ONE FROM THE HEART: 4K UHD Blu-ray (American Zoetrope/Columbia Pictures, 1982) Lionsgate
Few movies are
as intimately inspired or as epically blemished as director, Francis Ford
Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), a weirdly concocted musical mélange,
butchered in its eleventh-hour tinkering, and unceremoniously dumped on the
market without much fanfare. That it failed to draw an audience, even on the virtuosity
of Coppola’s name-above-the-marquee, is, in retrospect, no great surprise. Viewed
some forty-plus years after its theatrical debut, One from the Heart may
be sincerely motivated. Yet, it endures rather leadenly as a tome encased in
Coppola’s love-affair with the work itself, he utterly fails to communicate beyond
his own scope of appreciation. One from the Heart is a picture that
desperately yearns for acceptance, yet oddly, never tries hard enough to earn
it. The ‘Reprise’ edition – Coppola’s attempt to revisit and ‘improve upon’ his
original with the luxury of time and reinstatement of several key sequences
shorn before it ever hit movie screens - does not ‘improve’, so much as guilds
an already spectacularly anemic and wilting lily with even more gaudy and
highly stylized artifice. There’s more to ‘love’ here. But is love
really the answer?
Coppola’s ambition
to create a movie musical where the songs remain unsung by his on-camera
characters, instead, blissfully imagined in their heads as a soundtrack warbled
by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, seems ever more the gimmick now than it was in
1982. Yet, this fantastical betrayal of the time-honored precepts of the
musical is compounded by the fact these characters do trip the light fantastic, intermittently, in some intricately
choreographed dance numbers. These are spectacularly staged, but curiously out of step with our expectations for a movie musical to sing its way into our
hearts. To this magnificent mouse, Coppola plies yet another layer of zealous make-believe,
staging in a highly theatrical, faux Las Vegas fancifully re-fashioned from
production designer, Dean Tavoularis’ imaginative sets, and photographed by cinematographers, Ronald Victor Garcia and Vittorio Storaro to
reproduce the look and texture of a vintage 3-strip Technicolor bon-bon a la MGM in the late forties.
Based on a story
idea by Armyan Bernstein, reworked by Bernstein and Coppola, with additional
dialogue by Luana Anders, One from the Heart opens on July 4th,
contrariwise, the 5th anniversary of our protagonists, travel agent,
Frannie (Teri Garr), and junkyard/boyfriend, Hank (Frederic Forrest). The
couple has been cohabitating at cross-purposes, no more evident than in the
gifts they get each other to mark this occasion. Frannie buys them tickets to
Bora Bora – a place always to have held a certain magic for her. Hank, alas,
bequeaths the deed to their home – paid in full. Problem: Frannie does not like
where she lives. She has an adventurer’s heart, stymied by Hank’s desire to
remain a homebody. In flashback, we learn Hank had an affair with his best
friend, Moe’s (Harry Dean Stanton) gal/pal, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). But Coppola
deliberately keeps these particulars down to a thumbnail sketch – ditto for Frannie
and Hank’s past as a couple. This slivered innocence works…to a point. Curiously,
Hank wants to be a father. Frannie cannot quite wrap her head around motherhood.
Not yet. And thus, a quarrel escalates
into a full-on break-up. Almost immediately, Hank hooks up with Leila
(Nastassja Kinski) – a circus performer. Meanwhile, Frannie becomes involved
with Ray (Raul Julia), a lounge lizard who waits tables to pay the bills. And
that’s pretty much where the story – if not exactly the movie – ends; on the unpredictable
nature of Frannie and Hank’s possible reconciliation.
One from the
Heart is an explorative work, elemental in construction, if daring in its
execution. One senses Coppola’s inventiveness lethally rooted in the stakes of
silent cinema; an insurmountable hurdle, as Coppola’s interminable long takes,
navigate these characters through Tavoularis’ top-heavy décollage as though the
six-odd-decades between the death of silent cinema and this middling effort had
never transpired. Matte work takes Tavoularis’
incredibly detailed sets into a rather disturbingly lurid infinity. Nevertheless,
this too becomes slightly claustrophobic as the picture wears on. Coppola’s
layering of technique - dissolves, overlaps, and other sundry forms of ‘trick’
photography - discombobulate this dizzying panacea of neon and twinkling lights.
Characters pass in and out of close-ups, and, then shadows. Coppola’s idiosyncratic
and impressionistic penetrations into Frannie and Hank’s morality and character
are never to be explored concretely through either their thoughts or deeds. So,
the hallucinogenic quality of the visuals grates as more frivolous than
revealing, beating the ‘sur’ in surrealism, until a stifling grandiloquence,
far less pleasurable than pleasing emerges. One from the Heart is a rather
insincere forgery because occasionally, the plywood backing shows through. That
really is its problem. Coppola’s brushstrokes are less genuine than
genius run amuck.
And, getting
right down to it, One from the Heart is even more a thinly veiled reflection
on Coppola’s own sinking marriage to Eleanor. Like Hank, Coppola’s worldview of
what wedded love is – or rather ought to be, is anchored to the wife’s
acquiescence to her husband’s needs at the expense of satisfying her own. Even
so, in life, Coppola did try to compensate Eleanor for having dragged her and
their family half-way around the world during the shooting of his previous
pictures. In spirit and execution, Coppola’s newly amalgamated studio, American
Zoetrope was meant to be a resurrection of the ‘good ole days’ in Hollywood
(relocated to San Francisco), working from time-honored/studio-bound principles,
having made the picture biz what it once was, but with new technological savvy
to catapult movie-making into another golden epoch. It should have worked…but didn’t – chiefly, as
Coppola’s aspirations for One from the Heart exponentially mushroom-clouded
into a fiscally devastating eclipse of his initial vision for a
tightly-controlled/modestly budgeted musical.
