BOMBAST :APOCALYPSE NOW

 "...What I'm getting at is this: a native village is bombed and the bombs happen to be beautiful when they land. In fact, it would be odd if all that sudden destruction did not liberate some beauty. The form the bomb takes in its explosion may be...a picture of the potentialities (of the thing) it destroyed. So let us accept the idea that the bomb is beautiful..." ---Norman Mailer, 

 The quotation in question is classic Norman Mailer, circa 1963—an era when he often offered wild-eyed metaphors to drive home a point. To be fair, the passage is taken out of context from a dense, metaphysical discussion, and Mailer certainly wasn’t endorsing destruction for the sake of aesthetics. Yet the quote underscores a persistent issue of aesthetics, one that’s vividly present in Francis Ford Coppola’s *Apocalypse Now*. In many ways, Coppola seems to have embraced the idea that “the bomb is beautiful,” crafting a Vietnam War film brimming with explosions, firefights, and death—so visually arresting it could hang in a gallery. Its spectacle is breathtaking, but that very scale becomes its undoing, preventing *Apocalypse Now* from achieving the deeper film it aspired to be.

Coppola and screenwriter John Milius draw heavily from Joseph Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness*. The story centers on a CIA assassin named Willard (Martin Sheen), who, drowning in existential despair while holed up in a seedy Saigon hotel, is recruited for one last mission. His target: Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a brilliant Special Forces officer who’s gone rogue in Cambodia, establishing a cult-like kingdom in the jungle. Willard’s assignment—coldly phrased by command—as to “terminate his command,” sends him on a surreal journey upriver with a small patrol boat and crew. As in Conrad’s tale, the river voyage becomes a metaphor for descending into madness and cultural dislocation. The deeper they venture, the more rationality dissolves. The film unfolds more as a series of stylized set pieces than as a tightly woven narrative. A beach assault, led by a surfing-obsessed officer (Robert Duvall), is staged with ludicrous bravado in the midst of chaos. Later, a surreal USO show floats in on a game-show-lit barge, and a riverside Army outpost—bombed senseless—houses a platoon of shell-shocked soldiers firing at ghosts. The jungle slowly devours Willard’s crew as they drift further into absurdity and detachment. Rather than exploring themes through character or dialogue, Coppola leans into visual extravagance. The result: a film that loses grip on Conrad’s psychological and political critique. *Heart of Darkness* used plot and prose to evoke the horrors of imperialism, *Apocalypse Now* substitutes spectacle for coherence. 

At its best, the cinematography (courtesy of Vittorio Storaro) renders warfare with a haunting, sculptural beauty. But therein lies the issue—battle becomes an aestheticized experience, numbingly detached from blood, pain, or moral weight. Coppola’s Willard is a blank slate, conveying little emotion or transformation, which leaves the viewer distanced rather than absorbed. Even the climax, where Willard finally reaches Kurtz’s compound, falls flat. Brando, shrouded in shadows, mumbles cryptic musings on horror, judgment, and moral dualism—statements that lack coherence or impact. Kurtz, seemingly ready for death, offers himself to Willard, who kills him during a simultaneous ritual slaughter. The moment echoes Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” but Coppola fails to translate its visceral terror to the screen. Efforts to tether the film back to Conrad—via narration written by journalist Michael Herr—are uneven. The voiceover swings wildly in tone, from literary to slang, often contradicting itself. In contrast, Conrad’s Marlow subtly evolves throughout the narrative, pulling the reader with him into darkness. Coppola’s Willard drifts unmoored. In the end, *Apocalypse Now* is worth seeing not for its insights, but for the sheer audacity of its vision. Coppola’s talent remains undeniable—films like *The Godfather* and *You’re a Big Boy Now* cement that. *Apocalypse Now* also benefits from standout performances: Martin Sheen is convincingly haunted, Robert Duvall is gloriously unhinged, and Dennis Hopper crafts a gonzo archetype of the wartime hippie. As for Brando, his Kurtz borders on parody—whether it’s willful defiance or minimalist genius is debatable, but the final scenes are undeniably inert. For all its noise and ambition, *Apocalypse Now* ultimately falters under the weight of its own spectacle. It’s a masterclass in cinematic technique, but a muddled meditation on meaning.

