Tucker: The Man and His Dream
Francis Ford Coppola (1988)
It’s not a surprise to find that it’s weightless and enervated but Tucker – The Man and His Dream is still a distressing experience. Coppola is such a naturally expressive director that he manages to put himself, and reflect his state of mind, in his films – even when that state of mind means that he can’t give the material any emotional or dramatic force. Preston Tucker was a car designer and entrepreneur. In the late 1940s, he tried to produce and market the variously innovative ‘1948 Tucker Sedan’, challenging the supremacy of the ‘Big Three’ of the American automobile industry (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler). Establishment forces conspired against Tucker: he was accused of stock fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and stood trial. He was acquitted but the financial consequences of the legal proceedings were ruinous for his company, which folded. He continued to work on designing new types of car but died, aged only fifty-three, in 1956. His influence on car design, however, has been considerable and enduring. It isn’t difficult to see parallels, from Coppola’s point of view, between Tucker’s treatment by vested interests within the car industry and his own in the American film industry of the 1980s, and the financial problems of Zoetrope. Coppola’s other bête noire of the time was the press. The newspapers of forty years earlier were out to destroy Tucker too.
Most of the time, Tucker seems to be happening inside Coppola’s head rather than on the screen. In The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, different periods are recreated and brought to life vividly and, it seems, effortlessly. The same production and set designer, Dean Tavoularis, worked on Tucker yet all the scrupulous period detail here seems merely displayed, not integrated – because there’s next to nothing for it to be integrated with. It’s understandable that the cars are the stars of the show but they have shockingly little human competition. (There might have been some animal competition if the Tucker family dalmatians had stayed around longer but they disappear without explanation – as if they were nothing more than a design idea Coppola tired of.) Nearly all the characters are one-dimensional – they’re goodies or baddies and they demonstrate that repeatedly and unvaryingly, never developing into anything richer. Tucker has a good cast but the monotonous, sketchy performances are painful to watch in comparison to what you’re used to from Coppola’s earlier work – not just the first two Godfather pictures, which feature arguably the finest ensemble acting ever filmed, but The Conversation and Apocalypse Now too.
Coppola’s conception of Tucker as a wronged creative genius is so blinkered that it doesn’t allow Jeff Bridges in the lead any opportunities to get at something more complex. Martin Landau’s portrait of Tucker’s loyal, worrywart financier is meticulously thought out and delivered yet you feel that the 1970s Coppola would have helped the actor to conceal his ingenuity more. As members of Tucker’s engineering team, Frederic Forrest is OK and Elias Koteas more than OK. But Joan Allen is blah as Tucker’s ever-loving wife and Christian Slater dull as his son. The guest (uncredited) appearances – by Lloyd Bridges (as a corrupt politician) and Dean Stockwell (as Howard Hughes) – aren’t as incisive as you’d hope.
The start of the film suggests that Tucker’s story is going to be told as a promotional film made by his own company but this isn’t sustained. (The screenplay is by Arnold Schulman and David Seidler, who this year has entered the limelight thanks to his overrated script for The King’s Speech.) All the way through, scenes dribble on and fizzle out. There are only two significant exceptions – because I kept hoping that Coppola would snap out of it, I was grateful for these sequences, even though it didn’t require a director of his quality to make them succeed. The first is the public unveiling of the 1948 Tucker Sedan, which its inventor stages like the performer that he is and where a good deal of frenetic behind-the-curtains activity is needed to get the show, as it were, on the road. The second is Tucker’s trial: in a way, it’s dispiriting in itself that something as conventionally climactic as a courtroom scene brings the film to life but there’s one moment here that recalls vintage Coppola. After the industrial-political interests in the witness box have tried to sink Tucker, he asks to make the closing address himself. The trial judge (Joseph Miksak) is outrageously biased against him and, with the prosecuting attorney, keeps trying to shut Tucker up. In the mayhem of angry words, the foreman of the jury, an elderly, unconfident looking man, suddenly shouts in exasperation: ‘Let the man speak!’ There’s real force and surprise in this moment – and the intervention is tethered to the character which Al Nalbandian, the actor playing the foreman, has established with marvellous speed and economy. It’s a genuine reminder that, in the 1970s, there was no role too small for Coppola to give attention and full life to.
The outcome of Tucker’s subsequent plea to the court – railing against the crushing effects of corporate power on the individual entrepreneurial spirit, appealing to the jury’s decent ordinary American impulses – may be predictable but I was relieved, because Tucker is otherwise such unhappy viewing, by the relatively upbeat ending. According to Wikipedia, a biography of Tucker (who, like Coppola, was originally from Michigan) was planned as early as 1973, when the director had the world at his feet. It might have been an interesting film then. By the time it got made, too much water had flowed under the bridge and iron entered Coppola’s soul.
3 July 2011