The Talkies/Apocalypse Now

...When the movie finally enters that Hobbesian world-when we finally reach the heart of darkness that is Kurtz's home-it collapses...

...the river is an unknown quantity, treacherous and confusing...

...he has failed to make an effective drama or to develop a single memorable character...

...Here the by John Podhoretz film loses its atmospheric power and becomes muddied and overwrought...

...It doesn't, however, because for the first time the movie has to rely upon its screenplay (written by Coppola and the untalented John Milius) and the words it puts into Kurtz's mouth do not at all suggest the fiery intelligence and magnetism with which he is supposedly endowed...

...The only real character in Apocalypse Now is the war itself...

...And even though the narration runs from beginning to end, one hardly remembers a word of it after leaving the theatre...

...Happily, this is not the case...

...The four soldiers accompanying Willard, who are more often than not stoned or on acid, are likeable, and are even given the distinction of dying tragic, and not ironic, deaths...

...One might have assumed, from reports while the movie was being made and from comments by Coppola himself, that this film was merely going to be a ritualized enactment of the anti-war party line: imperialist America fighting a criminal war in support of a corrupt and oppressive South Vietnamese government against the noble North Vietnamese and Viet Cong liberators...

...it cries: "I am a masterpiece...

...APOCALYPSE NOW F rancis Coppola's Apocalypse Now takes the outline of its plot from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: a rather nondescript fellow, named Marlow in the book and Wil-lard in the movie, travels with a small group of people down a river through a foreign continent, his destination being the lair of a man named Kurtz...

...But it is with his conception of the Vietnamese people that Coppola truly finds an original voice...

...So we must take it on faith that he is alienated and troubled...

...Heart of Darkness is set in the early 1900s, with Marlow and Kurtz both agents for an imperialistic European company...

...it screams: "lama masterpiece...

...Apocalypse Now is set in the 1960s, with Willard (Martin Sheen) and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) both Americans at war...

...For Marlow/Willard, Kurtz's exploits and even his very name have achieved an almost legendary status...

...But the most profound difference between the two works is that Conrad's Marlow has been brought to the heart of darkness to watch Kurtz die, while Coppola's Willard, an Army intelligence officer, has been sent there to execute Kurtz, a colonel in the Green Berets who has gone insane...

...Coppola's masterful ability to tell his story atmospherically also serves to give us a more complicated sense of the war than we have received from the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion in the last 15 years...

...The war we see in Apocalypse Now is not a crime, but an enigma: Nothing in it is resolved and no one person portrayed is of one mind about anything...

...There is, finally, a disturbing self-consciousness pervading the finished product, as if Coppola knew from the first day he started filming that if he did not come away with the greatest picture of all time the whole thing would be a failure...

...The movie fails as well with its narration, spoken by Martin Sheen and written by Michael Herr, the highly regarded author of Dispatches, a volume about the agonies of being a correspondent in Vietnam during the war...

...And Marlon Brando, in a truly scandalous performance, makes of Kurtz an obese creep who reads T.S...

...It isn't...

...The demented Colonel Kil-gore (Robert Duvall)-who orders napalm strikes because he loves the odor, and who in convoying Willard's group to their river insists on taking an unimportant strip of beach in a Wagnerian battle because he wants to see one of the kids in Willard's group, a famous surfer, hang ten-is adored by his soldiers and is extraordinarily brave...

...A cultured man of impeccable credentials, Kurtz turns out to be running a kingdom at the very heart of darkness, a jungle kingdom in which the natives worship him as a god, and he has become as savage as his subjects...

...But since the movie is effective only visually, what Willard has to say does not matter ' very much...

...His Vietnamese, who have guns just as the Americans do, whose world has been penetrated as the world of the Africans never could be by the tools of modern warfare and the modern world, remain as savage and mysterious as Conrad's silent horde John Podhoretz is a student at the University of Chicago...

...Like Marlow, Willard fears what lies around the bend...

...of "niggers," with whom they share an almost supernatural ability to lose themselves in the thick forests nature has provided for them...

...The dark . continent which Conrad knew so well, a place where nature is omnipotent and man seems merely an* afterthought, is no longer Africa, but Asia, and its heart is not somewhere in the Congo, but in Indochina...

...And indeed, what Willard says is indistinguishable from what Herr says in his book, a standard anti-war tome, even though Willard is not an intellectual adrift in Southeast Asia but an amoral and unpleasant man...

...The general who gives Willard his mission is not the evil martinet we have seen in other Vietnam movies, but a polite and easygoing Southerner who is gravely distressed by the insanity that has overtaken his old friend Kurtz...

...A war can be a great sup-porting character-a foil-but it cannot carry a whole movie by itself...

...His voice harshly lectures us about the "clowns at the controls" and about Kilgore's madness while his actions display not one iota of moral intelligence or honesty...

...From its first moment, Apocalypse Now says: "lama masterpiece...

...Eliot aloud and badly, and wanders around muttering to himself...

...But he fails to leave us anything besides that taste of war...

...Brando, however, is often unintelligible, as if it would be too much strain for him to raise his voice so that we could hear him...

...It is in his updating of the atmosphere of Conrad's novella that Coppola displays an intelligence and subtlety that go quite beyond anything one has ever seen in the movies...

...Kurtz supposedly has begun to have the same hypnotic effect on Willard that he has on his legions, but when Willard finally does kill him, it seems to be because the great man turned out to be such a bore...

...the jungle holds not only Viet Cong or hostile tribes, but tigers as well...

...Not only is he an assassin, but he is also lousy company for those on the boat with him...

...An evil white fog surrounds his boat and through it, just as Conrad describes, hundreds of arrows come flying from the bushes, and the armed American soldiers who have killed repeatedly before our eyes are as helpless as the defenseless Marlow and his crew...

...And the truth of the matter is that, stripped of historical circumstances and recognizable human emotions, wars are not too interesting...

...Kurtz is supposed to possess a magnificent voice, a voice of such resounding quality that one is stunned merely by the sound of it...

...Nature itself is ominous and vengeful...

...We gasp not at the murder but at the disgusting decapitation of a water buffalo which we see in counterpoint...

...The overwhelmingly visual style, which is so effective in the first two-thirds, becomes merely bombastic, and the loud and weird musical score, which has been used somewhat judiciously up until this point, swirls and screams in an effort to make some kind of drama out of the meeting which is the consummation of Willard's journey...

...Coppola has managed in this ruinously expensive, over-discussed movie to give us a true sense of the war in Vietnam, of its confusion and its innately contradictory nature...

...Here, however, the similarities in plot between Conrad's novella and Coppola's epic film end...

...And just as in Conrad, it is not gunfire which scares these creatures into their jungle, but a piercing whistle from the boat...

...There is no reason that the screen should not explode with the conflict between the doubtful Willard and the extraordinary yet inhuman Kurtz...

...There are various horrifying, pathetic, and comic encounters with the Vietnamese, yet the overriding image of these natives is of their invisibility-their terrifying ability to disappear into that nasty, brutish, and short world which Kurtz is temporarily able to command before it takes him over as well...