August 9–16, 2001

movie shorts

Apocalypse Now Redux

by Sam Adams

recommended

"When you remember something in a movie and it’s gone, you feel as if your memories had been mugged." So wrote Pauline Kael in 1980, reviewing the re-edited "special edition" version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even in that pre-DVD (and practically pre-video) era, it wasn’t uncommon for films to be released in more than one version, but Steven Spielberg’s decision to reshoot, replace and recut scenes from his own film likely marks the first time a phenomenally successful film was altered for no greater reason than its creator’s whim. In so doing, you might well argue, Spielberg gave birth to the era of the "director’s cut," just as his Jaws gave birth to the era of the summer blockbuster.

While the idea of a director’s cut carries with it an essential artistic nobility, the sense that Art (the director) triumphs over Commerce (the studio) in the end, the concept is in many ways no more than a marketing gimmick. There is no shortage of cases where a director’s artistic judgment is trumped by financial and/or contractual obligations, but such movies tend to fail on initial release, thus limiting the perceived potential market for what is presumably a less-commercial version of an already unviable product. More often than not (at least with recent films), what a "director’s cut" really represents is the successful director’s right to change her mind after the fact. Think of Ridley Scott’s "director’s cut" of Blade Runner, which includes a shot of a unicorn originally filmed for Legend, which postdated Blade Runner’s original release. Or the way Oliver Stone has recut several of his own films for DVD, effectively disappearing the original versions. Or George Lucas’ pointless tinkering with the Star Wars franchise, while reportedly taking legal action to prevent screenings of the original versions. And after supposedly creating his own ideal version of Close Encounters, Spielberg went back and re-edited the film several more times, both removing some of the new material and reinserting some of the old. (Spielberg’s also said he’d like to pull a Lucas and rerelease E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with all-new digital effects.)

There is, of course, nothing wrong with an artist continuing to tinker with his work, even after it’s been exhibited. But a clear distinction needs to be made between the restoration of an artist’s original vision and the decision to return, years after the fact, and alter a work that is arguably not in need of alteration.

Which brings us around to Apocalypse Now Redux (ironically released by Miramax, a company notorious for forcing directors to alter their own films. Don’t hold your breath for director’s cuts of The Glass Shield or Happy, Texas). Though reviews of the original Apocalypse Now’s 1979 release were mixed, sometimes violently so, it’s become recognized over the years as a work of undeniable, if sputtering, genius, and quite probably the last great salvo in Francis Ford Coppola’s oeuvre, which has never recovered from its post Apocalypse spiral. Produced during a torturous year-plus shoot in the Philippines — captured in fascinating detail in the published diaries of Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, as well as the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness— Apocalypse Now was intended to be the first American movie on the Vietnam War (a distinction it lost due to its attenuated production process), a movie that, Coppola pompously proclaimed, would take audiences within a "small step" of "putting [the war] behind them."

From this distance, though, the film looks very little like a film about Vietnam and much more like a philosophical tract on the madness of war; Coppola has said that during the filming process, he took the film further and further from John Milius’ original script and closer to the film’s source material, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In either its old or new form, the film has always been too incoherent, too sensually indulgent, to serve as an indictment of any specific conflict. Apocalypse Now is not a tract; it’s a psychedelic explosion, a satirical orgasm. Its chief achievement is one of tone. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro pulls incandescent colors from the Philippine jungle, so that every napalm blast seems to be a hole opened up into the center of the world. The sight of Playboy bunnies cavorting on a floating stage in the middle of the jungle is no less absurd than a gung-ho lieutenant colonel (Robert Duvall’s memorable Kilgore) calling in an air strike to clear the way for a little Southeast Asian surfing.

Apocalypse Now leaks excess from every pore, so you might think that the (re)addition of 49 minutes of footage could do nothing but enhance the movie’s impact. But Apocalypse Now Redux is a case where more ends up being less. The three major and three minor sequences, which Coppola now says he cut because 1970s audiences weren’t "ready" for them, inevitably enlarge the movie’s scope. It would be impossible for a movie to be increased by nearly an hour and not feel more all-encompassing. But without exception, every one does violence to the movie’s carefully constructed tone. The result is a film that is perhaps more complete, but is definitely less fulfilling.

Most notable is the re-inclusion of the famed "French plantation sequence," where Willard (Martin Sheen) and his men come across a ghostly plantation above the Cambodian border inhabited by a handful of French colonialists who refuse to acknowledge defeat. Most of the scene (which runs nearly a half-hour) is taken up with a lengthy — and perhaps deliberately incoherent — exchange of political views over an elaborate French meal. While the scene notably features what are now the only non-American speaking parts in the film, and includes a pointed monologue by Christian Marquand which opines that the Americans "are fighting for the biggest nothing in all of history," it outlives its usefulness by at least half its length. Worse is the climax to the scene, in which Willard smokes opium and beds a French widow (Aurore Clément). For one, the new score for this last part is horse-chokingly syrupy, but more importantly, it vastly decreases our sense of Willard as a singularly focused killing machine, but one step away from the martial madness of Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the man he’s been sent to assassinate. Similarly, the new scene that shows a grinning Willard stealing Kilgore’s surfboard amounts to nothing more than pointless clowning, and derails the connection between Kilgore’s celebrated "napalm in the morning" speech and the voiceover narration that follows.

In another new scene, Kurtz reads to Willard, now captive in Kurtz’s temple-like compound, from a series of Time articles, underlining the extent to which Americans were lied to about the war. But such pointed commentary merely throws Apocalypse Now Redux’s polemical weaknesses into bold relief — not to mention that it undermines Kurtz’s sense of mystery by showing him, for the only time, in complete sunlight from head to toe.

At least these scenes conceivably work on their own terms. The third major sequence, where the crew of Willard’s boat encounters the Playboy bunnies farther upriver, is an appalling miscalculation in every way. After being "traded" for two drums of diesel fuel, the bunnies proceed to speak as if they’ve been lobotomized; one natters on about her job training birds at Busch Gardens, while the other fights her way through an improbable monologue about the loneliness of the long-distance Playmate. Coppola’s never exactly been known for his fleshed-out female characters, but you’d have to look pretty hard to find as insulting a scene in his body of work.

Of course, three-quarters of Apocalypse Now Redux is still Apocalypse Now, a movie eminently worth seeing on the big screen, especially in the beautiful dye-transfer prints produced for the nation’s top 20 markets (including Philadelphia). But one wishes that Coppola had left more than well enough alone. How much sense does it make to allow the Coppola of Jack and The Rainmaker to second-guess the Coppola of The Conversation and both Godfathers? In Hearts of Darkness, he said the French plantation sequence was cut because he wasn’t able to get the cast he wanted for budgetary reasons, and he was "mad" at it. Of course, "Now featuring footage we didn’t used to think was good enough, but we changed our minds!" isn’t much of a sales pitch.

Thankfully, there’s not much chance Apocalypse Now Redux will supplant the original, even if Coppola and co. made the rash decision to recut the film from the original negative. But the new version still damages the old; you can’t watch old scenes without thinking of the "new" material that used to go there. It’s bad enough that Coppola’s muse has deserted him, but diminishing his past films won’t make his new ones any better.

(UA Riverview; Ritz 16)