Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I’ve wanted to see this since the moment I first heard Coppola really was behind the camera again. I’m fascinated by his stumbles just as much as I am by his successes, and no matter what, I’m going to see this with an open mind.

Having said that, I feel obligated to warn you... this first reviewer has nothing good to say about this movie. And he seems to be arguing his points from a fairly sane position. Is it really possible that Coppola’s return to the bigscreen is this big a misfire?

Check it out...

Hi there Mori, long-time reader of your site, first time I post a review, not sure I'm meant to send it to you, but you're my favourite reviewer here so here goes.

I live in Rome, and yesterday I watched Coppola's new effort "Youth without youth" (YWY).

I must premise my review with 4 points:

First, I hated this movie.

Second, I was sort of predisposed, as I walked in not expecting much. Although what I got was far worse than what I expected. Throughout most of the movie I kept thinking back to an interview with Coppola in which, referring to the luke-warm reception for YWY by the critics at Venice (or was it Cannes?), he stated something like "well, y'know, Apocalypse Now was slated when it came out and it's considered a masterpiece now". So then I hated this movie even more 'cause I knew that Coppola had compared this... thing...to Apocalypse Now. Coppola, you asked for this review. 'Cause you made a very shitty movie.

Third, I am not the envious/bitter type who gets his kicks by criticising his betters (such as Coppola), I get no joy from writing this review, and I am still surprised that this abortion of a movie could have come from the same guy that gave us Godfather.

Fourth, I have not read the novel that this film is based on, but I am a serious student of eastern philosophy, mainly Shankara Hinduism, and so I would have thought that a lot of the philosophical musings present in this movie would have aroused my interest. Was I ever wrong.

Spoilers here, I guess. Although, honestly, I don't think this movie is much about plot, it's more about the intricate philosophy of the origins of consciousness, time, life and love, at least that's what I think Coppola was going for.

This movie has Tim Roth in it, and we all like Tim Roth. Tim Roth plays Dominic Matei, a manic-depressive 70 year old Romanian linguist in the 1930s who...uh, gets (literally) struck by a thunderbolt just before committing suicide. This gives him a Gollum-like split personality (where he talks with himself as though his other personalities were physically there, often standing inside mirrors, thus the Gollum comparison), spectacular telekinetic superpowers (like John Travolta in "Phenomenon"), and the ability to learn stuff by passing his hands over books (like a Jedi, or maybe, John Travolta in real life). Oh yeah, and he turns young again, so he's now a 30something Tim Roth which is good, although the old-Roth makeup is quite impressive. Yeah, that's the one good thing about this movie: some of the makeup is neat.

Ok. So Roth/Dominic gets saved by Bruno Ganz, a Romanian doctor, who now is following this amazing medical case. Has Dominic discovered the path to eternal youth?
Here is where I started getting annoyed. This is 15 mins into the movie, and already the accents are getting on my nerves. I swear, they're distracting. I mean, ok, so we're in Romania, and everyone speaks English. Fine, today people use subtitles, Coppola's still in the early 1990s, so let him use English. Cool. But Tim Roth speaks with a British accent and everyone else has these awful fake Romanian accents. I swear, Swiss actor Bruno Ganz sounds like he's from Yonkers. WTF? Plus, apparently Romanian newspapers in the 30s featured English headlines. If only this were the film's worst flaw.

'Cause you see, in addition to this, by this point you have already begun to notice one thing: the script is diabolically bad. It's insanely bad. And EVERY SINGLE LINE IN THIS MOVIE IS EXPOSITION. No, no, listen carefully. EVERY SINGLE LINE. Even the petrifyingly boring and long-winded philosophical musings (of which this is chock-full) are expository. They all "explain" something. And it's bad philosophy too. It's got lines as bad as:

"to get to the end of this problem you must kill your lover!"

"So what you're saying is...the end justifies the means?!"

Pretty fucking basic for a movie that's so damn pretentious.

Damn lazy too, if you ask me, all this exposition. Infuriating. Honestly, it's like one of those 80s hero cartoons, where someone would always go "Ah, now I understand: when the helicopter exploded it provoked a chain reaction that resulted in the chipmunk mutating into the monstruosity whose destruction we just witnessed!"

Yes, it's really that bad, that kind of clunky dialogue. Every line feels written. Does that make sense? Of course it's written, it's a script. But it seems that what might have looked great on page just ends up sounding like nails on a blackboard on-screen. So, tons of exposition, with awful, awful dialogue.

In one scene our unconvincing Romanian doctor actually says something like this, over coffee: "In Hitler's entourage there is a mysterious and ambiguous scientist, Dr. Rudolph...".

Who talks that way? Read that aloud to yourself and realise how dated and scripted it sounds, like a bad comic book. I DON'T WANT TO BE TOLD HE'S "MYSTERIOUS AND AMBIGUOUS"! SHOW ME! SHOW ME!!!

