Tetro
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 1.0
Sailor Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) meets up with his estranged older brother Tetro (Mr. Vincent Gallo) and Tetro's wife (Maribel Verdú) in Argentina, where his youthful questioning irks his secretive sibling, who wants to keep the truth buried. Though significantly more 'watchable' than Coppola's last incomprehensible film, Youth Without Youth, even a filmmaker (and screenwriter) as accomplished as FFC has to know how contrived and overblown the story is, as if he's consciously trying to take a simple story about a family and transform it into a stylistically overwrought soap opera that would send Almodóvar into a coma. Gallo's dead-serious demeanor is what keeps his 'final revelation' from sounding like a complete joke (come on, Coppola ... borrowing from Mr. Lucas?) and Verdú is one of my favorite actresses, but this becomes more and more about style (due to Mihai Malaimare, Jr.'s stunning black and white photography) than story.
