Coppola also well knows (and demonstrated in "The Godfather" films) that movies aren't especially good at dealing with abstract ideas -- for those you'd be better off turning to the written word -- but they are superb for presenting moods and feelings, the look of a battle, the expression on a face, the mood of a country. "Apocalypse Now" achieves greatness not by analyzing our "experience in Vietnam," but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience.
An example: The scene in which Robert Duvall, as a crazed lieutenant colonel, leads his troops in a helicopter assault on a village is, quite simply, the best movie battle scene ever filmed. It's
simultaneously numbing, depressing, and exhilarating: As the rockets jar from the helicopters and spring through the air, we're elated like kids for a half-second, until the reality of the consequences sinks in.
Another wrenching scene -- in which the crew of Martin Sheen's Navy patrol boat massacres the Vietnamese peasants in a small boat -- happens with such sudden, fierce, senseless violence that it forces us to understand for the first time how such things could happen.
Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is filled with moments like that, and the narrative device of the journey upriver is as convenient for him as it was for Conrad. That's really why he uses it, and not because of
literary cross-references for graduate students to catalog. He takes
the journey, strings episodes along it, leads us at last to Brando's
awesome, stinking hideaway ... and then finds, so we've all heard, that he doesn't have an ending. Well, Coppola doesn't have an ending, if we or he expected the closing scenes to pull everything together and make sense of it. Nobody should have been surprised. "Apocalypse Now" doesn't tell any kind of a conventional story, doesn't have a thought-out message for us about Vietnam, has no answers, and thus needs no ending.
The way the film ends now, with Brando's fuzzy, brooding monologues and the final violence, feels much more satisfactory than any conventional ending possibly could.
What's great in the film, and what will make it live for many years
and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the levels Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema. Some of those moments come at the same time; remember again the helicopter assault and its unsettling juxtaposition of horror and exhilaration. Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.
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