One From The Heart | Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr | a mood piece more than a movie

One From The Heart | Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr | Still my favorite movie..

DVDs:

One From The Heart

	One From The Heart Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr Fantoma / American Zoetrope, 2004 average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

From the director of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather comes a different kind of love story...

Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola shines his spotlight on a Las Vegas couple (Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest) whose break-up on the 4th of July leads them both to a night on the strip in pursuit of their romantic fantasies (Raul Julia, Nastassia Kinski). But in this town of gamblers and dreamers, should they bet it all on dreams, or give true love another roll of the dice? Featuring breathtaking design, show-stopping set pieces, the stunning photography of Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) and accompanied by the wonderful Oscar® nominated music of the one and only Tom Waits, this neon explosion of color, sound and innovation is a cinematic valentine for all movie lovers.

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a mood piece more than a movie

Like the real city of Las Vegas, you have to be in the right mood to allow yourself to sink beneath the flashy, dazzling, and artificial veneer that made up this dream-like cinematic mood piece. You have to let go. Stop thinking about why the hell would Francis Coppola made a movie like this. Stop thinking about the almost absurd acting and outsider-art like directions. Go chug down that two finger of bourbon, and sink into the neons. Which mood am I talking about exactly? I think looking at the DVD cover or listening to the nocturnal soundtracks done by the unlikely duo of Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle gives you a pretty good idea. It's not exactly fancy-pants snobby cinematic high art, but it has more of a three AM Fremont Street on a cold winter night kinda feel to it. This movie is jazzy, smoky, humorous (in a midnight carnival type of way), and there is a nary sense of melancholy to it. On that note, I think nobody but Tom Waits could have done the scores for a film like this. I love this movie and almost everything about it - the first time I watched it and ever since.

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Still my favorite movie..

Back in the '80s I was fond of telling people this was my favorite movie of all time. (Well, maybe in a tie with The Wild Bunch) but the years passed and I suspected that like so much of what I valued then, I would now see this movie in a much harsher light.

Boy, was I wrong! I remain baffled by the way Coppola was mocked and vilified for hurling his whole creative (and financial) being into this little dream of his. But it remains a beautiful dream. While at once creating vivid, indelible characters so perfectly flawed as to resemble no one and everyone, it functions as a sort of second chance for Adam & Eve. Yielding to temptation, Hank and Frannie ultimately learn what matters most. I still end up in tears. Tears of redemptive joy.

Needless to say, Tom Waits' music functions beautifully as wry commentary on the ill-fated blunders of the principals. Waits here is at the peak of his powers as heir to the great American songwriter tradition. This is before he wandered off to the junkyard to pursue the ghost of Harry Partch.

In an era that scorns the very concept of beauty, when film critics rave over "documentaries" about men who have sex with horses, this little jewel of a movie might as well come from a million years ago. If you've loved and lost, (or won), if there's a trace of a heart left in you, you can't be unmoved by this film.

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How could I have forgotten this???

I was reading another obscure Copplia movie review, when I came on this movie and just came to a stop. This quirky movie stopped me dead in my tracks 20 or so years ago and instigated a extended discussion about it with my companion for hours over dinner. I bought the album because the Tom Watts and Crystal Gayle soundtrack was just so captivating and bluesy ( maybe it was the music and not Terri Garr you think?) Or perhaps it's just an unconventional telling of an ordinary tale with visually amazing sets. Definitely a "character piece" ( no action what so ever ). For people who want to think and be entertained.

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One from the Heart of Darkness

A huge roll of the dice that wiped out Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio and saw him spending the next decade churning out pictures to pay off the debts the $28m flop left him with, One From the Heart is one of those films I really want to like - to love, even - but which just won't let me. Visually it's a triumph, but the Tom Waits suicide blues score rarely works as a screen musical and as a human drama its kept firmly on the ground by the fact these characters just aren't likeable. Coppola seems more interested in his lavish studio settings than what's happening in them, with even the most mundane sequences shot like an imaginatively staged theatrical musical with intricate shifts of lighting and colour, dissolving walls and neon dreams. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that Coppola doesn't seem to have made this film for the audience but for himself, and so it probably never connects with anyone not on his personal wavelength. The trailers give away a big part of the problem: the 1982 release stresses the Godfather and Apocalypse Now as evidence of Coppola's genius while the 2003 reissue trailer runs off a list of critical superlatives in a sternly unemotional voice: joy isn't on the menu here.

That the story is so simple as to be almost invisible - a couple split up over the 4th July weekend and become involved with new partners - needn't be a problem: after all, three sailors on furlough looking for Miss Turnstiles or a backwoodsman convincing his six bachelors to kidnap six local girls to marry aren't exactly complex. With good casting, good writing and good musical numbers, there's no real reason it shouldn't work. Unfortunately it doesn't get them. The argument that kicks off the split is atrociously written and just as badly acted - you've seen more vicious spats on The Dick Van Dyke Show - and because we never buy it for a moment the film is handicapped almost from the start. The fact that either lead can carry a movie, is even more of a problem, leaving you with a film without any heart at its center: Raul Julia is the only member of the cast who really shines, and he probably has the least screen time of anyone in the picture. The constant crosscutting doesn't help, with Coppola cutting away as soon as one scene starts to gel to focus on an awkward one that never does. Despite input from Gene Kelly (barely noticeable) and Michael Powell (visually very noticeable), it's not even quite a musical - aside from a couple of fantasy numbers it opts Yentl-like to keep the singing as an invisible chorus/underscore not so much commenting as setting the melancholy tone that counterpoints the bright, garish visuals. The film's one promising musical number, where Julia's serenade of Teri Garr spills out onto the streets of Las Vegas, is never allowed to play uninterrupted without meandering shots of Frederic Forrest wandering through the neon streets.

Coppola's 2003 re-edit of the film does nothing to improve matters. The revised opening is a little smoother but at the expense of Forrest's character, removing all remaining traces of color to make him even more of a boring homebody. It's an excellent DVD, however, with everything you could want to know and more and offering some fairly frank insights into the failure of Coppola's attempt to ally the expertise of the old studio contract system with the modern advances of electronic cinema, not to mention the constant financing problems. It's just a shame that the film itself is so damn hard to love.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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