When Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now first
appeared more than twenty years ago, I felt mainly dissatisfied and
frustrated by the film. Dissatisfied because it seemed to me a wretchedly
inadequate treatment of its subject, the Vietnam War, and frustrated because I
respected Francis Coppola and I had hoped for something far better. This
summer, however, the film has been put out in a new and even more apocalyptic
version, employing previously unused footage and extending the running time by
nearly an hour. Or, as a note on the little brochure that was available at the
showing quaintly puts it, "Portions of this motion picture were originally
released in 1979 in the United States and Canada by United Artists as
'Apocalypse Now'.
Apocalypse Now Redux hardly deviates from the
narrative structure of the earlier picture, following the progress up a river in
Vietnam of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on board a Navy patrol boat in search
of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade officer who has broken loose
of Army control and established himself as a de facto warlord in Cambodia, to
the chagrin of his superiors and the CIA. What Redux adds are several episodes
that take place as this Narrenschiff makes its way to Kurtz's hideout, including
more of the Playboy stage review and some sexual highjinks with assorted
Playmates in an American outpost populated by soldiers who have apparently been
smoking some very potent weed.
The most protracted, and also the most
interesting--and the most widely commented on--of these new episodes is a
layover at a French plantation inhabited by a family that has been residing
there for a much longer time than American forces have been fighting in Vietnam.
Although the quip of the patriarch of the clan, Hubert deMarais (Christian
Marquand)--that the French
are fighting for what belongs to them while the Americans are fighting for
nothing--is ludicrous, since colonialists have no right other than that of brute
force to the land they move in on and exploit, the sequence nevertheless provides an
effective historical dimension conspicuously absent from the first Apocalypse
Now.
In its new
incarnation, Apocalypse Now is still a mess, but it has become
a more artistically coherent mess. The addition of this new material
adds a considerable narrative density to Coppola's film, as if missing pieces
had been restored to a puzzle. Probably the most significant gain is that the
sense of everything becoming more and more crazy as the boat pursues its
journey is far more emphatic than it ever was before. Just as in Joseph
Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now's main source
of inspiration, physical distance corresponds to a descent into madness which
is also a regression to the barbaric origins of human society.
Yet the total effect of the film is not that of
a dramatic crescendo leading up to the discovery of Kurtz and his killing by
Willard so much as the unfolding of a nightmare in which the characters have
lost the ability to exercise any control over their actions. The
dramatis personae here are not those of a historical tragedy--not even the
would-be Übermensch Kurtz--but zombies carrying out the
incomprehensible orders of masters unknown to them. Unintentionally,
the film in this way offers a surprising illustration of the thesis advanced
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus that "The
only modern myth is that of the zombies...."
The idea of modern warfare as a waking
nightmare underlies the action of many twentieth century war novels--perhaps
most strikingly Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead--but the
stylistic means Coppola employs to convey this idea in Apocalypse Now
fail to live up to the task. Whenever the film tries to be hallucinatory, it
only gets hallucinogenic, with its swirling clouds of colored smoke and flashing
lights. At some moments, the Vietnam War as it is depicted in Apocalypse
Now resembles nothing so much as a 1960s rock concert run amok, and this
indebtedness to the drug culture of the period is one of the things which
irreparably vitiates the movie today.
This weakness is
further exacerbated by the excessive role played by metaphor in Apocalypse
Now. To borrow a distinction from
linguistics, many war films are metonymic--the two best war films of the last
twenty years, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence
Malick's The Thin Red Line, are prototypic examples--in which one
specific action or campaign serves as the representative for an entire war. By
contrast, in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the Civil War functions
as a metaphor for a more basic political conflict in the United States, just
as in Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on
the Western Front World War I functions as a metaphor for the horrors of
war in an absolute sense.
But Coppola wants to recklessly pile metaphors
on top of one another. The trip in search of Kurtz is
a metaphor for the Vietnam War itself, but if the war is in turn a metaphor
for everything that has gone wrong with the United States during the course of
its historical development, then the failure of the American dream
metaphorically indicates some profound ontological flaw in the nature of
things. Coppola's desire to pile metaphors on top of one another in
this way shows up most drastically with the appearance of Kurtz, who is no
longer the mystery man of Conrad's anti-imperialist allegory, but Captain Ahab
raging at the injustice of the Almighty.
Having said all that,
I still have to confess my admiration for the picture, which is far more
imaginative and ambitious than the majority of movies produced since it first
came out, and which easily overshadows all of this summer's other releases.
Coppola and his collaborators have done a remarkable job of expanding and
restoring the film, and the result on screen is more than worthy of their
labors. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography looks ravishing in the dye transfer
prints struck by Technicolor®, and the great soundtrack created by Walter
Murch can now be heard at its best played through the THX system. If there is
any one motion picture that has appeared since the beginning of the year that
I would unconditionally recommend to all serious viewers, Apocalypse Now
Redux is certainly it.
The acting was always
one of Apocalypse Now's
strong points, and it looks, generally speaking, even more impressive in the
new version. I thought Martin Sheen gave a nearly flawless
performance as Willard when I first saw the film, and re-seeing him only
strengthened that conviction. What I noticed this time around--which I had not
particularly picked up on before--is that he bears an uncanny resemblance to
Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity in some shots. Robert
Duvall's more than slightly over the top performance as Lt. Colonel Kilgore
requires no comment, but Albert Hall as Chief and Laurence Fishburne--now of Matrix
fame--as Clean stand out more strongly than ever.
The joker in the deck, is of course, Marlon
Brando in the role of Kurtz, whose romantic interpretation contrasts rather
sharply with the basically low-key, realistic interpretations of their roles
by the other actors. But this discordance only reflects the more basic
unresolved contradictions in Coppola's total conception of the movie. Brando
is perhaps more faithful to Coppola's idea of Kurtz than Coppola himself could
have wanted, but the effect didn't seem a very happy one back in 1980, and I
still don't find it convincing.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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