Blogorium Review: Youth Without Youth

I was sort of surprised to hear that Coppola was making another movie after all this time. He hasn't actually directed anything since The Rainmaker, but most of us really remember Bram Stoker's Dracula, a movie that sharply divides his fans (for the record, I think it plays fast and loose with the novel, but I dig it), so to come back fifteen years later was a giant question mark for a lot of people. Would this be the triumphant return of the director of Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, and The Conversation? Or were we going to see another Jack*, or worse, The Godfather Part III**.

So how is Youth Without Youth? I liked it, although I'm having a hard time boiling it down into ways of explaining why. Part of it has to do with the story, which is based on a novel by Mircea Eliade. I'm not an expert on Eliade, but I do know a bit about his theories on religion and the "sacred and the profane". That just barely prepares you for Youth Without Youth.

There are a whole lot of narrative and philosophical threads bouncing around in the film, which is on the surface about a seventy year old man being struck by lightning, which restores his youth. It also gives him certain supernatural powers, and fractures his identity, creating a "double". What's interesting is unlike most films that deal with doubles or people who have super powers, Youth Without Youth isn't all that interested in dwelling on them. The double, so often a device for nefarious purposes, is here more to act as a greek chorus for Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) as he makes sense of his mutation.

Youth Without Youth begins as a sort of World War Two thriller; when the Nazis discover Matei, the first third of the film is sort of a tense chase film. Then it shifts abruptly from the 1940s to 1955, when Matei meets a kindred spirit in a woman who lives through a similar lightning strike. Instead of exhibiting powers, she goes into hypnotic states, channeling increasingly archaic people and languages. She also seems to be a manifestation of the woman Matei lost as a young man, although the film is preoccupied enough that you might forget that.

I'm going to stop trying to recap the movie, because this already sounds contrived, and Youth Without Youth isn't nearly as cut and dried as this. Coppola plays with our perception of what is dream, what is fact, and where we are chronologically in the movie. He's also still got an amazing eye for composition and for creating images that are breathtaking. I haven't seen a movie that used such deep blues since Soderbergh's The Underneath, and this is a much better movie than Underneath.

Ultimately, I think this is a promising first step for Coppola, and I sense Youth Without Youth is more rewarding with multiple viewings. It's not that I didn't enjoy it the first time, but being able to watch it again and not focus so hard on soaking everything in should be advantageous. Watch it, but understand that parts of it require paying more attention than the average viewer is interested in doing.


* If you don't remember Jack (and I don't blame you), that'd be the movie about Robin Williams playing a child who ages rapidly and is entering the fifth grade. For a dramedy, it's neither funny nor touching.

** For the record, while I can't honestly argue with any criticism directed at Godfather III, I do kind of admire Coppola's attempt to push the saga of the Corleone family into Shakespearean territory.