Cinema Canada (Aug 1979)

before. We go a little further, we get a little stranger until, after a while, you are in a place where you've never been before.’ I was given the biggest compliment by a guy who was in Vietnam, a serious man who told me, ‘Now when people ask me what Vietnam was like, I can tell them to go see that film.’ That’s what I’m most proud of about the Vietnam aspect; it is the truth, it was an acid trip, it was crazy.” Francis Coppola “He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’ ” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness “one last chopper revved it up, lifted offand flew out of my chest... no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there.” Michael Herr, Dispatches The curtains are still drawn yet the sound of the jungle already fills the hall: crickets, macaques and beetles weave their chants into the sparse opening bars of The Doors’ apocalyptical song “The End.” The curtains part and give way to a shimmering row of palm trees bordering the Southeast Asian jungle. A Loach chopper, black and spider-like, floats by silently, followed by another until several crisscross the frame in a quiet, technological ballet. The face of a sleeping man appears, superimposed, then the egg-beater rhythms, of an overhead fan mixes with the Loach props as the fly-by goes on in the jungle. The music builds to a first spacey crescendo, suddenly, the green erupts in a torrent of napalm fire, the smell of victory, the answer to every grunt’s prayers. The nightmare journey of Apocalypse Now has begun. The plot, adapted from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is laid out quickly. Woken from a cognac-and-vomit sleep, Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) is dispatched to the headwaters of the Mekong to kill Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Green Beret SF officer who has succumbed, in the isolation of his posting, to the temptation of playing God. Up the river Willard goes ona boat skippered by Albert Hall and manned by a Harlem street punk (Larry Fishborne), an acid-dropping Californian (Sam Bottoms) anda thirtyish ex-cook (Fred Forrest). On the trip. he runs into Lt. Col. Killer Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a hotshot helicopter commander who delights in leaving death cards on the bodies of dead V.C., into Bill Graham who’s hosting a Playboy R&R show on a floating helicopter pad and into Coppola himself as a combat television reporter. As the implements of civilized amorality are stripped away. the journey turns into a progress towards the core of the human soul where bare-faced terror hashes it out with unadulterated beauty, a confrontation with the human dialectic which has plagued us since primitive times. Coppola has removed the politics from his film to distill the basic horror of the war, exposing the underlying hypocrisy and fear that motivated the killing and scarring of millions, the devastation of two countries, and, least important of all, the expenditure of billions of dollars. But, at the same time, Coppola has captured the seductive beauty of war, of its machines and of its no-holds-barred savagery sacrilegious as that beauty might be. In the end one comes out feeling on the one hand, blameless but, on the other, ultimately responsible. Coppola has said that the film was not about Vietnam but that it was Vietnam. Though he was in part referring to the production itself (“We were in too long, overbudget and we were in a state of chaos.”), he was also indicating that the film does not pretend to involve its audience in a drama but in an experience, in a boisterous quasi-Japanese meditation on the human condition reminiscent of Kurosawa’s 50’s films (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood). The goal is met by first setting the audience off balance with surrealist images and unique sounds and then by keeping them in a state of heightened tension, giving one the. impression of not being in control, much like going through an earth tremor that lasts for three hours. With haunting and sumptuous photography that frames operatic special effects and strange incidents drawn from a vet’s notebook, Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris) fill the film with images rich in beauty yet full of horror, from a harrowing chopper strike accompanied by Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (connotations courtesy of Riefenstahl and Lang) to a free-fire zone on the edge of the chasm where, night after bloody night, grunts and V.C. face off to the tunes of Jimi Hendrix, to the smokeshrouded ruins of a Cambodian temple where Kurtz reigns over his war-painted Green Berets and ash-covered Montagnard tribesmen. As the journey progresses and the moral frames of reference dissipate, the images and incidents become more and more primitive but Coppola prevents his film from being staccato and episodic through the use of generous dissolves and superimpositions and by respecting the day/night continuum, all of which reinforce the film’s — and the audience’s journey. The soundtrack represents another innovation; through the KEY TO QUALITY KEY TO CANADA'S FINEST OPTICALS FILM OPTICALS OF CANADA LTD. 410 ADELAIDE STREET WEST TORONTO (416) 363-4987 MONTREAL (514) 937-2336 VANCOUVER (604) 687-449) Cinema Canada/15