The Big Picture
Peggy Sue Got Married showcases Coppola's moving depiction of time travel and self-discovery; Captain EO was a career misstep that lacked his usual filmmaking flair; Bram Stoker's Dracula highlights Coppola's grandiose vision, blending passion with practical effects.
Francis Ford Coppola is a man interested in the frenetic experience of life, at its best and worst moments. He seeks to capture the undercurrents of tragedy and bliss that exist within the banality of everyday life, and he treasures the moments when his characters are released from the agony of death. In that dramatic vein, no storytelling concept is better suited to achieve that release than time travel. Just as we all inevitably grow older, and just as we can only experience everything once in life, we all know the pain of realizing that our current knowledge will not allow us to try again, and that our youth is limited. Coppola understands these pains, and has taken the concept and explored these ideas many times, with admittedly mixed results.
Peggy Sue Got Married is Coppola's most moving time-travel film.
Image courtesy of Tri-Star Pictures
Coppola's most effective use of time travel is undoubtedly in Peggy Sue Got Married. In it, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) hates the way her life is going. She's a 40-something woman who is devastated, her adult children have left home, and she's planning a divorce from her husband, Charlie (Nicolas Cage). The last thing she wants is to go to her 25th anniversary high school reunion and realize just how far she's fallen. But when she gets there, it's not as painful as she expected, everyone there is happy to see her, and life seems to be going well. To her surprise, she is crowned prom queen again and is forced to go on stage for everyone to watch and admire. At that moment, it all becomes too much for her, and she passes out. She wakes up back in 1960, reliving her high school glory days. While Peggy Sue is adamant about returning to her current life, she is not about to miss the opportunity to do something different, pursue something she has always wanted, and finally resolve her relationship with Charlie before it sours.
Because the film was released just one year after Back to the Future, comparisons have been plentiful, since both have the same basic premise of a modern person traveling back to their high school days in the 1950s and 1960s. But where Back to the Future was a whimsical, pop ode to a nostalgic Norman Rockwell version of the 1950s, Peggy Sue Got Married feels more tied to the uncomfortable reality of being on the brink of adulthood. The film is uniquely poignant for the way it frames a melancholic treatise on the need to break away from the past within a tender fable about becoming oneself and getting in touch with the emotions that most fully nourish the soul.
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Mirroring that contrast is Coppola's filmmaking approach, which blends a snappy script full of snappy dialogue and clear character arcs with his precise method of mining the emotional truths of artifice and cliché. The film may be full of 1950s touchstones, from doo-wop performances to hipster beatniks to a family's fuss over buying a new car, but it all feels detached from false fetishism. When Peggy Sue first meets her mother (Barbara Harris) in the past, she says, “I forgot you were so young,” hinting at Coppola's key wisdom: He may understand that you have to move forward into the future, but don't forget who you were when you were younger. That's how you keep your spirit alive and thriving.
George Lucas and Michael Jackson's 'Captain EO' is a strange and unusual film
Image courtesy of Buena Vista Distribution Company
Another of Coppola's early fantasy endeavors, from the same year as Peggy Sue Got Married, was actually a bizarre piece called Captain EO, a glorified Michael Jackson music video drowning in cheesy special effects and laborious production. The project was conceived by Jackson, who wanted to create his own ride at a Disney theme park, and Coppola only got involved because of his good friend George Lucas, who was producing it. Lucas knew that Coppola had received a “so-so” response to his film, The Cotton Club, and he wanted to get back at him.
This was probably a bad idea, as Coppola had no experience with heavy special effects and always relied on Lucas's direction. Frankly, the film ends up feeling like one of the many Star Wars knockoffs we endured in the 1980s, with barely a trace of Coppola's filmmaking sense or tasteful camerawork. It's tempting to dismiss this as a case of succumbing to a megastar persona, but Martin Scorsese managed to make Michael Jackson's music videos fit his creed and stay true to his grimy New York roots. Captain EO felt like a soulless paycheck job.
Francis Ford Coppola takes fantasy to the absurd in 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'
Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures
Bram Stoker's Dracula feels like the movie Coppola has been waiting his whole life to make. It's a Grand Guignol pop epic that takes a literary classic and turns it into a hysterical work that embodies the concept of passion. His reinterpretation focuses on Dracula (Gary Oldman)'s journey to recover his beloved, who died hundreds of years ago and has been reincarnated as Mina Harker (Winona Ryder). The time travel element is best captured in the famous line that Dracula traveled “the ocean of time” to find her. The overt melodrama of that emotion permeates every creative decision, as Coppola famously tried to use a variety of special effects that had been around since the beginning of cinema, all practical and shot in camera, to better fit the aesthetic of the era in which the film is set.
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Some might say he refused to cooperate.
Vampire fiction has always fed on the desire that seeps out from beneath the yoke of societal norms, and Coppola's operatic take on the canon of vampire lore is no exception, delivering tasteful, thoughtful indulgence in a way that's utterly tasteless. Blood pours like waterfalls, vampire women wear gaudy, kabuki-esque gowns, Dracula's shadow defies gravity, and Keanu Reeves' accent and grey wig defy convention. What better excuse to go that far than a story where the knob is broken and everything is turned up to 11, breaking the very rules of time and space for the noblest of causes: love.
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Francis Ford Coppola took a full 20 years off the mystical, but in 2007 he returned with The Man Who Was Awesome. Dominic Mattei (Tim Roth) is a 70-year-old professor living in pre-World War II Europe who is struck by lightning and unexpectedly rejuvenated to his late 30s, setting him on an unexpected path. Throughout his life, he pursues a philosophical quest into the nature of duality and the split in duality, finds a new love that reminds him of an old one, and escapes the Nazis who use his rejuvenation to scare him off. If that wasn't enough, he also becomes a literal mutant, gaining osmosis, the ability to control guns with his mind, and the ability to talk to himself as if he were two different people.
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These are all exciting concepts that might have been perfect for a Matrix sequel, but Coppola has no idea where to take these ideas, instead jumbling jargon and concepts until they feel like a word soup. To make matters worse, all the acting is so aloof and the dialogue so rambling and self-centered that every exchange feels like a monologue without any sense of chemistry or personal stake. His inability to keep too many plates spinning at once is reflected in the film's overly scattered visual approach, with some scenes sporting richer color compositions while others are digitally washed into a crude brown with inferior light-based special effects thrown over top. It's a disappointingly muddled attempt to recapture the artistic mental curiosity of his younger years.
“Twixt” is a gothic work that explores dream travels and ghosts.
Coppola's final foray into fantasy was the creepiest film of his career to date, Twixt (later retitled B'Twixt Now And Sunrise), which incorporates dream-based time travel and supernatural encounters into its storyline. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a struggling Stephen King wannabe writer, visits a small town for a book signing, but at the urging of the local sheriff (Bruce Dern), becomes embroiled in the murder investigation of a teenage runaway girl (Elle Fanning). As he investigates the town's history, Hall begins to receive help from the afterlife through the ghost of the murdered girl and Roger Corman's favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), whose ghost has taken up residence in the town only because he stayed overnight at a local hotel. It feels like Coppola is trying to go back to his early days as a director under Corman's tutelage, making a chilling, creepy film that takes advantage of cheap production values ​​and makes the most of its short running time.
But the result is a stagnant and morbidly ugly production, where the dialogue constantly undermines the story, every violent scene is neutralized with awful fake blood, and every nighttime scene feels like someone is in front of a green screen they found in a trash can. As for the special effects, they are so slapped on and so crudely conceived that it feels like Edward Wood Jr. is making a Hammer horror movie, desperately trying to squeeze atmospheric juice out of such hackneyed material. The quality of the actors doesn't help either, as they all seem completely lost and trying to stretch a flimsy storyline into a mere 80 minutes of film. We have to put up with Val Kilmer pitching a perfect Marlon Brando impersonation to write his terrible novel, and poor Elle Fanning, plagued by weird teeth and braces, glowing brightly as if she had radiation poisoning. It's just sad.
Francis Ford Coppola loved the fantasy element, but fantasy clearly didn’t always love Coppola. The more he went back to its sources for inspiration, the less artful his filmmaking seemed to become. Perhaps he was so caught up in the concept that he lost sight of the details that made his best work so powerful. More likely, his ambitions were not commensurate with the time and resources at hand, and so he let them slip out of reach. This is a shame, because Coppola has always been one of the most ambitious filmmakers we’ve had the opportunity to see. A prime example of this is how he continues to try to keep the dream of a truly independent American film alive with his company, American Zoetrope. With him finally able to produce his passion project, Megalopolis, he may finally regain his passion for reaching beyond the human form into the realm of dreams.
