A cineaste’s feast, but only for himself

Volume 2, Number 13 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | Dec. 28, 2007 - Jan. 3, 2008

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holiday film issue

Sony Picture Classics

Tim Roth in Francis Ford Coppola’s whirligig film, “Youth Without Youth”

A cineaste’s feast, but only for himself

Youth Without Youth
Written for the screen and directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Based on the novella by Mircea Eliade
Now showing at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St., between 1st and 2nd Ave.
(212-330-8182; landmarktheaters)

By Steven Snyder

It’s impossible not to feel respect for director Francis Ford Coppola and his much-hyped comeback “Youth Without Youth,” a film of bold intentions and dramatic flourishes. Like so few films made in today’s world — perhaps matched this year only by “There Will Be Blood” — it screams out for attention, eagerly presenting the audience with the assorted tricks waiting up its sleeves. But therein lies the problem: Admiration is not the same as adoration, and respecting a filmmaker’s ambitions is vastly different than getting swept up in them.

Based on the short story by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, “Youth Without Youth” opens to a montage of spinning clocks and the inner monologue of a desperate, frustrated elderly professor who believes his time is running out. More than a few pundits have commented on the link between creator and creation, between Coppola’s long-observed frustration in sinking from Hollywood’s A-list in the 1970s to the ranks of a gun-for-hire with such films as 1992’s “Dracula” and 1997’s “The Rainmaker,” and Dominic’s (Tim Roth) desperation in realizing that he may die without completing his life’s work.

A linguistics professor, his life-long dream has been to catalogue and capture the primordial language — the very first words ever consciously arranged and uttered as a form of communication by the human species. He wants to understand the very beginning, to gain mastery over the nature of consciousness, and he soon gets his wish. On the verge of suicide, Dominic is literally struck by lightning as he crosses the street one day, and as his bandages are gradually removed, not only is Dominic unharmed; he emerges as something of a super-human.

While the bulk of his body returns to the health and verve of a 30-year-old’s, his mind has seemingly gone through something of a super-charged metamorphosis. He can now hold up a book and instantly memorize its contents, he can affect his surroundings through a bizarre bit of telekinesis, and he is approached now regularly by what appears to be his subconscious, looking to engage in a conversation. In the reflections of a window or a mirror, lying next to Dominic in bed with he sleeps, a second version of himself appears, and aids the newly-young professor in scrutinizing his bewildering situation.

It’s this heightened mental capacity that seems to point Dominic one day to a woman stranded in a cave, similarly hit by lightning and now possessing the ability to travel backwards through time while she sleeps. For Dominic, who records her torturous, sweaty subconscious ramblings, it’s akin to winning the lottery, as she works backwards through the centuries, channeling earlier times and earlier languages. But for her (Alexandra Maria Lara), it’s an incremental death sentence, each journey sucking the life out of her.

As if the material were not dense enough, Coppola uses these various subconscious timewarps and internal monologues as excuses to experiment with new ways of framing and choreographing these inward journeys. And all taken together, “Youth Without Youth” is a dizzying mishmash of melodrama, parable, fantasy and avant-garde experimentation, layering a complicated story in an even more complicated template.

It would be one thing if these themes — bodily regeneration, renewed research, unexpected love, fantastical time-traveling — connected with one another, but as constructed in “Youth Without Youth,” the connective tissue seems to be missing. We jump from one story to the next, as the story’s implications continue to mount and spiral out of control. Enough cannot be said for Tim Roth, who manages to project a sense of awe and bewilderment that draws us in, even as he’s evolving from an elderly man to a middle-aged medical superhero, an unwitting romantic interest and a clinical researcher, observing the woman’s nightly descents into hell.

But Roth, alas, is not enough to right the ship. There’s love here that we don’t understand, danger we can’t quite process, philosophy we can’t comprehend and emotions we don’t feel. For the film’s final hour, the aesthetic has trumped the story, and while Coppola has set out to prove he still has a few tricks worth sharing, he forgot the magician’s rule of thumb: Showmanship. One of cinema’s greats, who used to bask in the thrill of the spectacle unlike any other, has forgotten in “Youth Without Youth” to mix in some pauses to go with the action. There’s no room for contemplation here, just for consumption; after all these years, Coppola made this movie not for us, but for himself.