Twixt

Francis Ford Coppola – 2011 – USA

Twixt, the third film in the new phase of Coppola’s career – following Youth Without Youth (2007) and Tetro (2009) – is a part-whimsical, part-macabre examination of the creative process, (using literature as a metaphor for Coppola’s own filmmaking), particularly with regards to reconciling private fulfillment with the demands of maintaining income and reputation.  Val Kilmer plays a moderately successful horror novelist named Hall Baltimore, traveling through Northern California on a self-managed book-signing tour.  Stopping in a small town run by Sheriff Bruce Dern, he discovers a famous local murder case and resolves to make it the subject of his next book.  In his dreams, meanwhile, an apparition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin) guides him through the mystery and inspires his writing.  As Hall lapses in and out of fantasy, the style of the film is insistently artificial, with a mix of surreal elements and juxtapositions of color, black-and-white and tints.  Two important themes for Coppola are played out explicitly in Twixt; time and endings.  The town’s seven-faced clock tower shows seven different times, just as memory, history and the present at times exist side by side, and the more Hall tries to focus on the future, the more he is sucked into dealing with the past.  Just like Hall, the frustrated playwright in Tetro had struggled openly with how to conclude a story, something Coppola himself has famously wrestled with at least since the days of Apocalypse Now.  The fact of authors agonizing over endings in both Tetro and Twixt ultimately seems not like a plea for patience from Coppola, but more a shrug of the shoulders as though he has accepted this supposed weakness as an inevitable, perhaps valid, part of his style.  Some directors - (David Lynch, for example) - turn to jelly when free to indulge themselves at will, and Coppola is accused of this too, but I see him as admirably controlled.  At a modest 84 minutes, Twixt is admittedly not in line with prevailing trends in either art or commercial films, but it is a far cry from the extravagant ego-trip some critics have made it out to be.  As François Truffaut said, a film is really successful when you can read the director’s pleasure or anxiety between its images, and that happens clearly and poetically in Coppola’s film.