A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but unfortunately for Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth,"" the same holds true in reverse. The Hollywood legend returns to the screen after a ten-year absence from the director's chair, and while his talent shines through to make for a beautiful cinematic experience, the core story of the film still smells rotten.
Tim Roth stars as Dominic, a 70-year-old linguistic professor living in pre-WWII Romania. Dominic mourns his life's work, a complete origin of human language and consciousness, which he fears he will never complete. Things take a turn when he is struck by lightening, a cataclysmic event that restores him to the build of a man in his mid-thirties. The regeneration also develops his mind to superhuman levels, giving him an incredibly vivid memory and the ability to master new languages in his sleep. His powers develop further, sparking the interest of Nazi scientists eager to kidnap Dominic to help create a race of ""supermen.""
The plot continues into segments of classic films about spies and intrigue, some brief love plots and eventually meditation on the cost of near immortality, isolation and loss. The film never seems to gel together into a single narrative - the plot points seem to be at best distractions for Roth's character as he contemplates the ramifications of his newfound abilities. At its worst, the plot seems to be Coppola's effort to recreate his favorite classic cinema scenes without giving an explanation for why they're in the same film.
Fortunately, this is where the film shines - it is gorgeous. Nostalgic viewers will be hooked from the opening credits, distinctly modeled after the credits on ""talkies"" and other films of Hollywood yesteryear. Some of the camerawork does a better job characterizing Dominic than Roth does in his performance. The camera isolates Dominic on the screen from other characters, and the use of trick photography to show Dominic conversing with the ""double"" that manifests itself in his heightened mental abilities is spectacular.
The WWII espionage segments use the high contrast colors of propaganda war posters littering the streets of Romania, and later scenes in the film turn up the contrast to emulate the feel of a classic film like ""The Maltese Falcon."" The whole film has a fine coat of polish that could only come from as steady a hand as Coppola's.
In the end, the film suffers from the tragic flaw of egotism. Many unnecessary scenes are left in the final cut, most leaving audiences scratching their heads instead of driving the story forward. These scenes - while a blast for film geeks to dissect and analyze - do nothing to move the film as a whole to any logical conclusion. By the end, viewers are left with the cliché of the regretful immortal and clusters of philosophical dialogue from throughout the film that are recited again over the final scene. The plot of the film becomes an exercise in delivering philosophical revelations without context or explanation - a form that will definitely turn off all but the most introspective viewers.
""Youth Without Youth"" clearly represents Coppola's work by the level of quality but falls flat as art house fare. It becomes too contrived to truly stand as a film worth praise.
