ONE FROM THE HEART
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
1981
VOD, Reprise on Blu-Ray

I don’t always find the Movie Brats best at their most sentimental. I do with Spielberg, where my favorite films are The Fabelmans, Catch Me If You Can, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind over his landmark blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark and his prestige dramas like Schindler’s List. When he gets sweet, he puts up just the right amount of guard for most of the runtime and then allows absolute powerhouse wallops to rock you to your core. With Lucas, I vastly prefer Star Wars to American Graffiti these days – Scorsese, the crime epics of The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon notch a tier above movies like The Age of Innocence and Hugo. If De Palma has a sweet side, I’ve only really seen it in The Untouchables and Phantom of the Paradise, and I prefer the nastiness of Blow Out or Carrie.

By comparison, I’m still getting to know Coppola. I’ve seen the classic 70s quadrilogy, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and outside I’ve only seen Peggy Sue Got Married and One From The Heart: Reprise. Peggy Sue I find nostalgic to the point of acrid, with really only its bizarre Nic Cage performance breaking through to make me think we might be laughing together. So I came into One From The Heart: Reprise knowing it was a film which bankrupted both Coppola and his Zoetrope Studios into financial ruin, a film reviled upon release that had seen some reappraisal since, and a “musical” sung through by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle. I hoped to get some fun out of a calamity.

From the opening credits which unveil this reconstructed fantasy of the Las Vegas strip from under a sea of sand, I spent basically all 93 minutes of this film with my joyful smile in rictus. During the fantastical dream ballet sequence (shown in the trailer and borrowed in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land) I started crying. This story of two people falling out of love and still refusing to let go is not told effectively through the script, but through the film’s intoxicating color, music, and rhythm. The story, which positions Frederick Forrest’s Hank as so unlikable that you’re rooting for Acme violence against him by the film’s second half, serves as friction against that cocktail.

Hank has been living with Frannie (Teri Garr) for several years, and they’ve fought and made up repeatedly the entire time. He cheats, they break up, they get back together the next day, and the dysfunction continues. This film’s fight appears to be the fight that finally ends things, and they pursue new relationships with new flings. Nastassja Kinski’s Leila can really only engage with Hank on a surface, physical level, a sheltered immigrant circus performer who romanticizes the idea of running away together. That relationship sings because, honestly, romantic fantasy is all Hank can provide, too – the death of their time together is built in from the moment they meet because she only wants a fantasy and he’s a facade.

The real meat of the movie is Frannie and Raul Julia’s Ray, a singer/waiter who challenges her to actually follow her dreams and see the world. Their relationship is lush, coming across as having real empathy, chemistry, sex, fun. Surrounded by skeptics, it was their scenes together that very obviously pulled everyone onto the same page. Their reunion after a couple small flirtations is the beginning of the film’s longest dance sequence, and while their dialogue together is much stronger than Hank and Leila’s, it’s the dance that sells you that these two are meant for one another.

Even outside the dance sequences, there are long, dialogue-free songs set to the Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle vocals. Early in the film, there’s a lot of walking from one end of the strip to the other, looking around longingly, bathed in neon and shadow. I’ve been explaining “what happens” in the film so far, but it’s really a film baked in How It’s Shown. Hank wandering through the cold blue neon of the martini bar and eventually seeing the giant superimposed Leila was an emotional powerhouse for me. I won’t say “the art speaks for itself,” but this film is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words, and there are too many pictures that make my heart soar here to dig into what I find so beautiful about each one as part of this film.

The running story of Coppola at this time is about his upcoming Megalopolis. Once again, Coppola is betting the farm (in this case, the vineyard) on a passion project. The conversations around it have highlighted a lot of his personal failures, among them his lack of realistic perspective on the state of art commerce and his refusal to disavow evil men. There’s a tension between wanting to view Coppola as a master artist and tragic figure and the recognition that his choices lead him down the road he deserves. I’m not sure it’s as simple as believing that people get what they do or don’t deserve – my feelings on One From The Heart reflect that same tension, a film ending on someone who maybe would better have been left alone in a dark room. Maybe with future viewings, I’ll pull some new meaning from that last thirty seconds. For now, I’ll settle on it being a promise that the story is not quite over yet.