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THE BOUNTY OF "BEING THERE"

 

With a flurry of hype preceding its debut in San Diego, it’s understandable why someone might approach director Hal Ashby’s new film, Being There, with a “show me” attitude usually limited to citizens of Missouri. The film, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski (who also wrote the screenplay), had opened three months earlier in New York and Los Angeles, and the advance reports from taste-making critics sounded like a chorus singing the same old tune: Being There, they harmonized, was indeed a comic masterpiece—a work of art, proof that American filmmakers can make movies that do more than satisfy an audience’s urge for the cheap vicarious thrill. Feeling burned by what I thought was payola-influenced propaganda for Kramer vs. Kramer—and the irrational rush of national and local film writers to reaffirm the majority opinion—I expected a downright drag. The new TV campaign announced, “…this time the critics are unanimous.”  I approached Being There with my own case of “show me.”

Well—surprise. Being There is, in fact, a good film that gives the audience a rare dose of “something to think about” while supplying a constant stream of funny stuff. Even more surprising was Kosinski’s screenplay, with which he, to use an arcane adjective, miraculously salvages what worth there was in his weakest novel and retools it to fit the medium like a nut and bolt.Kosinski’s novel concerned the doings of a gardener with intellectual disabilities named Chance, whose worldview is limited to tending a garden and watching unwholesome amounts of TV. He’s forced to leave the only home he’s known when the old man who cared for him dies. Nattily dressed in a suit from the old man’s wardrobe, Chance meets Eve Rand, wife of Benjamin Rand—a dying multimillionaire industrialist and kingmaker courted by presidents, senators, and foreign dignitaries. Chance’s name is eventually misconstrued as  “Chauncey Gardiner.” When a Soviet ambassador recites his favorite Russian poet, Chance simply smiles and nods. His vague, uncertain replies—rooted in television and gardening metaphors—are mistaken by others as visionary truths. These desperate elites, hungry for a voice of optimism in a world of money, power, and deadpan cynicism, cling to his half-wit utterances as if they’re the insights of a poet.

Ashby must have had a long talk with Kosinski and given him some needed pointers. Gardener is taken to be a man of supreme taste and intellect. He impresses Benjamin enough to earn an introduction to the President. Asked what the country should do to stimulate economic “growth,” Chance draws from the only field he knows—gardening—and delivers a homily about strong roots and springtime renewal. From there, he’s catapulted into national celebrity. The President, enchanted by “Chauncey Gardiner’s” unique philosophical optimism, quotes him (with due credit) during a televised State of the Union speech. The President, impressed by "Chauncey Gardiner's" philosophical optimism, quotes him during a televised State of the Union speech. Chance attracts attention from a leading business magazine, appears on a talk show, is investigated by the CIA and FBI, and impresses a Soviet ambassador who thinks he is a genius.

Kosinski’s novel was a shaggy dog story. Once the punchline landed, readers had to wade through too many pages watching the same joke play out in minor variations. Kosinski, dealing with a genre—the comic novel—that didn’t suit him, couldn’t quite develop the premise. His real strength as a novelist lies in grim fatalism. His best characters—cast-iron, post-existential types brutalized by life—navigate bleak and violent encounters with an eerie grace. His prose, terse and distanced, has elevated novels like Steps, The Painted Bird, The Devil Tree, and Blind Date.

But in Being There, his detached tone left the humor dead on the page. Fortunately, Ashby coaxed him into adjusting that tone for the screen. The dialogue remains spare, but the lines carry greater weight. Ashby pulls powerful performances from his cast, bypassing Kosinski’s subtleties and translating them into broader comedy.

Peter Sellers, like Chance, is magical. Where the novel’s character was flat and abstract, Sellers brings him to life as a wide-eyed, well-meaning idiot savant—an uncomprehending soul riding the wave of events that lift him ever higher. Shirley MacLaine as Eve, Melvyn Douglas as Benjamin, and Jack Warden as the President all flesh out their roles with an unerring sense of closed-system gullibility. Ashby wisely avoids buffoonery. He has his actors treat their characters’ quirks as givens within everyday interaction. There’s a matter-of-factness about the film that I admire. Being There manages to be funny without descending into slapstick or drawing-room farce. This perspective reflects Kosinski's belief that life consists of random events—hence the name "Chance"—that influence the course of history in ways humans think they control.

