Cinema: The Making of a Quagmire

APOCALYPSE NOW Directed by Francis Coppola Written by John Milius and Francis Coppola

Now that the movie is in the theaters, audiences are at last going to learn just why it took Francis Coppola $30 million and almost four years to finish Apocalypse Now. The answer, it turns out, is not nearly so mysterious as one might suppose. Coppola delayed the completion of his Viet Nam film for the simple reason that he could not bring off the grand work he so badly wanted to make. He tinkered right to the end—long after a lesser director would have cut his losses—but his movie remains a collection of footage. While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. It is not so much an epic account of a grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat.

The letdown is especially upsetting because Apocalypse Now seemed the ideal marriage of a major artist to an important subject. Except for Stanley Kubrick, no other contemporary American director is as gifted as Francis Coppola. In his classic Godfather films, he proved that great themes—power, family, violence, love, morality—could be expressed in the richest language of popular moviemaking.

In his thriller The Conversation, he offered the most sophisticated indictment of Watergate-era politics yet to appear onscreen. Given his talent for fusing ideas with the diverse demands of big-budget entertainment, Coppola was the only real candidate to make the definitive film about Viet Nam. Apocalypse Now promised to go beyond the narrow scope of Coming Home, beyond the wrenching drama of The Deer Hunter. These promises, though broken, can still be seen in the film. Like other legendary movie mishaps, from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, Apocalypse Now is haunted by the ghost of its creator’s high ambitions.

Coppola’s first instincts were correct: there was a fine idea for a movie here. Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Coppola wanted to portray America’s Viet Nam adventure as a literal and metaphysical journey into madness. The literal journey is taken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), an officer who is commanded to travel upriver from Saigon to Cambodia. His mission is to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once exemplary Green Beret who has now gone crazy and set up a kingdom of murder in the darkest jungle. “There is no way to tell [Kurtz’s] story without telling my own,” Willard explains early on. Coppola apparently hoped that by dramatizing both Kurtz’s and Willard’s descents into savagery, he would arrive face to face with the moral horror of the war.

Unfortunately, the director never does get around to telling the story of either character’s personal apocalypse. Instead, he uses part of Willard’s river journey as a pretext to unveil a series of large-scale, self-contained set pieces—an impersonal tour of the war front. Though these sequences do not add up to a movie, they are feverishly imagined and brilliantly shot (by Bertolucci’s favorite cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro). Indeed, the first of these war scenes may be the most spectacular battle ever created for a film. With a megalomaniacal officer (Robert Duvall) leading the charge, a cavalry of American helicopters wipes out an entire Vietnamese village. The display of aerial hardware is immense, the rush of explosions dizzying. Duvall’s tough but nutty commander would do justice to Joseph Heller: as bullets whiz by him on all sides, he engages his men in an obsessive debate about surfing.

Shocks of a more surreal nature follow. When Willard meets up with a bump-and-grind U.S.O. show in the proverbial middle of nowhere, Coppola creates a haunting spectacle of corrupt American values loose in an alien world. Later, Willard encounters a platoon of spaced-out black G.I.s who are shooting aimlessly into the night without benefit of a commanding officer. “It’s the asshole of the world,” says one fleeing soldier. Coppola’s eerie visions, sculpted out of smoke, fire and darkness, make the words real.

Yet such is the nature of the entire film that even these hallucinatory passages are not so powerful as they might be. At times they are as anesthetizing as the Viet Nam footage that once dominated TV’s evening newscasts. What is missing from these panoramas of death is a human context. There are almost no well-defined characters in Apocalypse Now. The biggest nonentity of all, sadly enough, is Willard. We are supposed to see the movie through his eyes—which are frequently superimposed on the film’s images—but those eyes tell us nothing. It is not Sheen’s fault; no one has written him a role. He is neither the initially innocent traveler of Conrad’s fiction (where the character was called Marlow) nor a hardened assassin.

Perhaps if Coppola had succeeded in his efforts to recruit a star for the part, Willard might have commanded an audience’s interest and empathy by sheer force of personal magnetism. Having no star, the director tried a more desperate solution: he commissioned Journalist Michael Herr (Dispatches) to write a narration that attempts to fill in Willard’s personality ex post facto on the sound track. That narration—alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho and antiwar—is self-contradictory and often at odds with Willard’s behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure or begin to achieve Coppola’s loftier goal of charting Willard’s tailspin into psychological terror. Eventually, the voice-over commentary becomes a makeshift panacea for the film’s many other defects: it hastily clarifies plot points and states themes that Coppola has uncharacteristically failed to develop through action, dialogue and pictures. This strategy is as hopeless as trying to glue together a $30 million airplane with wads of bubble gum.

Certainly the narration does nothing to rescue Willard’s thinly sketched crewmates (Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms and Larry Fishburne). They are typical American kids who inexplicably travel together for days without ever engaging in intimate conversation. When they go mad in the film’s second half, their transformations seem arbitrarily decreed by Coppola rather than dramatically justified. We feel nothing. Still, the crew members are almost Dostoyevskian in complexity compared with the deranged Kurtz. When we finally meet the renegade at his camp of Montagnard disciples, Apocalypse Now collapses into a terminal anticlimax. An overweight, bald Brando weaves in and out of the shadows of his temple headquarters, doing little more than spouting quotations from Conrad and T.S. Eliot.

Coppola appears to believe that if Kurtz soliloquizes about “horror” and “moral terror,” the audience will think that the movie has actually dealt with these matters. But when Willard assassinates Kurtz, we still do not know why the Green Beret went mad, the genesis of his large cult or even the identity of the many gruesome corpses and severed heads that lie strewn about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz’s undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues his film initially intended to explore. The journey into America’s Viet Nam madness—not to mention the journey into Willard’s and Kurtz’s souls—reaches its dead end in a quagmire of freshman English class recitations.

The ending fails not only intellectually but also as plain theater. Like the apocalyptic space journey in Kubrick’s very similarly structured 2001: A Space Odyssey, Willard’s journey is designed as a psychedelic trip. Each stop along the way is meant to be more phantasmagoric than the last. In 2001, Kubrick successfully escalated his film at each stage, even topping the seemingly unbeatable light show with a more bizarre finale. Coppola, while creating progressively weirder war scenes, runs dry before he reaches his crucial imaginative leap: Kurtz’s fastidiously designed compound looks as tame as a set in an oldtime jungle horror movie. His murder, which is archly intercut with the ritual slaughter of a carabao, is the film’s only poorly shot death scene. Apocalypse Now’s much talked-about discarded ending — another air raid — would not have illuminated this murk.

The real sadness of the movie, however, is not that Kurtz eludes Coppola’s grasp, but that Viet Nam does. In its cold, haphazard way, Apocalypse Now does remind us that war is hell, but that is not the same thing as confronting the conflicts, agonies and moral chaos of this particular war. Yet, lest we lose our perspective in contemplating this disappointing effort, it should be remembered that the failure of an ambitious $30 million film is not a tragedy. The Viet Nam War was a tragedy. Apocalypse Now is but this decade’s most extraordinary Hollywood folly.