By Richard Winters
My Rating: 2 out of 10
4-Word Review: Break-up/make-up
Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr) have been together for 5-years but while celebrating their anniversary at home the cracks in their relationship begin to show. Frannie is upset that they can never go out and wants more adventure. Hank doesn’t see this as a problem, so the two break up. Frannie meets Ray (Raul Julia) a waiter who has ambitions to become a singer. Hank gets together with Leila (Nastassja Kinski) who is much younger than him and lives the fast lifestyle. Each spends a night with their new partner, but end-up longing for their former mates when it’s over. Ray offers to take Frannie to Bora Bora, but will she really board the plane, or will Hank catch-up with her in time and convince her to move back with him?
The movie has a weird look about it and this is mainly because director Francis Ford Coppola decided he wanted to film the entire thing on the soundstage of his Zoetrope studios. This in retrospect seemed absurd as the setting was Las Vegas with one of the most flamboyant downtowns of any city, so if the real thing is already visually arresting why trump it with a fake one that isn’t half as exciting? The artificial presence kills the movie from the very start and what’s worse is that it was so painstakingly expensive to create the set design, which is massive, that it sent Coppola and his studio into bankruptcy of which it took many years to recover and all of it wouldn’t have been necessary if they had just shot it on-location, which would’ve been a thousand times better.
The lighting is one of the more annoying aspects particularly the red light that shines through the couple’s home window making it look like they live in the red-light district of Denmark, or near a police station. The outdoor scenes look as phony as you’d expect including having the night sky shown to have a ‘ceiling’ and the distant mountain vistas appearing as nothing more than a cheap matted on paintings. Everything comes-off as loopy like a great director whose ego got the best of him, and he made a massive artistic overreach for no other purpose then just to see if he could. The music interludes by Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits don’t work either. If a movie is intended to be a musical, as this one kind of is, then each song needs to sound distinct and at least moderately peppy, but here it comes-off like the same droning song that just never ends and adds little to the already goofy set-up.
The characters are poorly fleshed-out and, with the modest exception of Harry Dean Stanton and Elia Kazan, wholly uninteresting. The break-up is the biggest problem as the ‘squabble’ appears to be over nothing more than the fact that Hank didn’t take Frannie out on their anniversary, but to move-out because of something like that seems awfully trite. Normally for relationships/marriages to go really bad there needs to be a lot of anger simmering underneath the surface and this thing at best is just a tiff especially when at the beginning they seemed content with other. To make it realistic there should’ve been clear underlining animosity right away and not go from ‘happy couple’ to break-up with a snap-of-the-finger.
Not sure either if it’s exactly possible to get back together after the other partner has slept with someone else. Granted there could be some exceptions, but most people would consider it an extreme betrayal and unforgivable and certainly not something that they could just conveniently forget about and return back to the ‘happy couple’ that they were. Yes, in this instance they both cheated, but that makes things even worse. Who’s to say you can ever trust the other again? If one tiny disagreement can get each one to suddenly jump in the arms of a perfect stranger what’s to say that won’t get repeated in the future?
Garr, who appears topless in several scenes and even fully naked from the back in one moment, is okay. The supporting cast is also good especially Allen Garfield as Julia’s perturbed boss. I even found Kinski a bit mesmerizing with her singing and the way she was able to balance herself on a big orange ball that used to be the sign for the Spirit of 76 gas stations, but overall the thing is so thinly plotted, with too much emphasis being put on the garish set design, that it can all be summed up as a hopeless experiment gone wrong. Even Coppola has admitted in subsequent interviews that it’s a ‘total mess’, so if the director is warning you that his own movie doesn’t have much going for it, you’d better listen.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: February 11, 1982
Runtime: 1 Hour 39 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 