Surrendering to the Big Dream

By RICHARD CORLISS

ONE FROM THE HEART Directed by Francis Coppola Screenplay by Armyan Bernstein and Francis Coppola

The hope and the hype surrounding Francis Coppola's latest exercise in free-fall parachuting should not obscure one fact: One from the Heart is also a movie. In any other case, and with no disrespect intended, one could say it is just a movie. No government will topple, no arms treaty will be aborted at the reception of this novelettish romance about a guy and a gal, together five years, who go on separate flings one Las Vegas Independence Day. But with the fate of Zoetrope Studios riding on this crapshoot, it may be difficult for audiences and critics to pay attention to what is on the screen. So imagine that you are in Radio City Music Hall--not in 1982, with all attendant fanfare, but in, say, 1941, when moviegoing was a habit and not an event--cozying yourself into a plush orchestra seat with your date, your popcorn and modest expectations. Here it comes: One from the Heart. Just a movie. What do you see?

What you see is pretty blooming spectacular. From the first shot--a long track down a densely designed and populated Vegas street that leads to the travel agency window where Frannie (Teri Garr) looms like Kong over a toy Manhattan skyline--you are advised that One from the Heart means to set reality and artifice into felicitous collision. On the Zoetrope sound stages, Production Designer Dean Tavoularis has created a show-stopping amalgam of razzle and dazzle, sending skyrockets speckling over what looks like a mile-long Strip of surreal glitter. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has lighted these sets in gloriously garish Technicolor--pulsating magentas and ambers that mirror the characters' moods even as they assert the environmental imperative. Coppola has staged his scenes in long, sensuous takes. A single shot may comprise several scenes, several planes of action and setting, while the camera glides around the ordinary hero and heroine like the young Astaire around a lamppost. They are ordinary indeed. As played by Teri Garr, Frannie is a Shirley MacLaine gamine minus the cutes and the smarts and the go-get-'em will. Her fella, Hank (Frederic Forrest), who works in an automobile graveyard, is just as lackluster. Sitting at the breakfast table with his beer belly peeking through a towel toga, Hank looks like the last of the Caesars--Sid, playing late Brando. The apogee of their romantic arc is long in the past, almost beyond memory. And so, to the cadences of Tom Waits' bluesy songs 'performed by Waits and Crystal Gayle), these restless lovers find spirits to incarnate their once-in-a-nighttime, winnertake-all hopes. For Frannie, it is Ray (Raul Julia), a latino crooner. For Hank, it is Leila (Nastassia Kinski), a circus acrobat. Hank's dream girl is far enough above reality to convince him that the atmosphere is too rarefied, and he returns to earth to search again for someone he can live with as well as love -- Frannie.

Like John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, One from the Heart has three endings: sad, then happy, then just like life. But the true climax comes after that. The last scene dissolves into a pa per moon, and across it is scrawled: FILMED IN ITS ENTIRETY ON THE STAGES OF ZOETROPE STUDIOS. This is a movie about moviemaking -- about the surface glamour and mundane reality of an indus try-art, about the dreams that $26 million and some priceless talent can buy. One from the Heart is a showcase for all that wizardry, and a demonstration of the way small lives intersect with and surrender to the big dream, only to emerge into the daylight glare of jobs and frustrations and lovers who cannot measure up to the oversize images on the silver screen.

This is the film's the matic strength and dramatic failing. The movie keeps surging toward orgasmic release-- as a liberated Frannie dances down the Strip, as she and Ray begin a sultry tango, as Hank conducts a junkyard symphony and Leila dances out his dreams --but it refuses to go productively crazy, to soar into fantasia and take the characters and the audience with it. This is surely Coppola's point: that Hank and Frannie, prosaic souls in a neon paradise, may be seduced by their surroundings into a one-night stand with advertised ecstasy, but that real life must proceed in equal doses of pleasure and accommodation. Such a thesis makes for a movie to be admired, not embraced. It is not the audience's fault that it may want Hank and Frannie to fade into their natural gray, and the bright stars, Leila and Ray, to commandeer the film. Those two are sparkling emblems of the film's style -- of the dreams that movies are made of.

The films Coppola made in the '70s --the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now and his bijou masterpiece, The Conversation --were all conceived in the '60s. Perhaps, working from Armyan Bernstein's original screenplay, Coppola was biding his time while searching for a theme for the '80s. His latest film proves he has style to spare, artists to realize that style and, in his beleaguered Zoetrope Studios, technical facilities beyond a tinkering boy's dreams.

But this "new kind of old-fashioned romance" is landlocked in its feeling. Here, as in his considerable past, Coppola has worked from the brain and gut. It remains to be seen whether he can ever make one from the heart. --By Richard Corliss

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