Apocalypse then

Rating: 8/10 (2 March 2004)

Francis Ford Coppola was at the height of his powers when he decided to make his gramatically-challenged film 'Apocalypse Now', which pivots around the brilliant idea of using Joseph Conrad's novel 'Heart of Darkness', about Kurtz, a capable and idealistic colonialist gone mad in deepest Africa, as a metaphor for the Vietnam war. It should also have been the first major American film to address that difficult subject, but it was subject to numerous, infamous delays in production and was not finished until 1979, by which time other films (like 'The Deer Hunter' or, indirectly, 'Taxi Driver') had already addressed the same subject. What remains is a wildly ambitious film of vast scope, full of astonishing images but possessed of a certain fundamental silliness in a way that 'The Deer Hunter', for example, completely avoids. Having read the book since I first saw the film, however, one surprising discovery is that the incoherence and relative absence of closure, which some may consider faults, actually derive from the source material.
Viewed solely as cinema, 'Apocalypse Now' is a flawed but original, thought-provoking and and highly distinctive piece of film. But it's also interesting in terms of where it fits into the (by now, very well defined) genre of Vietnam movies. The classic narrative now avoids the political question (should the war have been fought?) to concentrate on the hardships of the (mainly working class) young soldiers whose misfortune was to have to fight it. 'Apocalypse Now', although not overtly political itself, is arguably a stronger film than most, because it does not allow its protagonists to escape personal responsibility for their actions: the draftees may have been victims, but they were perpetrators too, and the film recognises the duality. However, this does not make it a peacenik anti-war flick. Coppola cleverly borrows the ambivalence that Marlowe, Conrad's narrator, has towards Kurtz, for his own narrator Willard. Willard's (and Kurtz's) hatred of the war as is manifests itself in split emotions, one peaceable and the other hostile, the urge to destroy, to kill, to fight hard and with "clarity" of purpose - rather like the Viet Kong - with the implication that this way the war could have been won. This double psychology is central to the mood of the whole story, and is a convincing mindset for these two professional soldiers. But perhaps also serves to make the film slightly more palatable to its domestic audience, allowing the viewer to take away the message of their choice. Another observation is that the portrayal of the "natives" is scarcely more advanced than it was in Conrad's book - the Vietnamese appear as little more than romantic savages, and others have commented how the largely uninhabited jungles through which Willard travels ignore the reality of densely populated Vietnam. As with 'Heart of Darkness', 'Apocalypse Now' is best seen as a fable, that asks questions about the behaviour of supposedly civilised men, but which operates within terms of reference that the same men would recognise.
The final word must be on Marlon Brando, who is surely the perfect embodiment of the enigmatic Kurtz. His is a great performance, though it doesn't last long - a shame, for he holds the screen with a quiet brilliance.