STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2008
STARRING: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, and Bruno Ganz
WRITTEN BY: Francis Ford Coppola
DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola
FEATURES: Commentary with Director Francis Ford Coppola
Making of "Youth Without Youth" featurette
The Music for "Youth Without Youth" featurette
"Youth Without Youth: The Makeup"

Very few directors as talented as Francis Ford Coppola have made movies as awful as Youth Without Youth and that's coming from one of the man's most adamant and consistent supporters. Sure, everyone loves The Conversation, the first two Godfather movies, and Apocalypse Now, but I'll gladly tell you about why the third Godfather is underrated, One From the Heart is a beautiful mess, Cotton Club is a movie I can watch repeatedly, and Bram Stoker's Dracula borders on masterpiece. But Coppola went downhill fast in the '90s, hitting a career low with the abysmal Jack in 1996 and basically going into exile after 1997's The Rainmaker. He took off an entire decade and when he returned to the world of filmmaking, he produced Youth Without Youth, a beautiful but shockingly ill-formed and stunningly boring movie that is literally a struggle to get through. It's almost as if a creative voice as talented as Coppola's had SO much material built up inside him over the last decade that he let it all spill out in one mess of a movie, unconcerned with making anything that an audience would want to see. If getting this out of his system makes the next film another masterpiece, it will have been worth it, but if this is the start of a new trend for Coppola, a legacy could be permanently tarnished.

After the set-up, it's hard to even explain what Youth Without Youth is about besides a series of stunningly shot pictures. I firmly believe that the talented cast must have read the screenplay and assumed that Coppola the director would translate this massively confusing film on-screen, but that simply never happened. Tim Roth plays Dominic Matei, a 70-year-old man who is hit by lightning in the '30s. He miraculously survives to find himself significantly younger than when he was hit. Not only did he lose thirty to forty years of age, but he's gained mutant-like special powers, including being able to woo any woman and instantly know a book's contents just by handling it. Naturally, the Third Reich is interested in Dominic's story, so he goes on the run, trying to finish his life's work, a study of the human consciousness. He meets a woman who looks exactly like an old love, who is also hit by lightning. The film awkwardly jumps from Switzerland to Malta to India with several un-subtitled languages in between. It's an ambitious film to be sure, but also a complete and utter mess at every turn.

Themes of language, love, and immortality have been major parts of many spectacular films, but Coppola tries to tackle so much with Youth Without Youth, you can almost see the strangely complex story get the best of him. If it was a complete theme piece, totally unconcerned with plot, it might have worked, but the story of the Nazis and the romance are constantly butting heads with the fact that the movie makes no sense at all. I love that Coppola is finding a passion again that was missing from the films he made before his 'sabbatical' and he should continue to do things that strike him in the heart more than the head, but sometimes when people shoot higher than your average screenplay, the fall flat on their face. Youth Without Youth is such a time.

Honestly, the only reason to see Youth Without Youth is to see how much Coppola has maintained his visual sensibility with stunning cinematography by Mihai Malaimare Jr., who is also shooting the director's next film, Tetro. Knowing that the film is mostly a visual experience, Sony has given it a perfect video transfer. The audio is clear but never spectacular. Finally, the DVD comes with a commentary by the master and three featurettes. In the end, I love that Coppola is back and taking chances, but that doesn't mean that just because Youth Without Youth is risky that it's good. Even though I'd much rather have a director who shoots for the stars and falls on his face, that doesn't make the fall any less painful to watch.