Tetro - Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is no stranger to family sagas, having gifted the world with the operatic sweep of the Godfather films. Tetro, his latest film, is tragedy on a slightly smaller scale but it marks a return to form for the filmmaker after two decades of work ranging from disappointing to middling. With a strong screenplay and great performances all around, Tetro manages to be both an intensely personal and rather moving family drama, and a meditation on the act of creating art.

The story centers on two brothers reunited after a long estrangement. The elder is Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who fled the family and has essentially cut ties with them and now lives in Argentina with his girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdu); the younger is Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), who has long idolized his brother and dreamed of their reunion. Tetro is not happy to see Bennie, goes out of his way to make him feel unwelcome, and basically pushes him to go home. Bennie, however, is determined to stay and learn the reason behind his brother’s self-imposed exile.

Tetro was once a writer and his unfinished work, inspired by the family troubles that drove him away, seems to have also driven him a little insane. Miranda relates that the first time she met Tetro was in her capacity as a mental health worker and in flashbacks we see him clutching his handwritten manuscript, looking like a man on the verge. Bennie finds the manuscript, written in code, and begins working to decipher it, hoping to find the answers to the questions that have long plagued him.

Bennie has always known his father, famed composer Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandaeur), to be a difficult man, a man whose happiness seems rooted in lording his success over those closest to him, including his brother and his sons. Flashbacks show him diminishing his eldest son’s dreams of becoming a writer and, even worse, seducing the woman Tetro loves, the woman who later becomes Bennie’s mother. It is an act of selfishness but also, perhaps, of revenge. Other flashbacks reveal that Tetro was driving the night his own mother was killed in a car accident.

The screenplay, written by Coppola (his first original screenplay since 1974’s The Conversation), weaves itself around these family secrets, teasing us as it moves back and forth between building up the family’s fraught and complicated history and exploring the ways that history continues to effect and define the brothers in the present day. There is an interesting scene near the middle of the film in which Tetro comes home to find Bennie and Miranda spending time together. There’s an odd tension to the scene, to Tetro’s reaction particularly, that is ambiguous until the end of the film, when informed by later scenes. Tetro is ultimately a film that is layered in such a way that it’s an even more rewarding experience on subsequent viewings when you can more closely examine how intricately constructed it is.

The plot plays out like Greek tragedy but the film itself has a very modern sensibility. It is very self-referential in that much of its concern is with how stories are created and who can claim authorship of them. After he’s deciphered Tetro’s manuscript, Bennie takes the next step and creates an ending for the unfinished work. His brother is furious – it is his work, after all – but Bennie argues that since the story is based on their family history, it belongs to him as much as it does to Tetro and therefore he has just as much right to give it an ending. We learn that this is ultimately what Tetro feared and fled from, the ending that signals not only the conclusion of his novel but also the conclusion of the family in its current form. Coppola deals with these complexities in an efficient and compelling way and finds the right balance between giving the actors – all of whom are excellent – enough room to breathe and make his presence as a storyteller known. Though Tetro does not quite reach the heights of his best films, it is proof positive that despite a few disappointing outings in recent years, he is still a vital and interesting filmmaker.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: