Two years ago, Francis Ford Coppola returned to filmmaking with the small, self-financed “Youth Without Youth,” about an elderly professor who gets younger after being hit by lightning.
While it was exciting to see such a master director striking out on his own and defying Hollywood conventions, the result was laughable in its self-seriousness, and the visuals too often looked cheesy.
His second effort in this same stripped-down vein, “Tetro,” is gorgeous to behold with its lustrous black-and-white and splashes of bold color, but the tone remains pretentious. The air is nearly suffocating with artistic angst and aspirations of Greek tragedy, but the film’s third-act revelations of long-held family secrets seem hollow instead of profound.
Coppola may have a real find, though, in Alden Ehrenreich, whose looks and demeanor recall a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Ehrenreich stars as Bennie, a 17-year-old who shows up at the Buenos Aires apartment of his estranged older brother, Tetro (a brooding Vincent Gallo), who left home and severed ties with the family more than a decade ago. Once a promising writer, the volatile Tetro now scribbles stories (in backward scrawl, for some reason) but never finishes them.
“He’s like a genius but with none of the accomplishments,” Tetro’s girlfriend explains in a rare moment of levity.
Bennie and Tetro are both literally and metaphorically running from the intimidating shadow of their abusive father (Klaus Maria Brandauer), an accomplished orchestra conductor who’s had a competitive relationship with his own brother, also a musician. (Coppola’s father was a composer and his uncle is an opera conductor, but he has said he only used them and their sibling rivalry as a leaping-off point for his script, the first he’s written since 1974’s “The Conversation.”)
While Tetro treats Bennie rudely and only reluctantly lets him stay for a few days, his warm girlfriend, Miranda (the uniquely lovely Maribel Verdu), welcomes him and takes him under her wing. The maternal vibe she feels toward him is impossible to miss, as is Bennie’s attraction to her, one of the film’s many obvious Oedipal themes.
But as he stays on with Tetro and Miranda, he begins to probe his own past, glimmers of which Coppola recreates in blazing colors, especially deep reds. Visually, it’s a striking contrast with the crisp black-and-white that dominates the film (the work of cinematographer Mihai Malamaire Jr.) — a classic and structured cinematic look, even while the dialogue remains contemporary and natural.
And as Bennie finds out who he is and where he comes from, the parallels between his relationship with Tetro and their father’s tense one-upmanship with his own brother are too facile. This is especially true when Bennie takes up writing himself, finishing one of Tetro’s works and turning it into a play that, out of nowhere, receives praise from an influential literary critic (Carmen Maura) and becomes a top contender for an important prize.
By the time we reach the final melodramatic scene — in which Bennie nearly ends up in the same sort of accident that put Tetro in a leg cast at the film’s start — the heavy symbolism of binding family ties becomes too much to bear.