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PARTISAN REVIEW
Coppola's unusual curiosity about such things as fatherhood, marriage,
power, spiritual anguish, etc., sets him apart from the run of Hollywood
directors as a central interpreter ofAmerican experience, a man taking the big
risks, working outside the limits of traditional genres. The lack of eccentricity
or repeating obsession, the avoidance of obvious visual metaphor or radical
foreshortening of narrative may deceive some viewers into declaring there 's no
artist behind the perfectly achieved images, the marvelous amplitude and
evenness offlow, but that would be a mistake induced by the influence of the
auteur theory on educated taste. Those looking for "personality"-the
flourishes of "signature" -may be too distracted to feel the power of
Coppola's work. His personality (sad word) emerges in the way he chooses to
reveal his characters. For instance, he has a genius for noisy, shallow, self–
propelling types-the American as untrammeled egotist, powerful and
infantile at the same time . He appears to love their theatrical energy and flash,
and his sense of how such people behave in social situations is so accurate that
he can do very funny scenes without a trace ofcaricature . He's at his best in the
convention of "surveillance experts" in
The Conversation .
Boastful, frenetic,
absurdly aggressive, these American go-getters can't stop competing for a
moment, not even at a party, and so they begin showing off their skills and
playing dirty tricks on one another. Their casual cruelty while "relaxing,"
their amiable, thoughtless dedication to "professionalism" as a binding
justification for any act, gradually produces a kind of horror that is all the
more powetful for coming at us so obliquely . The sequence never ceases to
play at its quiet, evenly sustained level of observation, yet the reverberations
are tragic ; it's hard not to think of soldiers testing weapons in Vietnam and
other recent examples of American professionals run amuck . To expose the
murderous falsity of appearances without betraying the appearances them–
selves remains one of the principal tasks of realism and one of the things
movies do most successfully . Coppola's work, at its best, sustains the highest
traditions of realism. Despite everything that can be marked off against him ,
there 'severy reason to expect Coppola to be a principal exponent of American
themes in the movies of the next two decades.