 

 

Woody Allen's "Manhattan"

 

A vulgar comparison, perhaps, but it’s possible to think of writer/director Woody Allen as a latter-day Jerry Lewis. As with the usually denigrated Lewis, Allen's film persona is a paranoid who finds the world he knows conspiring to put him in the worst light. The bumbling Everyman, where social ineptitude is first nature, a superpower that benefits no one.  As with, Lewis, Allen’s characters are variations on a theme of failure, bad posture, poor self-esteem, is someone so lacking in finesse, agility, or aptitude in the well-heeled that most attempts to emulate sophisticated manners are inevitably catastrophic. This theme runs throughout all of Allen's films, with a central preoccupation with sex. Allen rarely gets any, and when he does, it never comes off as the instruction manuals or the Playboy philosophy promised. Allen presents himself as a victim of the sexual revolution's propaganda, he is Norman Mailer’s “ prisoner of sex” someone furiously trying to make his relationships with women adhere to a set of rose-hued promises.

Allen’s themes are deeper than what one could extrapolate from Jerry Lewis and Allen, long our favored conspicuously intellectual filmmaker, expanded his theme into a murkier tableau. Manhattan, comedy, is something of a treatise on what's wrong with modern man: a lack of moral certitude, the silence of God and man's attempt to fill the void with his own concepts, the meaninglessness of language, the obsession with surface. and the lack of spiritual reflection. All these strands, culled from the books of Tolstoy Sartre. Burroughs, and especially the films of Bergman, are all touched on during the film. Luckily, Allen, the writer and director, has developed a perfectly coherent visual style and a sense of dialogue that makes the film less foreboding than it sounds.

The story revolves around someone named Isaac Davis (Allen), a high paid writer of a trendy TV comedy who quits his job so he can work on a novel exposing the spiritual vacuity of the denizens of Manhattan. He is divorced from his bisexual wife, who left him for another woman, and who is writing a memoir that reveals the touchiest aspects of their relationships. Davis has taken up with a seventeen-year-old girl named Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a bright teenager who loves Davis but whose love he rejects in the interest of a writer named Mary (Diane Keaton). who is currently dating his best friend. the already-married Yale (Michael) Murphy), on the sly. Davis waits for the two to break up before he makes his move. Mary and Davis finally get together, Davis breaks the relationship with Tracy but, after two weeks, Mary and Yale are seeing each other again. leaving Davis in the cold. Davis rushes. to catch Tracy, on her way to England to attend school, and the two rekindle their relationship. That, fundamentally, is the plot from beginning to end. Though the particulars don't promise much at first, Allen's Memorex ear for dialogue makes Manhattan one of the better serio-comic films in years. The characters are well-educated professionals, mostly writers, who walk around New York City's haunts Central Park, Greenwich Village. uptown publisher parties-rattling off vague utterances that sound nice, but which evaporate under close inspection. At a pro-ERA benefit, Davis listens to a novelist who tells the theme behind his new book to an audience of enthralled listeners.

"This woman has never had an orgasm," says the writer, "she suffers from the quintessential emptiness of the age. She meets a man who is all essence. They make love. She has an orgasm. and then she dies." "I had an orgasm once," pipes in a comely but vacant-eyed blonde, "but my analyst told me it was the wrong kind…."  "That's never happened to me," says a bemused Davis, "even the worst one I ever had was right on the money."

Manhattan is the best made of all of Allen's films, and may establish a standard by which his future ms will be judged. Gone is the distressingly artificial intellectualism of the previous Interiors a film so text bookish that it was inseparable in content from any recent Bergman offering. The camera shots are spare and well-framed. basically, a series of medium close-up static shots that uses the screen as a kind of stage and allows the actors maximum leeway for effective facial expressions The cast is generally superb. but the biggest surprise is the young Hemingway, whose portrayal of a bright teen is remarkably unforced and natural. The black and white photography by Gordon Willis leaves something to be desired. though. The texture is too stylized, unnatural and washed-out in vocation of grays that have the resolution of a newspaper photo. Likewise. Allen's use of Gershwin archly-romantic music, intended no doubt as an ironic counterpart. is too much. The music doesn't underscore or suggest irony. but rather points to it. The film's point is clear enough without the ironic counterpoint the music might provide. The material is strong enough.