If there were annual awards for the best credit sequence in film each year (there very well may be), then Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in 10 years would win. Employing a throw-back graphic design and large name-filled title cards, the film purports itself to be a romantic drama that will be filled with panache. After the rose-filled into, the film really falls apart. Building intrigue now and then, the plot murkily explores an old man who studies language who is struck by lightning and starts to age in reverse.
Yeah, really. The romance that emerges is “The Fountain”-like and at times laughable, as Tim Roth’s Dominic character can speak her secret languages that she has learned after she was … of course … struck by lightning. The film takes place in the 1940s, making it hard to impugn with today’s standards in science and really I don’t think the film was supposed to be taken seriously in that way. As a whole, the film should not be taken serious in any way, shape or form.
Roth turns in a nice performance fighting through Mandarin and an odd, eternal, convoluted romance with the elusive Veronica. Alexandra Maria Lara also is serviceable, starring in her first major English-language film.
It is Coppola and the badly-constructed script that cause this film undue ham. The presumably interesting novella on which it is based about the mysteries of the universe, reverse-aging and the origins of language should have made this a stand-out of its genre.
KEN TARR is a student at Santa Monica College, an actor and writer and is also taller than 99 percent of the population. He telepathically or at
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 22, 2007. Read the original PDF.