Coppola On Actors--One From the Hip

As an American film goer, over time, it's generally hard to say anything but God bless Francis Coppola. In the course of faintly praising his upcoming Youth Without Youth in a post last week, I quoted Esquire's Tom Carson (writing in March of 2000) re the director's "surfeit of ambitions". Carson also noted, "He's happy just to show us wondrous things, crammed with emotions that don't need to cohere to resonate; that's true even of The Godfather, Part II, and it's why he's given moviegoers more moments of beauty than any other filmmaker of his generation."

That said, it seems unusually churlish for a guy who's essentially been coasting on his rep and his thriving vineyard and hotel empire for a fair few years--after the 1996 Jack and the following year's The Rainmaker, he basically went on cinematic hiatus until this new film began shooting in 2005--to trash DeNiro, Pacino and Nicholson for being working stiffs.

The already widely disseminated quotes in the GQ Magazine piece--which the director spewed after his interviewer's worked him like a picador with a lengthy paragraph ending with "What has happened to these guys?"-- snarked at Pacino as "very rich", DeNiro as "wealthy" and Nicholson as someone who "has money and influence and girls...they all live off he fat of the land."

Hmmm. In 1995, when Coppola paid an estimated $10 million to own the 95-acre Inglenook estate in Sonoma, thus reuniting it (and its 39,000-square foot chateau) with his adjoining, 125-acre Niebaum property, he vindicated the decision he'd made in the early 90's when he had to declare bankruptcy for his American Zoetrope studio, but insisted on keeping his vineyard. (He'd originally bought in 1975 with the take from The Godfather, which he made for $175,000 plus six percent of the net--worth about a million per point, as it turned out. By the time of his back to back bankruptcies, he listed liabilities of $98 million against assets of $51 million.)

Those movie-points dollars keep coming, and he's also also selling oceans of self-branded wine and running some very ritzy resorts. So for Coppola to equate big bucks with a dearth of artistry is to risk a painful ricochet; he's probably worth more than all three of those other capitalist running dogs put together.

But what of the artistic accusation? The director put his money where his boccalone is and made Youth Without Youth on his own nickel. It will struggle to make back its estimated $20 million cost for him and Sony Classics, and purely as a film--well, let the reviewers have their say when it opens October 26.

Compare for a minute his track record with those he now scorns. Yes, DeNiro is vulnerable--though his actor/director outing The Good Shepherd was a clearly sincere effort, it ended up earning unfortunate comparisons to none other than the Godfather saga. And yes, he essentially now lampoons in comedies the very power that made him iconic. (That said, would your really subtract lines like "You a pothead, Focker?" from your guilty pleasures?)

But Nicholson is hardly phoning it in. He won an Oscar within the decade (As Good As It Gets, 1998), was nominated in 2003 for About Schmidt, and was arguably the centerpiece of last year's The Departed, which won Best Picture and Director, among others. If you don't like Jack in that, tell it to your buddy (and still-productive rival) Scorsese standing over there with the statuette.

And although The Bucket List is a holiday season two-hander clearly well-drenched in sentimentality, with Morgan Freeman displaying his trademark godlike avuncularity, it boasts an affecting ,committed Nicholson performance absolutely stripped of personal vanity.

Pacino's a trickier case. You could say 2002's Insomnia was the last reverberating performance we've seen (whether that's due to bad luck or bad choices could be debated), but the DVD collection called An Actor's Vision speaks well of him--a much-praised doc about crafting a Shakespeare play (Looking for Richard, with its 86 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes), and two virtuous adapatations of stage plays in Chinese Coffee and The Local Stigmatic. He did have a film (88 Minutes) go straight to video last year--but he's currently shooting Righteous Kill for the same director Jon Avnet, where he's opposite--DeNiro.)

All in all, it's a mixed bag. But do these three they deserve such a dismissive comparison to even the admittedly great Javier Bardem, who Coppola declares is "excited to do something good... I don't feel that kind of passion to do a role and be great coming from those guys, because if it was there, they would do it!"

And if Coppola could beat the crisis of confidence that prevented him from completing the script to Metropolis, a sprawling epic of city builder Robert Moses that also takes inspiration from the Cataline consipracy in ancient Rome, he would do it.
Exclamation point.

And if there were good parts for Nicholson, DeNiro and Pacino, just who would he choose after skipping over them? Instead of sheltering in the philosophical obtuseness of his latest film, maybe he could say what he claims the trio of actors weren't ready to say: "Let's do something else really ambitious."

(Francis Ford Coppola with prop knife and Robert DeNiro, on location, January 1974; Hutton Archive/Getty Images)