In one scene the same doctor (Bruno Ganz is given some of the worse lines in this movie) just comes out of nowhere and says "Time, Dominic. We're running out of time." Is it me? Is this actually good writing? It's so disconnected, it's like someone saying "So, did you enjoy the restaurant last night?" and you answer "Victoria. I went with Victoria." Agonisingly bad writing. Sure it looks good written down, but...do me a favour, go watch this movie. You cannot possibly understand until you do. We're not talking "so bad it's good" bad. We're talking a piece of shit. I have never had this experience before. I have always found something to enjoy in awful movies. Watching this was like getting my ass cleaned out with a spiked gauntlet. It's honestly bewildering. Maybe I'm just too picky with scripts, who knows.

Anyway, Dominic is trying to complete his "life work", to discover the origins of language and of consciousness, so he does his magical research (jedi-reading all the books he can find) but now all of a sudden he's hounded by Nazis who want to find out how come he looks so young. He screws some Nazi SS chick, who's meant to be spying on him and who is such a brilliant and subtle spy she keeps a copy of "Mein Kampf" under the bed which he reads while they fuck. Oh yeah, she also had swastikas all over her garters. But they're tiny so you won't notice them till you're up close. Ok. Then all of a sudden (yes, it's a very disjointed movie) Dominic's in Switzerland under false identity making a living playing in casinos. Nobody explains how he can win all the time, but a great bit of exposition voice-over tells us "I discovered an uncanny talent for assuming false identities and forging ID documents".

Gee, thanks for that, sure is nice of you to help out.
Then he's found by a "Swiss Doctor" who is clearly not who he says he is (he's the Nazi scientist) but the big reveal is fucked up because we already saw him in a flashback and so we've known who he is all along.
The back-alley showdown with the Nazi is halfway through the film and features brilliant dialogue such as: [spoilers]

Nazi - We can help you!
Nazi chick - Don't listen to him, Dominic!
Nazi - Traitress! (shoots)
Nazi chick - Please...forgive me...Dominic (dies)

At which point Dominic used his superpowers to kill the Nazi. No kidding. He uses his telekinesis to force the Nazi to shoot himself.

That's the kind of shit we're dealing with here.
Ok, end of the movie? You wish.

We have a montage of paper headlines telling us of the passing of years till 1955 (all the papers from around the world are in English, 'cept the French papers which are in French, damn nationalists), at which point Dominic is happily trecking up a mountain only to find a girl who is the spitting image of his once lover from 50 years ago. He was once in love you know. At least, one Dominic was. The other Dominic, the "evil" one inside his head was probably never in love. We know this because the evil Dominic sneers all the time, and that's how Tim Roth shows us he's the evil Dominic who was never in love.

But oh, how he misses her. He gives her directions to the mountains and the BAM he's in the police station saying "there's a chick up in the mountains, go help her" then BAM he's up there himself and she's cowering in a cave, spouting gibberish in some weird language. Damn, this movie skips a lot. Like 24 grams, but at least that movie was, well, a movie and not something you could squeeze out of one of Satan's anal pustules.

So Dominic and crazy-chick hook up, then she goes mental again, is posessed by the soul of her past life in which she was a medieval Buddhist (good thing Dominic is an oriental linguist, so he speaks Sanskript and can understand what she says, phew), then the case goes international, then they get some professor to put her to sleep and fly her to a cave in India where she awakens to a shaman who spouts some nonsense on duality, then she recovers, moves to Malta with Dominic (dialogue snippet: "what's that bird?" "that's a maltese falcon") is posessed by other past lives which speak in weird ancient languages and...uh...just let me stop here. Oh no, there's a bit at the end which will make you think of Dorian Gray. In a "Jesus, they couldn't come up with something better than ripping Dorian Gray off?" kinda way. This movie doesn't know what it's about. I couldn't tell you, that's for sure.

It's confusing, but not in that invigorating David Lynch kinda way, where you're all "oh shit what's going on?", but rather in a way where you just can't be bothered because none of it is any interesting.

Sure, the final bit of the movie is quite creepy, what with the chick's nocturnal hallucinations and all, but in general the movie is so badly written, so hideously over-directed (you really get the impression Coppola is going "lookee! I still got the goods! Look!"), so senseless and so butt-ugly there's no possible redemption.
Tim Roth is ok. I mean he's actually good but because his character is so unlikeable you never warm up to him. It's not even a cool sort of unlikeable, it's just sort of uncharismatic unlikeable. But he does his best with a shit script.

Everyone else sucks. Because of bad accents and because of the dialogue. Oh, the chick is cute, I'll grant her that. And Matt Damon makes his most meaningless cameo since his Jay & Silent Bob stint. And Bruno Ganz is preposterous.
Couple of nice shots, that are all the more infuriating because they remind you that you're watching a movie by one of the greatest directors alive.

I can't really give a balanced opinion on this. The film lacks all trace of cohesive structure, is has no focus, no real style, is burdened by tons of ambitious ideas (amazingly none of them are any good), Coppola doesn't really know what he's trying to do, what genre this is meant to be, or even why he's still making movies. He amps up the terror factor in a couple of neat scenes towards the end, but by then the AWFUL AWFUL (I can't stress this enough) script has already turned you away from this terrible, mind-numbing experience.

