Francis Ford Coppola’s supposed “return to form” is best described as a waste. It is a shame to know that the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now is capable of making a film this bad (not to mention The Godfather Part III).  In the film, cruise ship employee Bennie (the young Alden Ehrenreich) is reunited with his brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo) at the latter’s home in Argentina.  Tetro has tried his best to distance himself from the past and his family, and Bennie investigates to determine what exactly his older brother was running from.  Behind Tetro’s back and with the encouragement of the unconditionally-loving girlfriend (Maribel Verdu), Bennie decodes his brother’s autobiographical play to learn about their father, the death of Tetro’s mother and the troubles that tore their family apart.

First and foremost, this film is a waste of the talent of its actors. In many scenes, Gallo communicates the complexity and depth of the enigma that is Tetro.  In a scene in which he visits Bennie in a hospital, he naturally goes from excitedly surprising his kid brother to yelling and physically abusing him in his crippled state.  The comparisons of Ehrenreich to Leonardo DiCaprio are inevitable because of the slight resemblance and also because of the great talent we see at such a young age.  As was the case with DiCaprio earlier in his career, Ehrenreich exudes maturity beyond his years, and he allows the audience to emphasize with the anxiety bubbling below the surface.  These two central actors are capable of masterful performances, yet Coppola has given them a script that meanders without any destination.  Coppola is trying to say something about family and brotherhood, but he is not quite sure what. As a result, Gallo and Ehrenreich often look like fools.

Coppola also wasted beautiful photography and production design.  The film was shot mostly in gorgeous black and white, lending this drama to the sort of bleak honesty one would expect from a Martin Scorsese picture.  In contrast, the flashbacks in the film are presented in color and in a 4:3 ratio aspect.  These flashbacks depict Tetro’s rocky relationship with his father Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a world-renowned composer and conductor, and a car accident in which Tetro’s mother is brutally killed.  The latter scene is shot and edited so viscerally, I almost physically felt the impact.  However, this craft is lost amidst Coppola’s writing, which does not always reconcile the unique formal components of the film with the narrative.  Coppola instead insists on using absurd plot points to engage the audience in his story.

More than anything else, this film is a waste of the audience’s time.  It feels as if the rollercoaster of a relationship between Bennie and Tetro is going to go somewhere, yet a plot twist during the final act of the film reduces what could have been a complex study of familial relationships to material barely worthy of an afternoon soap. He abandons the basics of a good story with rising action and presents us with a climax which into question the relevance of the previous two hours. Add pretentious tributes to Powell-Pressburger films, painfully obvious metaphors regarding bright lights, and laughably melodramatic scenes, and you have evidence that Coppola is finished.  Coppola has always lacked focus as a filmmaker, and Tetro disappointingly shows it is only going to get worse.