One from the Heart (1982)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Natassja Kinski, Raúl Juliá, Harry Dean Stanton, Lainie Kazan. [R]

Career-altering flop from Francis Ford Coppola, his first film since Apocalypse Now, is an earnest but gaudy romantic fantasy full of dreamy photography and sublime Tom Waits music, but whatever passes for story and emotion are as artificial as the Vegas sets. The effect is reminiscent of surreal musicals from the 40s and 50s, trussed up in filtered lights that blaze so bright, every Zoetrope Studio stage used for the production must have been a fire hazard. It’s all so overwhelmingly stylized, however, the effect smothers the actors’ efforts to make something of mundane characters that aren’t developed or made interesting on the page. Forrest and Garr play husband and wife, bored and dissatisfied in their marriage, who find attractive options for new lovers in cocktail waiter Juliá and tightrope walker Kinski. Everything underneath the glaze is rendered impotent by Coppola’s experimental techniques, shooting the thing from a mobile “command center” with videotaped storyboards as a guide, and even those visual and aural pleasures sour after a while because the experience becomes so tedious at length. I didn’t even feel manipulated by the false ending/reversal resolution of fate for the central pair because I didn’t care either way how it ended for them (hit by a bus, join the Navy, get abducted by aliens would have all been acceptable alternatives). A pre-Risky Business Rebecca De Mornay can be spotted briefly in her film debut.

39/100