Thought, Feeling, and the Cinema of Francis Ford Coppola: the Rain People As Exemplum
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CHAPTER 12 THOUGHT, FEELING, AND THE CINEMA OF FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: THE RAIN PEOPLE AS EXEMPLUM The Coppolas, Francis Ford and his daughter, Sophia, both have the same artistic problem: neither is a thinker. The father has always been short on thought; indeed, he stumbles when he thinks, when he thinks he’s thinking. The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990) was strongest in its execution—also its executions—not in its adolescent implications of analogy between the Mafia and corporate capitalism (an analogy that ignores, among other things, the origins of the Mafia and its blood bonds of loyalty, which have nothing to do with capitalism). The Conversation (1974) faltered in its Orwellian idea-structure. And in Apocalypse Now (1979), the attempts to dramatize private moral agony and general moral abyss during the Vietnam War were disjointed, assumptive, weak, for all of Vittorio Storaro’s aptly hallucinogenic color cinematography. Even Coppola’s scripts for others have suffered from woolly thinking: his screenplay for Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, turned Fitzgerald’s supple suggestiveness into mindless blatancy; and his scenario for Franklin Schaffner’s Patton (1970) presented the glaringly contradictory nature of this famous general as praiseworthy, even fathomless, complexity. That’s the top of the heap. From there, we head down to Coppola’s blotchy script for René Clément’s Is Paris Burning? (1966), a rambling, pseudo-documentary recreation of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. Then we get to the adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ This Property Is Condemned and Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, for Sydney Pollack (1966) and John Huston (1967) respectively, in which Coppola—who began his career in the early 1960s as a director of short sex films—manages to denude the world of Southern Gothicism of all but its trash, its kinkiness, and its pretense. As for Coppola fille, her first film, The Virgin Suicides (2000), attempted to render the mystery—and the metaphor—of multiple, teenaged female suicide in one American family, even as the paterfamilias had once tried to poeticize troubled teenaged boys in both The Outsiders (1982) and Rumble Fish (1983). But the real mystery of Sophia Coppola’s picture was the year in which it took place, 1975, which seemed irrelevant to its action; and, where adolescent suicide is concerned, The Virgin Suicides describes the symptom of teen angst but doesn’t penetrate any cause outside the family circle, though it would have us believe that these siblings’ deaths are the result of something seriously amiss in society at large. In fact, the 125 Chapter 12 daughter’s maiden directorial effort suffers from the same mimetic fallacy as her father’s Conversation. To wit, the sound technician in Coppola Sr.’s movie is made flavorless and monomaniacal: a man without a “personal” life even with the woman he beds, a lifeless figure set up so that life can visibly invade him. Thus a flavorless electronic- surveillance expert supplies us with one flavorless episode after another. Ditto the mindless Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, whose deaths are equivalent to the destruction of the elm trees that line their street: they are lovely and it may be sad to lose them, but since these five girls (like their parents) have no inner life or spiritual depth—at the same time as they are paradoxically self-absorbed—they cannot have any emotional or intellectual connection to the external, wider world around them and therefore cannot really interest us. Unlike the protagonist of The Conversation, however, they are invaded not by visible life but by shadowy death. Sophia Coppola’s second picture was the lovely but wildly overpraised Lost in Translation (2003), which won most of its awards—from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Directors’ Guild of America, among others—for want of competition. Some people seemed at the time to have forgotten that this movie had been made earlier: to name only two distant examples, David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) hover in the air above it; and, not so long before Lost in Translation, we were given Audrey Wells’s Guinevere (1999), Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), and Fran Rubel Kuzui’s Tokyo Pop (1988). Coppola’s characters, if not her setting, may very much be her own (it is in this sense that her screenplay is original, whereas she adapted the script of The Virgin Suicides from a novel), but that borrowed setting happens not to complement the story fully and thus is another instance of a shortage of thought in a Coppola family film. Francis Ford Coppola was the executive producer of Lost in Translation, and I wonder if, during its production, he flashed back to the second film that he wrote and directed, when he was around thirty years old, even as his daughter made her second picture at about the same age. (Sophia was born in 1972, her father in 1939; he made his first feature, the light comedy You’re a Big Boy Now, in 1967, and, like The Virgin Suicides, it was adapted by its director from a novel.) I bring this matter up not only because the two movies, Lost in Translation and The Rain People (1969), have some narrative elements in common, but also because The Rain People is Coppola Sr.’s most fully realized if least spectacular film. It is more successful artistically than his films to follow because it is filled, not with thought, the attempt at thinking, or gaps in an ideational framework, but with feeling. (Sadly and surprisingly, The Rain People was immediately preceded by a film that Coppola directed but did not write or adapt, Finian’s Rainbow [1968], a rendition of the hit Broadway musical that featured neither thought nor feeling—like Coppola’s other, later movie musical, the disastrous One From the Heart [1982].) Quite unlike his subsequent, make-work adaptation of John Grisham’s similarly titled The Rainmaker (1997), The Rain People has been called a “personal” picture, 126.