One From The Heart

[bix171]

Still a bust, even two decades later. Francis Ford Coppola’s Las Vegas fantasy is not so much an attempt to reimagine the movie musical as it is to modernize it, but the results are carelessly half-formed, dreary and with barely any consideration for its audience. It’s the last word in filmic chutzpah. Shot entirely on a soundstage, Coppola’s artificial Vegas has a cramped, stifling hothouse look to it and seems little more than a variation of the sets from “West Side Story”—you half-expect the Sharks and Jets to stage a rumble in the middle of the Strip. Coppola further attempts to stylize his film by framing the story with a suite of songs sung (lethargically) by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle; they’re all downers that spotlight the unflattering white-trash aspects of the protagonists and their seemingly pointless dreams. The protagonists are played by the miscast Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest, a townie couple whose romance has faded and who turn to their fantasy ideals (played by Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski) as a means of escaping their oppressed lives. Perhaps it’s the characters’ disconnect or the performers’ overall lack of execution (the exception being Julia’s charming low-rent playboy, handled like a true professional) but so little happens to suggest there’s any depth to be on the lookout for. Instead, the film seems arbitrary, especially when the script (co-written by the director and Armyan Bernstein) allows digressions such as crazed dance numbers that seem appallingly improvised. Outside of Gregory Jein’s miniatures of the famous hotel neon signs in the opening credits, there’s less than meets the eye: Coppola’s experimentation with the then-nascent video technology is not very impressive, with trickery that seems obvious in its cleverness.