly rejuvenated, closer, more real. Bless the guiltless profligacy of it all - having been silent for a decade now, FFC decamped for Romania and, with his vineyard dividends behind him, produced precisely the movie he wanted to make (inasmuch as his talent allowed). Indulgent? You fucking bet. Coppola, big and fleshy, a notorious Hollywood sybarite in his younger years, reborn as a well-to-do vintner, remains one of the screen's great, wallowing sensualists."

Posted by dwhudson at December 11, 2007 7:01 AM