Youth Without Youth (2008)

Stars: Tim Roth and Bruno Ganz

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Plugs: None

I have a slightly higher appreciation of (or tolerance for) art films than the average filmgoer. Generic studio blockbuster fare holds little interest for me, and I like artists who try something new, personal, and different. Having said that, Francis Ford Coppola's new film—his most personal and first in a decade—Youth Without Youth is pretty bad.

Youth Without Youth starts out with an interesting and promising premise: A depressed and aged Hungarian linguist named Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is reflecting on this life's unfinished work. Soon he heads to Budapest planning to kill himself, but gets struck by lightning before he can go through with it. He ends up heavily bandaged in a hospital, and it's not just his speedy recovery that shocks him and his doctors: He actually becomes a young man again. So far so good.

Normally this is the part of the review where I continue the plot synopsis, but after the first half hour the plot gets so convoluted that I'd need an extra two pages of space (and an extra fifteen minutes of your time) to really untangle the story into something comprehensible. I'll try to summarize: Dominic soon finds he has amazing psychic powers, and can learn the content of books simply by waving his hand over them. He romances several women; creates (or imagines, it's never clear) a double of himself, an evil twin if you will, with whom he has occasional conversations; the Nazis try to kidnap Dominic but he escapes to Switzerland, where he continues his life's work involving ancient languages; by happenstance he meets a woman who is soon in a car wreck—the vehicle was struck by lightning, of course—and who, upon awakening from unconsciousness, speaks the ancient language Sanskit. They decide she is the reincarnated spirit of a seventh-century Indian guru; they fall in love, and Dominic regresses her through various ancient lives in search of some ultimate "protolanguage" that will complete his life's work.

If you think following that is difficult, try watching it for over two hours. The film seems to be a meditation on Aging and Love and Immortality and Death and the Illusion of Time… I'm sure it all made sense to Coppola after a few bottles of merlot from his winery, but the result is a pretentious jumble of symbolism, shamanism, half-baked ideas, arbitrary plot twists, and red herrings. It's never clear where the film is going, or why. Dominic doesn't even seem curious about his sudden immortality or amazing powers. Is Dominic insane? What's going on? After the first hour, I stopped caring.

The existential novella the script was based on would be considered unfilmable, and that evaluation is right on the money. In the last issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine, Coppola gives a hint into what went wrong when discussed his writing method on Youth Without Youth: "I write five or six pages off some idea that provokes me…then the next morning I pick up the work, again without reading, and go on writing. See, I don't start re-reading and worrying it is bad and start rewriting constantly." While Coppola is a talented writer, the process seems to have failed him in this case; I suspect that when he finally got around to reading and critiquing what he'd written, he had already fallen in love with all the work he'd done.

Youth Without Youth is not as excruciatingly awful as, say, Dreamcatcher or Evan Almighty. It is saved from being a total disaster because of Roth's acting and Coppola's direction, but that doesn't mean it's worth watching. There's nothing wrong with a film being challenging, demanding patience and attention of its viewers. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with making a personal piece of art just for yourself. But screenwriters and filmmakers have an obligation to not waste the time and money of their audience, to provide the entertainment that they promise. As a personal, pet project of Coppola's that need only satisfy (and make sense to) him, Youth Without Youth is fine. As a film that audiences are expected to endure, it's just cinematic masturbation.