Tetro

Tetro is the first original script Francis Ford Coppola has produced in almost thirty years and, being Coppola, it has to be a bit mental. Is it, however, Apocolypse Now-mental, hereby ‘good mental’, where everybody is fat and has heart attacks and one of the greatest movies ever or the Godfather III-mental, which we will call ‘bad mental’, whereby one casts Sophia Coppola in a leading role and has a scene where a helicopter attacks a hotel.

In my opinion, Tetro is brilliant-mental.

The story revolves around two chronically accident-prone brothers and the dark family secrets that dog them: an oligarch of a father, a mother who dies making opera noises in a car accident, an talented but unfulfilled uncle. Tetro, the older, gruffer, Vincent Gallo-shaped one, decides he’s had enough and flounces off to Buenos Aires, via an open-air mental hospital, and shacks up with Miranda, an infinitely patient Spanish common-law wife. A decade of blissful exile is rudely interrupted by his naval and nosey young brother, Bennie, who digs through all of Tetro’s old writing (from when he was mental), cobbles together an award-winning biographical play without really knowing what it’s about, and then Tetro has a bit of a stress, goes missing again, then turns up and they chat and the film finishes.

The crux of Tetro is both in the classic familial themes – stingingly accurate throughout, which makes the whole thing so engrossing – but also the rich contrasting character of Tetro; at once talented but unproven, proud and embarrassed, tortured by a past he is trying to forget and almost constantly smashed into by cars. There’s a reason the film is titular.

The casting is superb. Alden Ehrenreich as Bennie does a great turn as ‘boy becoming man’ just as Al Pacino did in The Godfather, Maribel Verdu of Y Tu Mama Tambien fame does a typical turn as ‘older-lady-initiating-young-man-into-adulthood-with-a-combination-of-roadtrips-and-sexual-tension,’ while Vincent Gallo does a striking turn as ‘bloody hell, like, award-winning actor-to-be’. The three leads steal much of the acclaim as the film is so sparse – filmed in deliberately grainy black-and-white, scrapbooked together with saturated colour flashbacks into the titular Tetro’s childhood. In short, the film is great – a little over-long, and not especially affirming – but a quality film by a thoroughbred director.

Words by Joel Golby