Lost Youth

In his return to filmmaking, Francis Ford Coppola thinks big without thinking.

by Sam Adams

GONE WITH THE WINDING: Tim Roth starts aging backward and stops making sense. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In interviews about Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola has described the film using words like "little" and "experimental," which seems his way of saying, "Take it easy on me, folks." After making several stabs at commercial success, the last of which was a John Grisham adaptation, Coppola withdrew from filmmaking, tinkering with his legacy instead of extending it.

Youth Without Youth is not a timid return. Based on a novel by Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade, the story spans decades and continents. Through the tale of Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), an elderly linguist who begins to age backward after he is struck by lightning, it attempts to address the origins of language and consciousness itself. Adapting it would be a tall order for a filmmaker at the peak of his powers, which by most reckoning makes Coppola about 20 years too late.

Before his transformation, Dominic is in despair. He feels his life beginning to slip away, leaving his greatest achievements unfinished. "Sometimes, I admit to myself it will never be possible to finish my life's work," he laments. So despondent is he that he plans to end his own life, perhaps to exercise a final degree of control. But a jolt of electricity diverts him from his fatal errand, and he finds he is rejuvenated in mind and body.

Coppola has made no secret of his personal attraction to the character of Dominic, and Youth Without Youth does exhibit a vigor that, for lack of a better term, one might call youthful. Coppola and his cinematographer, 30-year-old Mihai Malaimare, aggressively manipulate their color palettes: The scenes of Dominic's convalescence, where Bruno Ganz's off-kilter doctor diagnoses him as being in a "larval state," are bathed in a honeyed glow; the scenes when he awakes in the night, unsure of what the purpose of his improbably extended life might be, are draped in a cold, antiseptic blue.

The trouble is that these effects are laid on with a trowel, the same tool with which Coppola applies Youth Without Youth's thematic underpinnings. Ideas turn up in great, undigested chunks; Dominic makes several references to "post-historic man" without venturing a hint as to what the concept might involve. The most thankless vehicle for the movie's themes is Alexandra Maria Lara, last seen opposite Sam Riley in Control, who plays a handful of roles: the lost love of Dominic's younger days; a woman named Veronica whom he meets years later, who is her exact duplicate; and, maybe, a seventh-century mystic named Rupini, who takes possession of her body after she, too, is struck by lightning.

Rather than regressing personally, Veronica moves backward through time in a series of trances, speaking in tongues that move progressively closer to the origins of language. As she nears what Dominic calls the "proto-language," the unrecorded tongue from which all subsequent languages sprang, Dominic himself has begun to take notes in a dialect of his own invention, giving rise to thoughts that transgress the boundaries of the spoken word.

There may be ideas lurking underneath all of this, but the way Coppola spews them out in large vomitous chunks makes them come off as so much mumbo-jumbo. The movie's parts seem to have little to do with one another, and certainly never congeal into a satisfying or even intelligible whole. The actors, not surprisingly, rarely seem to know what to do with themselves, although Ganz projects a private amusement that seems to transgress the bounds of his character.

It would be wonderful if Coppola had been struck by his own lightning bolt, if the years away had built up in him a fervent need to say or show something, and the accumulated clarity to convey them. But Youth Without Youth tries to say too much and garbles its words. At least he can take comfort in the fact that the movie's mistakes feel like those of a young man, one so enthused with a book he's just read he can barely catch his breath to explain it.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Youth Without Youth

Written and directed by Francis Ford CoppolaA Sony Classics releaseOpens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse