Arts & Culture
Apocalypse . . . again
Published 26 November 2001
The Vietnam war has possessed the imaginations of film-makers for a quarter of a century. But one hellish vision of the conflict still dominates the canon
They don't make 'em like this any more. It says everything about the state of cinema in 2001 that the best film I've seen on the big screen this year was first released in 1979. Epic seems too small a word for Apocalypse Now, like calling a £50 note a piece of paper. It is the sheer vaulting ambition of this film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, that still has the capacity to astonish and, seeing it once again in a cinema, and reading the production notes detailing the problems that attended the shooting of the film, prompts me to remember another great cinematic folie de grandeur, Fitzcarraldo. Coppola's high-risk effort, combating hurricanes and paranoia in the Philippines jungle to make his movie, seems no less operatic than Klaus Kinski's Irish adventurer lifting a Mississippi paddle steamer out of the Amazon River and hauling it up the side of a hill, in a Herculean effort to bring recordings of Enrico Caruso to local Indians.
Coppola dominates Seventies cinema (arguably the decade's four best movies - The Conversation, The God-father, The Godfather: Part II and Apocalypse Now - were all directed by him) in the same way that Michelangelo dominated Renaissance art; and with its 238-day shoot, 370 hours of film, two years in post-production and postlapsarian theme, not to mention the Jehovah-like presence of Marlon Brando, Apocalypse Now represents nothing less than Coppola's Sistine Chapel.
The story is based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, and concerns a young intelligence officer, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who takes a classified mission, involving a boat journey upriver into Cambodia, to find Colonel Walter Kurtz (Brando) - a Special Forces officer operating "beyond all decent restraint" - and there to terminate the Colonel's command, "with extreme prejudice". At 153 minutes, the original cut was no longer than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; and yet, back in 1979, there were many who whimpered that the film was too long and, in the scenes featuring Brando, too elusively poetic, too introspective, too philosophical to represent the climax of such an Orphean journey. Some critics wanted Hades himself at the end of the river, and instead they got T S Eliot.
For all its perceived literary affectations - my own opinion is that Eliot provides a better sense of hell than any other poet, including Milton - I never had a problem with Brando's performance. Indeed, I now believe that his scenes are among the best in the film. Looking at Brando once again, in the new director's cut, forever washing his hands like Lady Macbeth, while only the thinnest nimbus of his magnificent Angkorean head remains in the light, as if the rest of him already dwelled in Luciferian darkness, I asked myself, who else could Coppola have possibly chosen for Martin Sheen to find at the end of his journey? Now, more than ever, I think that no one but Marlon Brando could have conveyed such a strong sense of a jaded character, weary of it all, whose early promise has somehow disappointed - for is that not Brando's own story?
For the Redux version (the Latinate "redux" is only a highfalutin, Updikean sort of word meaning "restored"), Coppola has added an extra 49 minutes of footage to bring the new length up to 202 minutes, so that anyone now seeing the movie risks not just bruised eardrums - Walter Murch won a well-deserved Academy Award for his sound design - but deep vein thrombosis as well. There's not a dull minute, although the restored sequences add little more than reliquary value to the audacious excellence of the original vision - it's like reading Nabokov's The Enchanter years after one has become intimately acquainted with Lolita.
The longest of these additions is a French plantation sequence in which Sheen endures a rancorous dinner party with the speechless bafflement that all Americans seem to feel in the presence of the French, after which he makes love to Roxanne (Aurore Clement), a beautiful French widow. It might be argued that this sequence, reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, serves to point up that Willard has, like every other American soldier, found himself marooned on the left bank of some Stygian hell. But my own impression was that, like Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, Sheen and his nonplussed boat crew had simply blundered into the wrong studio, one where Luis Bunuel just happened to be shooting The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Redux adds only a little to the famous "surf's-up" scene with the Valkyrian helicopters and the infamous Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), whose own surfboard, it is now revealed, was stolen by Sheen and his crew. Truly, Coppola puts the hell into helicopters. These scenes serve to convey, more than any other film I have seen, both the high-adrenalin excitement and the sheer brutal insanity of war, and remain probably the best reason to go and see Apocalypse Now on the big screen. Robert Duvall's cameo almost steals the whole film in the same way that Jack Nicholson's did in Easy Rider.
Apocalypse Now was by no means the first film about Vietnam. Let's not even talk about The Green Berets (1968), a crude piece of gung-ho, anti-communist propaganda starring John Wayne. The Deer Hunter and Coming Home may have been the first Vietnam films to be released, both in 1978, but Coppola's film was planned as early as 1974, one year before the war ended. Had it not been for the director's largely self-inflicted post-production nightmares, he would have released his movie in 1977, and doubtless would have won the sev-eral Oscars that these other, largely inferior and now very dated-looking movies won instead.
After these three, the deluge. By my reckoning, there have been almost 50 films with a Vietnam war-related theme. It might reasonably be asked what effect, if any, they have exercised on our sensibilities vis-a-vis Vietnam. It is surely this: that there can be no one who now believes that US involvement in Vietnam was anything but a disaster, both for America and for the Vietnamese. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, for most non-Americans at least, opinion of the war has been shaped by Hollywood, especially Coppola's film, although he actually made not one but two Vietnam movies. Of Gardens of Stone, it is best to say very little. And it is Apocalypse Now that bestrides the whole Vietnam genre like a colossus. Never has a film pointed up with such dramatic impact the yawning gap that lies between the war talked up by the politicians and generals and the rock'n'roll, drug-fuelled, "what the fuck are we doing here" kind of war fought by the ordinary men on the ground.
As American planes over Afghanistan drop food parcels and bombs alternately, I am reminded of what Captain Willard says following the accidental shooting of an innocent peasant women: "It was the way we had over here of living with ourselves: we'd cut them in half with a machine-gun and give them a Band Aid. It was a lie, and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies." Apocalypse Now has an extra resonance in these benighted times.
Apocalypse Now (15) is on limited release from 23 November
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