Old Men and Youth Without Youth

Mystery Man on Film has a long article on Francis Ford Coppola's new movie Youth Without Youth, an adaptation of a philosophical Mircea Eliade novel(!). This thing sounds too crazy to be true. As MM tells it, you can't help but feel apprehensive about a filmmaker and artist seemingly past his prime attempting such an ambitious and potentially disastrous project.

Does this mean that the film will be terrible? I have no idea. I can’t help but admire the wild, blind courage of Coppola to tackle a story like this, and I’ll be first in line to see the film. And I'll try to forget what I wanted and didn't get out of the book. Sometimes I wonder if we don't judge films/scripts too harshly because they're not the films/scripts WE would've created, as opposed to considering, on its own terms, the one that the director/screenwriter created.

Even if he fails, I won’t care. When it comes to Coppola, I’ll take the bad with the good. I’d rather him fail and keep trying than to see him do nothing at all. To hell with embarrassment.

It's hard to imagine that Coppola can bring the same energy to this movie that he once did with a cheap little gangster movie or a Vietnam war retelling of Heart of Darkness. Nor is it likely that he can achieve the personal lightness that his daughter brings to her movies. No, this seems more like Kubrick in the end making Eyes Wide Shut, a movie that mourns the filmmaker's own lost sense of vitality and purpose in life.