Coppola’s Youth Without Youth is my favorite
superhero movie. It’s not an action film,
nor is it derived from a comic book. Yet
the film’s basic premise – (man gets hit by lighting and develops advanced
mental and physical powers) – would sound like a rip-off of The Green Lantern
or Spider-Man were it not for the fact that it is based on a novella by the
great Romanian religious historian, philosopher and novelist Mircea
Eliade. Instead of an all-American jock
who invites god-like adoration with a ludicrous costume and a public promise to
save the world, here we have diminutive Tim Roth as an elderly professor named
Dominic, who – when his medical anomaly renders him some 40 years younger in
appearance – undertakes to discover the origins of human language and
intelligence. It’s the eve of World War
II and the Nazis take an interest in Dominic’s case, considering him their Nietzschean
übermensch. In a way, he is. It becomes evident that he is a harbinger of
an advanced race that will supplant humanity in the aftermath of a forthcoming
atomic holocaust. However, Dominic wants
no part of the media and political intrigues that flare up around him, nor the
fame and glory that await him. He
focuses instead on personal things, especially the great love of his life that
he let get away due to his shyness. As
in many of his films – especially Apocalypse
Now (1979) and One From the Heart (1982)
– Coppola walks a thin line between profound and pretentious; I think he always
stops just short of the latter, but many disagree. For Coppola, to fail to reach some type of
conclusion about the themes of his stories is a cop-out, and he always chances
pretentiousness rather than settling for a wishy-washy “everyone-has-their-own-interpretation” cliché as most of his
colleagues do. After working many years
as a journeyman in Hollywood trying to overcome the bankruptcy brought upon him
by the two films mentioned above, Coppola took ten years off to focus on his wine
business, which made him a millionaire again, allowing him to finance his own
films in this new phase of his career; which so far as also given us Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011). Youth Without Youth is in my opinion the
most substantial of the new films. It is
emotional and gentle and yet also so potent that it makes you reassess what
appeared to be Coppola’s main concerns all along. The issues of time, age, regret and nostalgia
are preeminent here as they were in The
Godfather series and Apocalypse Now and even Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). It is also boldly experimental, full of
dreams and reveries, and presented in colors that are rich, warm and sensual. Despite the vast arc spanning decades,
languages and ideas, the film is anchored by the melancholy central performance
of Tim Roth as a modest man who gets a second chance and opts for risk, romance
and even adventure at the expense of temporal successes and laurels.
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