Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Marlon Brando,Martin Sheen,Robert Duvall
You know the quote: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." It
comes from one of the great American films, and one of the best films about war.
Why is it great? Because it is contradictory and surreal, about as odd and
disjointed as real life, but heightened, as one might imagine war to be.
Using Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as his inspiration, Francis
Ford Coppola put together a script that follows Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin
Sheen) as he travels upriver in Vietnam on a secret mission to kill Colonel
Walter Kurtz (Martin Brando), a US Army officer who is no longer following
orders. The script was then put aside for much of filming, and the actors
ad-libbed a fair amount of dialogue. Then, to make sense of what he had, Coppola
hired Michael Herr to write a voiceover for Willard. Confused? Don't worry about
it.
There is a scene that encapsulates this movie for me. A couple of guys on the
boat that is meant to deliver Willard to Kurtz drop acid. There are fireworks
everywhere and it's beautiful and you have to wonder if taking drugs was the
right thing to do at the moment. Then they wander/float (we are on a boat here)
into actual combat. And it's beautiful, too.
The story tells us over and over again: war is scary, awful, dehumanizing.
And the film shows us something different: war is a spectacle, an impressive
marshalling of resources, and strangely entrancing. Are these contradictory? You
tell me.
This film is particularly rich perhaps because the director was so invested
in it. After you watch this, I recommend you see Hearts of Darkness, a
documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now that makes clear that Coppola
saw making this movie much like waging a war. And why not? He was subjected to
the same pressures of budgets, natural disasters, command chain difficulties,
and even near death as an army captain.
But back to the original. There are some odd cameo roles here, including
Harrison Ford (as a character named Lucas - film geeks take note), a trippy
Dennis Hopper, and a teenage Larry Fishburne, before he became Laurence. And
then there is Brando. This is not the young rebel who bashes his way through On
the Waterfront. This is the seed of the completely bizarre man who showed up
in pasty-faced muumuu drag in The Island of Doctor Moreau. He whispers,
he babbles, he shifts his bulk around in a dark cave. It's an unexpected
performance, asking unanswered questions, that, in its own way, also
encapsulates this haunting film.