I swear, the one impression I got from this movie? Coppola's gone senile. It's harsh, and I hate to say this, but this isn't even a failed experiment. My definition of failed experiment is Stone's "Alexander". Lacks focus as a movie, but heart in the right place, with some honest-to-God great scenes. This movie here? A complete abortion. One of the worse things I have ever seen. At one point while watching it I was comparing it to "Goya's Ghost" another recent failure from a one-time great director (Milos Forman). But that movie had it's memorable moments. It wasn't bad. It was just slightly incoherent and reverted to some nasty little plot-cliches and formulaic dialogue that should have been left behind in the early 1990s. This on the other hand is a complete and utter disaster, a movie that should never have been made.
I'm going to have to see this again one day, because I have never reacted so badly to a movie before, so I gotta know, is it me? Did I just not "get" this? The audience reaction was weird too. Silence. Just...silence. Not awed silence like I got at the end of Saving Private Ryan. Just something like vague disgust.

What a strange experience.

I recommend it though. If only because I need to know what other people thought of this.

I swear, I'm still dumbfounded.

YWY makes Spiderman 3 look like a half-decent movie.

YWY is just awful.

If you use this, call me Noodles.

p.s. I know you've got a lot on your hands Mori, but I'm dying to read your review on this. As a guy who writes movies I am certain you will agree with what I said on the script, just you're able to put it into some vaguely coherent form, unlike me.

Anyway, cheers pal.

Ouch. Man, I really am looking forward to this film. I want to see Coppola do the same thing Lumet did this year, and just come out swinging.

Maybe our second reviewer had a better reaction to it. Let’s see...

As far as legacies go, New York native Francis Ford Coppola need do little more to better his own. A handful of films cemented in the bowels of great American cinema and five Oscars to his name, it seemed only fair to let the now rotund director retire to his California vineyards. In fact it has been a decade since we saw the name in lights. Yet here we are in 2007, the great man is back and determined to rewrite his efforts post-1990. 'Youth Without Youth' hosts the kind of ambition that a young Francis Ford became known for. This unlimited scope of creative freedom and ideas that encouraged big thinking and - I'm sure just a few - wary producers. It should be known that this is a modest film in every meaning of the word bar 'ambition'. Funded by the very vines to which Coppola has been tending over the past decade, and submitted to one singular film festival despite the pleas of many. It seems in this light that the man is returning, driven by a love for the art - apparently no longer content to just sit back and oversee production on his daughter's movies.

Spanning the mid-twentieth century, 'Youth Without Youth' is a tale of love and life. Particularly the plight of linguistics professor Dominic Matei (played by Tim Roth) and his struggling towards an impossible life's work. This elderly individual has given up hope, when he is quite literally chosen from above and made young once again. Allowing him to chase both love and life from a fresh standpoint and with the ultimate advantage of hindsight. Unfortunately though, with the War raging around him - Dominic becomes the interest of entirely more sinister individuals than impressed language students. With Adolf Hitler himself declaring interest in our seemingly immortal individual. As stated previously, one can easily commend the ambition 'Youth Without Youth' brings to the table. An expansive drama-romance that portrays noir elements and more than a dash of mystery. The fact is that Coppola seems to have taken on too much. There is no definitive genre or direction attended to, therefore the films entire stance becomes muddled. Unfortunately the next logical step produces a fall, a spectacular one maybe - but a fall nonetheless.

It is extremely difficult to pull off a film that moves through nations and nationalities, and these difficulties are highlighted in 'Youth Without Youth'. The correct decision was made to dub those that needed help with the delivery of lines, yet this means nothing when the general support acting is amateur at best. Bruno Ganz, the experience Swiss actor that played the aforementioned Hitler so well in 2004's 'Downfall' struggles through his English, yet even then is given a role as one dimensional as they come. With a character that apparently has no motive whatsoever. Ganz's partner in 'Downfall' was the beautiful and now swiftly rising star of Alexandra Maria Lara (to whom Coppola wrote offering her the role) - here she plays Laura, the object of Dominic's distracted affection. Indeed she does well enough with what she is handed script-wise, but even this seems at points beyond saving as the film lurches onward. Things go from ridiculous to incredulous as science fiction is dragged onto the list of genres on show, with certain aimless chunks of dialogue proving to be a particular low point. So much so in fact that the attempt at including World history seems forced - almost an afterthought from Coppola.

As many may have read already, the saving grace of the film comes in the hunched form of a maturing Tim Roth - who wades his way though pretentious dialogue to hold 'Youth Without Youth' together. There are points at which poor writing rears its ugly head, but when left to his own devices the actor rises to another level. Indeed most of the films finer moments occur when Roth is acting with himself, the maligned Dominic character wrestling with his own split personalities. To say this lead role was a difficult one could be the understatement of this year, yet whatever is thrown at him Roth hurdles. Spitting chunks of tooth onto a rain-soaked Romanian street, or dictating maths in ancient versions of the Mandarin tongue - the actor handles all with a confidence that makes one wonder why he is no Hollywood leading man. As previously mentioned, the ambition of 'Youth Without Youth' is impressive, yet proves ultimately and somewhat ironically to be its undoing. With some incredible acting by our lead still unable to bail out a confused plot and increasingly atrocious dialogue.

4/10

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