There are many great films in the world--not enough, but many. They are captivating and complex and well-made. They are the reason that I go to the movies, hoping that I will stumble across some hidden gem waiting to present the world to me in a new light. But of all of these great movies there are a select precious few--it would take me some moments to even compose a list--which reach that highest level of filmmaking, and then transcend it, broadening the way in which we view the cinema as an area of artistry and storytelling. These are the dearest and greatest of all films, and in my opinion Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is one of them.
The Vietnam War is to Americans what WWII is to the British or the French, an anathema that has transfixed us in its inability to be understood by those who weren't there. Consequently, movie after movie has been made on it, trying in some way to make sense of it all and impart to ignorant audiences why it was such a life-altering phenomenon. In the minds of these men the jungle was a personal and collective hell, reshaping the way they saw their fellow man as well as themselves. Adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Coppola presents us with his own journey into the blackest pits of men's souls.
Martin Sheen stars Capt. Benjamin Willard, a dislocated man in Saigon, stuck in the limbo of his first and second tour. Called before his colonel, he is told of the brilliant, enigmatic Col. Kurtz, a green beret who has gone AWOL and completely insane, setting himself as a god in the eyes of a small tribe in the jungle. His practices being "unsound" by any humane standards, Willard is instructed to terminate Kurtz "with extreme prejudice." Commanding a small boat with four other soldiers, Willard begins his plunge in the forest and his own heart of darkness, an ultimately existential journey where we learn the breaking point of a man.
A cacophony of light, sound, and powerful imagery accentuate Coppola's sprawling, grand, and terribly brilliant epic. The director's cut clocks in at just shy of three and half hours, neatly divided into three acts, giving time to unfold in its enormous, almost hallucinatory manner. Here is ultra-realism told in a lyrical way, combining great artistry and great horror into one of the best war pictures ever made.
Beginning the film one cannot imagine the path that it will finally take. It opens with Willard in his hotel room, drunk or high in his underwear, doing a chaotic dance, sobbing and eventually breaking his mirror with his fist--all of which was unscripted. It sets the tone of a film about shattered men, but we've seen this before, particularly in "The Deer Hunter". We cannot, however, foresee to what great depths we will be brought. This is especially true when Willard sets down in the jungle, meeting Lt Col. Kilgore (played perfectly by Robert Duvall), a loud, brash and untouchable man with an affinity for surfing. Amidst one of the most incredible battle scenes I've ever watched, Duvall keeps the spirit of the film high, even jocular, even though the carnage is great. The film still carries the smell of a novel by this point.
But by the second act our small group of five is on their own, the story grows darker, and a deeply personal exploration of loss and devolution begins. What struck me possibly more than anything else is the fascinating way in which this mammoth movie is both epic in its sheer size and spectacle, but also supremely intimate. Beyond the sets and explosions and impossibly large themes we never once lose sight of the characters, or the intent that all of these scenes we witness are there to shape these men. Coppola never forgets his goal of making an introspective film, and never does he leave them behind for the sake of shooting terrific battles. In the end an army is made up of human beings, and that's the point.
As we travel down the river with Willard and the boys, the film becomes tighter, more claustrophobic until that point in which we meet Kurtz. The script sets high standards, praising him in a way that surely no man meet, and an actor was needed who shared that same sort of mystery and brilliance. Marlon Brando, though in the film for probably no more than fifteen minutes total, proves once again he is the great wonder of the cinema, engulfing his scenes with controlled, incendiary power. The final scene of the film left my nerves scattered.
There are a lot of stories which have circulated about the making of "Apocalypse Now" and I am inclined to believe most of them. Filming was reportedly supposed to take five months, and ended up taking sixteen. By the end of it all Coppola threatened to commit suicide. What I am most compelled to accept that there was a lot of drugs on set, and this amazing cast, also featuring Lawrence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper, went slightly crazy in the making of the movie. It would be hard not to, stuck in the heat of the jungles of the Philippines with all the perks of being actors. Many of them, namely Brando, were already crazy to begin with, and I have no doubt that some of them were pushed over the edge, fueled by the content of the story.
Coppola shot well over two hundred hours of footage, and parried down has one of the most sweeping, emotionally powerful results it has ever been my great pleasure to watch. The word "masterpiece" gets touted around far too often (I myself throw it about far more than I should), but if this isn't a masterpiece then we need to have a rethinking of what that word actually means.
4/4
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