“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.”
Francis Ford Coppola said those words at the Cannes Film Festival in
1979, debuting his epic Apocalypse Now as a “work-in-progress.”
Apparently still a work in progress, the film appears again as Apocalypse
Now Redux, a reedited version that adds 50 minutes of new footage and
forces us again to contemplate Coppola’s grandiose claim.
What does “Vietnam” mean in this context? The last thing that Coppola, or
America itself, associates with the word “Vietnam” is Vietnam itself — the
country and its people or their particular experience of that war.
Apocalypse Now is surely not about that “Vietnam.” Though more
thoughtful and truthful than other celebrated American films on “Vietnam,”
most notably The Deer Hunter, one of the central failings of
Apocalypse Now is still its refusal to give voice or perspective to the
Vietnamese themselves. Not a single Vietnamese speaks in the film (or, rather,
those permitted voice in the film’s aural background are denied subtitles),
and the closest thing to an actual Vietnamese presence in the entire film is a
young VC woman who throws a grenade into an invading American helicopter
before being shot down.
The “Vietnam” in Apocalypse Now is really “America” and our
particular experience of that war. As an examination of this “Vietnam,” the
film is a bag of mixed messages. The film’s opening sequence is bravura
filmmaking, with visions of Vietnamese jungle decimated by napalm and the
flutter of helicopter blades morphing into a ceiling fan in the hotel room of
Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard. Synced to Jim Morrison singing, “This is the
end,” the scene ignites a fever dream about American confusion. Willard
glances out his window as the off-screen narration mutters, “Saigon shit.”
Audiences in 1979 could surely relate.
With its plotline lifted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
the film is also a mystery story. Willard joins a group of American GIs on a
river journey into the heart of the war, his mission to assassinate the rogue
Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who Willard’s commanders say has gone insane. In
this context, Willard is an audience stand-in, with Kurtz a personification of
America transformed by its experience of the war. But the film’s fatal flaw
isn’t so much its lack of an answer as its insistence on trying to be all
things to all people — to embody all of the feelings its audience would bring
to the film. War is hell and war is awesome spectacle. The white man is a
devil and the white man is a god.
The bulk of the film’s new footage concerns a stop Willard’s boat makes
at a ghostly French plantation, a remnant of the land’s colonial past. But
this scene only adds to the mixed message. “Why didn’t you Americans learn
from our mistakes? With your power, you can win it if you want to,” one
Frenchman says to Willard, speaking for the hawks in the audience. “You
Americans are fighting for the biggest nothing in history,” says another,
speaking for the doves. The film’s famously bad acid-flashback of an ending
likewise gropes for poetic vagaries rather than saying anything clear about
the war or America’s involvement in it. Dennis Hopper babbles incoherently,
Sheen rises from the swamp in a shot that looks like parody now, and a bald,
fat Brando spouts T.S. Eliot.
Perhaps the truest “Vietnam” this film is about is filmmaking itself, an
epic visualization of director Samuel Fuller’s axiom, “Film is a
battleground.” Coppola’s comments at Cannes continued this way: “We were in
the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too
much equipment, and, little by little, we went insane.” These comments are
almost obscenely glib but not unwarranted. Much like his country, Coppola took
his megalomania and noble cause to the jungles of Southeast Asia
(Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines), only to be dragged into a
quagmire with no sight of victory and a decidedly unsure exit strategy. The
epic scope and foolhardy passion of the production itself are like something
out of silent cinema, on par with the likes of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B.
DeMille or Erich Von Stroheim. It is mad, passionate cinema that shames the
timidity and artificiality of current Hollywood product, but I’d still rather
watch a more modest Coppola film like The Conversation.
Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is the inherent impossibility of making a
mainstream entertainment about something as politically prickly and tragic as
the Vietnam war. Coppola’s battle scenes, regardless of his politics, are
filmed to be exciting. The famous, technically magnificent helicopter attack
by Robert Duvall’s mad Col. Kilgore, ushered in by Wagner’s “Flight of the
Valkyries,” may be a deeply sarcastic commentary on military power run amok,
but I don’t think viewers cherish it for its irony. The cinematic power and
glory of the sequence bulldozes all irony. It’s a triumph of sorts, but I was
dreading its approach and not just because of what happened last Tuesday.