This film cost Coppola and his cast and crew more than its blown out budget, more than the notoriety of making it – it cost Coppola his sense of proportion. At some point, an artist has to let the work alone – it’s out, it’s done, move on. “Final” cut? Probably not – Coppola has long been obsessed with this film. The epic took so much out of its participants that maybe he feels he owes it to all that footage to include it.
I disagree. If Werner Herzog can brilliantly winnow 200 hours of Timothy Treadwell ranting about the US Forest Service while he treats grizzly bears as humans in bear suits (and pays with his life for that illusion), down to the 2-hour Grizzly Man, I think Coppola could have let well enough alone.
I appreciated aspects of the Redux version: giving Marlon Brando more time on screen, bringing the movie resolution. I didn’t need the Bill Graham/ Playboy Bunnies USO show – it was OK, but did the story need it? Debatable.
The section in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) encounters a French plantation and its armed and determined family who declare Vietnam to be their home, for which they will fight and die and kill Vietnamese intruders, seems to be stretching a point. Is the purpose to teach us about Dien Bien Phu? To remind us that long before the US sent “advisers” to the country in the late 1950s, the French had established a colonial state there, which they were unwilling to cede to its natives? I found this section, first appearing in Redux, to be a distraction, even more so in the much longer Final Cut version where Willard shares an opium pipe with a Frenchwoman (Aurore Clement) and has an idyllic night – I thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and was disappointed by Coppola’s borrowing.
Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Final Cut gets much more screentime for his surfing obsession, cocky sense of command, and the annihilation of villages. The point was well made in the original – I didn’t need more of his bluster and arrogance, nor even more footage of rows of palm trees going up in flames, Hueys swarming, nor the ridiculous pursuit of Willard on the patrol boat to retrieve Kilgore’s stolen surfboard. I really didn’t need that.
The extended jungle scene of Final Cut in which Willard and Chef (Frederic Forrest) go looking for mangoes, was good – I really got a feel for these Americans in a totally alien environment, afraid all the time. The glimpse of an unexpected peril underscored the absurdity of the entire American misadventure in Southeast Asia.
In the original, Brando’s screentime was brief – as the reason for Willard’s journey it needed more weight, and in Redux Brando received his due. But the Final Cut version beat a dead horse: I didn’t need Willard’s drawn-out imprisonment in a bamboo cage, being lectured by madman Dennis Hopper (in the role he was born to play) – in Redux we got all we needed of Kurtz’s camp, the ubiquitous dangling corpses and disembodied heads. I didn’t need more more more of that. The end was the same – Willard terminates Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Taking the hand of LB Johnson, the still-childlike surfer, to lead him back to the now crewless patrol boat, was enough.
Here’s my compromise, Mr. Coppola: You can keep the USO show in the movie, but ditch the French plantation, and keep Kilgore and Brando to their Redux footage. That makes the film shorter than the Redux version (OK with me!!). Final Cut felt like piling on – the points had already been powerfully made. Shoving them at us repeatedly dulled their impact.
