Tetro

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Maribel Verdú, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Carmen Maura
USA, 2009, 127 mins.

Tetro is Francis Ford Coppola’s melodramatic masterpiece about family drama. When the film opens, our eyes are fixed on fresh-faced Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), a cruise ship waiter who has taken shore in Buenos Aries, looking for his long-lost older brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo).

As the film unfolds in splendid black and white (only flashbacks were filmed in a sort of muted color), the audience learns that Angelo now calls himself Tetro, a somewhat failed writer who has escaped his family’s glorious accomplishments and refuses to include Bennie in any of the family drama despite his pleading. That is until Bennie steals one of Angelo’s “failed” scripts and mounts a play under the encouragement of local critic and writer Alone (formidably portrayed by Carmen Maura). When the play is accepted to the prestigious Patagonia Festival, the brothers must come face to face about their family’s troubled past.

The exuberant, over-the-top feel of Tetro was necessary for the film’s comic relief. Coppola’s Tetro was not without weeping, high-strung violins, operatic pantomimes full of broken dolls filmed on a sound stage, elevated mystery and Gallo’s long, too cool face. Of course, the cinematography was sumptuous and brilliant and the acting outstanding as well.