Francis Ford Coppola
Every couple of years,
Francis Ford Coppola's devoted fans--and such people still exist--do something
heartbreaking: They see his new film. This month has brought the latest Coppola
punishment, The Rainmaker . Or rather, John Grisham's The
Rainmaker , a title that tells you everything you need to know about the
movie.
Critics are greeting
Coppola's film--the usual Grisham tale of an idealistic young lawyer
slingshotting a Goliath--with a desperate generosity. Casting about for
something nice to say, most reviewers have hit upon the conclusion that
J.G.'s The Rainmaker is better than the "typical" Hollywood movie (by
which they mean it has fewer automatic weapons, fewer car chases, and more
character actors than regular fare does). One well-meaning critic called it the
best Grisham movie since The Firm . This is sad: Francis Ford Coppola,
the director of The Godfather , The Godfather Part II , The
Conversation , Rumble Fish , and Apocalypse Now and the winner
of five Academy Awards, is being praised for making the second-best John
Grisham movie.
What's
even sadder: The Rainmaker is actually much better than most of
Coppola's recent work. In the past 15 years, he's become the most hackish of
the studio hacks. His last dozen films have ranged from bombastic dreck
( Bram Stoker's Dracula , The Godfather Part III , The Cotton
Club ) to infantile dreck ( Jack , Captain Eo ) to biographical
dreck ( Tucker: The Man and His Dream ) to pretentious dreck ( One From
the Heart , New York Stories ). He has also been producer for an
astonishing volume of bad cinema and television, including NBC's The
Odyssey ; the 1992 movie Wind ; and White Dwarf , a sci-fi movie
for Fox.
Despite this record of unadulterated mediocrity, a fog of
optimism continues to envelop Coppola. Rainmaker reviewers are saying
the same thing about Coppola that they said when Jack opened in 1996,
when The Godfather Part III opened in 1990, when Tucker opened in
1988: He's ready to make his comeback. This movie, it is promised, will be
Coppola's last as a studio lackey. Soon he will return with his own project,
independent of Hollywood's morons, and make the great movie that They
have stopped him from making since the late '70s. (Coppola is cryptic about
what this project will be, but there are vague rumors about Megalopolis ,
a long-planned film comparing Imperial Rome and modern Manhattan. Other rumors
have him filming Jack Kerouac's On the Road .) The optimists are sure to
be disappointed--they misdiagnose the cause of Coppola's illness.
People
continue to believe in Coppola because he is the romantic archetype of the
movie director. He has embedded himself in the mythology of the film industry
like no director since Orson Welles or D.W. Griffith. Coppola made his name as
the director who would risk everything--his fortune, his family, even his
sanity--for his art. During the '70s and the '80s, Coppola bucked Hollywood by
opening his own studio, American Zoetrope. It was a doomed enterprise but a
noble one: For a few years, Coppola did free himself and his protégés from
Hollywood's thrall. In the late '70s, he cemented his reputation as an Artist
with Apocalypse Now . He gave himself a nervous breakdown, gave Martin
Sheen a heart attack, and spent $16 million of his own money to complete the
picture. (His Apocalypse Now lunacy is brilliantly chronicled in the
documentary Hearts of Darkness .) In the early '80s, Coppola drove
himself into bankruptcy again for One From the Heart , his beloved
musical romance. He made a black-and-white movie ... for kids ( Rumble
Fish ). Coppola has made more actors into stars than any 10 other directors
combined, and he has pioneered technology (notably video editing) that other
filmmakers have come to rely on. In person, Coppola is expansive, generous, a
brilliant talker, a salesman. He is, in short, the very model of what a movie
maker should be.
This vision of Coppola as romantic genius makes
it very easy to rationalize his failures as poor accountancy. "His career can
be summed up as the case of a man who needed a financial manager," says Roger
Ebert. Coppola spent much of the '80s in bankruptcy, driven there by the
failure of One From the Heart and his studio's collapse. So of course he
became a hired gun: He needed to pay his debts. According to the mythology,
Coppola was given third-rate scripts and managed to transform them into
second-rate entertainment like The Cotton Club , Gardens of Stone ,
and Peggy Sue Got Married . (Coppola, who had been notorious for
delivering his own movies late and over budget, earned a reputation as a
reliable director. He stuck to his budgets, and almost all his studio movies,
even the reprehensible Jack , earned money.)
Coppola
too buys into the notion that he would have kept making great movies if only
he'd been debt free. He's obsessed with the notion of artistic purity. The
Rainmaker is a two-hour tribute to the idea of not selling out. (Click on
the graphic to see the movie's emotional climax, when the young lawyer hero
confronts the old lawyer villain about selling out.) In recent interviews,
Coppola has upbraided himself for his own .
But Coppola may be misjudging the reason why he's made so
many bad movies. He thinks that selling out--making movies for financial rather
than artistic reasons--has put a crimp in his style. But he has always been a
sellout. Or, to put it more kindly, the quality of his movies has never
depended on whether the movies were sellouts or not. Some of Coppola's
"personal" movies are magnificent ( The Conversation and, arguably,
Apocalypse Now ). But others are dreadful ( One From the Heart ,
Tucker ). Some of Coppola's sellout movies are dreadful ( The Cotton
Club , Jack ...). But Coppola's two greatest movies, the
Godfather s, were studio-funded, studio-managed projects. The
Godfather , in fact, was the quintessential sellout: Paramount picked
Coppola to direct the movie because he would work for cheap. Why would he work
for cheap? Because he had just bankrupted himself making a disastrous
independent movie called The Rain People .
Coppola
has become a studio hack for much more banal reasons. He got older, mellower,
more respectable. He has his estates, his winery, his Belize resort, his
merchandise. It's impossible to imagine today's Coppola driving himself or his
actors the way he did during the filming of Apocalypse Now . He also
seems to lack the inspiration for a grand project. His last truly personal
movies were Tucker , back in 1988, and One From the Heart , back in
1982. Neither was good.
Recently Coppola said, "People want me so badly
to do something truly astounding. To show them something they haven't seen
before. I would like to do that, and I really believe I can do it."
This may be the heart of
Coppola's dilemma. He views his life as a story of unfulfilled promise, the
tale of an artist constrained by commerce. It isn't. Coppola's life is the
story of fulfilled promise. He made two of the greatest, if not the two
greatest, movies in American history. These were triumphs enough for any
career. It is Coppola's tragedy that he believes his best work is always ahead
of him, yet keeps on making Rainmaker s.
