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.