Youth With­out Youth had a shock­ingly poor recep­tion for the first film in years from a major Amer­i­can film­maker, gar­ner­ing a mid­dling 43 on Meta­critic and a painful 29 from Rot­ten­Toma­toes. In Jan­u­ary 2008, this Dork Reporter found him­self in a room with a bunch of jour­nal­ists from genre pub­li­ca­tions like Fan­go­ria and ComingSoon.net (Weird, right? It was a work thing. Any­way…). Sev­eral of them had recently reviewed Youth With­out Youth, and the buzz was extremely neg­a­tive. Now hav­ing finally seen it myself, it is this Dork Reporter’s opin­ion it received an unfair bad rap.

Recline thy weary head betwixt my thighs, old man

Why would the likes of Fan­go­ria be inter­ested in a pres­tige period piece? Need­less to say, Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola is one of the most famous liv­ing film­mak­ers. Many young movie lovers first dis­cover an appre­ci­a­tion for film through the canon­i­cal The God­fa­ther Parts I & II and Apoc­a­lypse Now (and hope­fully later grad­u­ate to the sub­tler plea­sures of The Con­ver­sa­tion). Alas, he went trag­i­cally awry with the expen­sive folly One From the Heart in 1982, and spent decades dig­ging out of the finan­cial hole. Peo­ple have been wait­ing for years for him to return to form after many years of work-for-hire (The Rain­maker) and mis­judged sequels to past glo­ries (The God­fa­ther Part III). But the main rea­son for sci-fi & hor­ror fans’ inter­est in Youth With­out Youth is that it is in fact Coppola’s first sci­ence fic­tion. It is, how­ever, more in the con­tem­pla­tive mode of The Man Who Fell to Earth than Fangoria’s usual beat.

Oh, Fran­cis, you know you’re going to catch flak for that beret…

The freeform plot mean­ders to say the least, which clearly isn’t the point, but will frus­trate view­ers antic­i­pat­ing a more lucid sci­ence fic­tion con­ceit. The aca­d­e­mic Dominic (Tim Roth) under­takes a project lit­er­ally too big to fin­ish in a life­time: a com­plete his­tory and analy­sis of lin­guis­tics. In a true exam­ple of careful-what-you-wish-for, the aged and sui­ci­dal intel­lec­tual is struck by light­ning and mys­te­ri­ously restored to his youth (Roth is at his best in these scenes, where he car­ries his younger body with the gait and pos­ture of an old man). As he strives to com­plete his mas­sive folly (could Cop­pola iden­tify?), he is aided by a sym­pa­thetic Pro­fes­sor Stan­ci­ulescu (Bruno Ganz), evades the Nazis, and is haunted by an incar­na­tion of his youth­ful love Laura (Alexan­dra Maria Lara). Youth With­out Youth is def­i­nitely an old man’s film (I mean that as a com­pli­ment, Fran­cis), for the themes of reju­ve­na­tion, dou­bles, and transmutation/reincarnation echo through­out Dominic’s extended life.

Please see Jaimie Stuart’s excel­lent and suc­cinct appre­ci­a­tion (at the bot­tom of page), sug­gest­ing that one pos­si­ble rea­son for the film’s poor reviews was that the dig­i­tal for­mat trans­ferred poorly to large screens but looks rav­ish­ing on DVD. It does.

---

Offi­cial movie site: www.sonyclassics.com/youthwithoutyouth

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Tweet

Related Posts:

1. 
   The Incredible Hulk