Twixt (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2011)
Francis Ford Coppola shouldn’t need any introduction, but I’m going to give one anyway.
Coppola got his start in cinema as a graduate student at UCLA, where he made a short film based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, “William Wilson.” He fell in with Roger Corman, working for American International Pictures, including directing a very forgettable horror film, Dementia 13, for them. He would achieve mainstream success in the mid 1960s and founded Zoetrope Studios in 1969. The seventies, of course, you are familiar with: The Godfather Parts I and II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now. That decade also saw him expanding into various business ventures, principally winemaking. The eighties were troubled and ultimately tragic. He lost 25 million dollars on the musical One from the Heart. He would spend 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, making two S. E. Hinton adaptations, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, which were modest successes, but a far cry from his New Hollywood heyday. 1984’s The Cotton Club was another disaster, only making back half of its 58 million dollar budget. In 1988, his son Gian-Carlo died in boating accident. The nineties saw a return to at least financial success with all his films grossing money. The Godfather Part III is not as bad as its reputation suggests, but it’s not good either. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a great looking film hampered by some unfortunate performances. Jack is an abomination. The 1997 John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker would be his last film for a decade. Between 2007 and 2011, he directed three films in short succession: Youth without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt.
Twixt is the story of Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), an aging, ponytailed horror novelist and “bargain basement Stephen King” who has been reduced to hawking books and autographs on an all-time awful book tour. He is currently in a small town that saw a mass murder some years previously when the sheriff and amateur writer Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) requests that Baltimore read his manuscript and see a murder victim at the morgue. That night, Baltimore experiences a deeply strange vision in his sleep, meeting a young girl named Virginia (Elle Fanning) and meeting Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), who serves as the Virgil to Dante in this liminal dreamscape. Experiencing money problems, career burnout, and marriage problems with his wife (played by Val Kilmer’s actual ex-wife Joanne Whalley) in the wake of their daughter’s death, Baltimore decides to write a new novel, using sleeping pills to return to his dreams of Virginia, Poe, a child molesting clergyman, and a Baudelaire quoting, goth biker named Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich), and investigate the town in his waking hours.
You might be noticing a few similarities between Coppola’s life and this story of a writer on the decline. The film revels in metafiction to a degree that’s somewhere between pretentious and profound. Val Kilmer, who I will be polite and say looks like a man in his 50s, gives an honestly kind of great performance as Baltimore. It’s seemingly as informed by Kilmer’s own experiences as it is Coppola’s. Baltimore’s daughter dies in exactly the same way that Coppola’s son died, and I can hardly imagine how difficult that must have been to do.The recurring references to and appearance of Edgar Allan Poe not only point back to the earliest part of Coppola’s career, but also suggest the inherent melancholy nature of making art while dealing with grief. All this follows in line with Coppola’s previous film Tetro, which similarly used autobiographical material to build a story.
Now, I do not want to give the impression that Twixt is good. It’s an interesting film, sure, but good is a step too far. Its plot is borderline incoherent. The film looks bad enough with his digital photography, but the dream sequences in particular are absolutely awful looking. I don’t know what filter he used, but it needs never be used by any human being ever again. Elle Fanning and Alden Ehrenreich have both given performances that I’ve liked a lot, but I was so embarrassed for them here.
I will say this, though. Twixt has one of the most honest scenes of what writing is actually like you’ll see in cinema. Nevermind that it’s similar to the one in Throw Mama from the Train, because this one has Val Kilmer doing impressions in it.
October 17, 2018
oliveresque 