Francis Ford Coppola returns to film school, per se, and is a triple threat as writer, producer and director for this independent black and white study of two brothers: one a brooding "genius", Vincent Gallo as Tetro; the other, Alden Edrenreich as Bennie, a youthful dud who, staying with brother and his girlfriend, yearns to complete Tetro's play-in-progress, scrawled in notebooks and only meant as cathartic exercise for the author.
This same thing can be said of the film: obviously heartfelt and soul-owned by Coppola, it all comes across as pretentious and, despite a pretty good twist-ending, somewhat liken to CHINATOWN, this is a muddled, plodding, overlong mess that, if it were in fact a student (short) film at twenty minutes, might have been interesting.
The location, Buenos Aries, is beautiful, as is the cinematography. But the characters are all one-sided, especially the famous composer father, shown in colorized flashbacks: so abundantly evil he should have a thin little mustache.
Vincent Gallo looks, and acts, the part of a dark-horse artist; but Edrenriech lacks the blunt determination that, for instance, Matt Dillon (originally cast as Tetro) wielded as the little- bro-under-big-bro's-shadow in Coppola's eighties venture RUMBLE FISH, which this is a ponderous replica of.
This same thing can be said of the film: obviously heartfelt and soul-owned by Coppola, it all comes across as pretentious and, despite a pretty good twist-ending, somewhat liken to CHINATOWN, this is a muddled, plodding, overlong mess that, if it were in fact a student (short) film at twenty minutes, might have been interesting.
The location, Buenos Aries, is beautiful, as is the cinematography. But the characters are all one-sided, especially the famous composer father, shown in colorized flashbacks: so abundantly evil he should have a thin little mustache.
Vincent Gallo looks, and acts, the part of a dark-horse artist; but Edrenriech lacks the blunt determination that, for instance, Matt Dillon (originally cast as Tetro) wielded as the little- bro-under-big-bro's-shadow in Coppola's eighties venture RUMBLE FISH, which this is a ponderous replica of.