Daily, Coppola
presented his stars with new pages of script to commit to memory, often, with
only a few moments’ respite before the cameras rolled. Worse, being ones’ own
producer had proven an insurmountably costly disaster. Just one week into
shooting, Zoetrope could not make payroll, forcing Coppola to finance the bulk
of One from the Heart by putting up his own property as collateral – a million-dollar’s-worth
at a time. At this juncture, One from the Heart could not afford to be
an experimental flop; nor even, a modest success. It had to be a box office
titan – just to break even. The odds were not in Coppola’s favor, particularly
after negative press began to erode popular opinion in the trades, suggesting
the movie Coppola was endeavoring to create from stardust and magic, and the
one slowly unraveling into the dust on his backlot, were disparately not a
masterpiece, but an atrocity of badly bungled mismanagement, repeatedly
derailed by Coppola’s own excesses. Any comparison between One from the
Heart and the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima, Japan was, thereafter, justly
warranted. American Zoetrope went bust, and Coppola was forced into personal
bankruptcy.
The crater left
behind effectively relegated One from the Heart to the scrap heap,
seemingly in perpetuity. Coppola, however, was not entirely ready to give up on
what he so obviously considers a magnum opus. But the reworked ‘reprise’ edition
to emerge is not a reimagining of greatness, as a reformulated salvage
operation where only Coppola’s memory knows for sure where all the pieces fit and/or
remain buried. Yet, if anything, it is
in the whorls of this new version where One from the Heart falters even
more so, becoming unwieldy and, arguably, unsalvageable. The theatrical version
possessed a linear, if more lissome lyricality that this new version has grotesquely
mislaid. Frannie and Hank now dissolve their partnership almost at the outset
of the picture, forcing Coppola to work it backwards to reframe their past as a
flashback. If anything, this impugns the forward trajectory of the original,
making even more needlessly a puzzle of the picture, yet to be solved. Coppola
has also shorn the ‘reprise’ edition of Hank’s motivation in buying the deed to
the house he shares with Frannie; namely, to force her into committing to his idea
of their marriage by depleting their joint funds to make his dreams a reality
at the expense of hers. This excision makes Hank more superficially empathetic
to the audience. But it also redirects Frannie’s modus operandi, now, as being selfishly
obstinate.
Lionsgate’s new
reprise 4K of One from the Heart will surely leave no stone unturned in
one’s admiration or disappointment respectively, for the film that once was,
the one that presently is, and, arguably, the one we still sincerely wish it
might have been. With color design lent credence by input from no less authoritative
Messrs. of the musical mélange than Gene Kelly and Michael Powell, One from
the Heart in 4K is an utterly ravishing visual tome. The picture has
certainly had a fascinating post-production history: trimmed by Coppola
straight from the OCN in 1982, then, constantly morphing to Coppola’s personal
tastes, right up to, and including its New York, Radio City premiere, and even,
thereafter, with all of these trims baked into the negative from which 70mm
prints were struck, to serve as the foundation for all home video releases
thereafter. The result – 3 different versions of One from the Heart. The
‘reprise’ edition arguably represents a 4th, and, Coppola’s ‘definitive’
cut, this time derived from an OCN, as well as protection masters recovered in
Los Angeles after a flood inside Rome’s Technicolor laboratories destroyed
virtually all archival OCN trims made decades ago. The ‘Reprise’ edition was a
Herculean restoration effort, toggling between IP materials and the OCN, with
finite color grading applied to massage and homogenize the image into a
seamless visual presentation. This has been wed to a remastered 6-track audio,
marginally tweaked from the work performed in 2003 by Richard Beggs.
Extras are
spread across the 4K and standard Blu-ray, also included herein. On the 4K we
get Coppola’s feature-length audio commentary, feautrettes dedicated to ‘The
Look of One from the Heart’ (17 minutes), ‘The Cast of One
from the Heart’ (22 mins.) and, ‘The Choreography of One from the
Heart (25 mins). Also on tap, director, Baz Luhrmann’s take on ‘Reinventing
the Musical’ (25 mins.) and a barely 4 min. restoration comparison. On the
standard Blu, we get ‘The Making of One from the Heart (23 mins),
The Dream Studio (28 mins devoted to American Zoetrope and its demise), ‘The
Electronic Cinema’ (10 mins) charting Coppola’s investment in the ‘then’
new technologies meant to streamline production, an homage to ‘Tom Waits and The
Music of One from the Heart’ (13 mins), 9 mins. of rehearsal
footage, and almost 40 mins. of deleted scenes, plus Coppola’s ‘distributor’s
reel, and Waits’ music video, and, nearly 25 mins. of Waits’ alternative tracks
– audio only. Bottom line: One from the Heart will never be a masterpiece.
In its present reincarnation, at best, it faithfully represents the verve and
mania Coppola poured into his grand experiment in ‘82, hoping to rewrite the
rules of the traditional Hollywood musical. He did not succeed. But Coppola’s
failures are always fascinating to observe and study. One from the Heart
is decidedly one of his most excitingly deficient. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
2.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
5+
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