Musical homages, overblown melodrama and ludicrous characters — Coppola’s latest is suitably overblown

Tetro

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The second film in the “second career” that Francis Ford Coppola began after a 10-year hiatus from directing, Tetro bears a far greater resemblance to the heroic comeback that the old lion’s admirers had hoped to find in his 2007 headscratcher Youth Without Youth. While this semi-autobiographical drama — which also counts as Coppola’s first self-penned film since 1974’s The Conversation — may not be strong enough to stand alongside the man’s classics, it’s still rich with wonder, imagination and deeply felt emotion.

Tetro also serves as a vital reminder of the acting talents of Vincent Gallo, a man who’s attracted the same kind of poisonous PR that often afflicted Coppola’s career. Excelling in a role that the director originally intended for Matt Dillon, Gallo gives a bold, sensitive and thoroughly charismatic performance as the titular Tetro, a tortured writer who’s forced to contend with his family’s stormy history when his younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) shows up on his doorstep in Buenos Aires.

Though most of the film is in black-and-white, flashbacks in colour depict both brothers’ conflicts with their imperious father (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a famous conductor. These scenes turn out to be the movie’s weakest, but at least the family’s musical milieu justifies the operatic intensity of the emotions, as well as Coppola’s often ingenious homages to The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann, the musical film fantasias of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The latter sequences add to the film’s unabashedly old-fashioned feel. Bold, bustling and big-hearted, Tetro has the gusto of a ’40s melodrama, albeit one that occasionally allows elements of the surreal — and the frankly ludicrous, such as Carmen Maura’s appearance as an ultra-glamorous book critic — to intrude on the action.

It’s hard to gripe about such excesses when nearly every frame of the film testifies to Coppola’s eagerness to delight and surprise not just his audience but also himself. The only sensible reaction is to give the man a toast, preferably with one of his own wines.