Francis Ford Coppola has come out with a new, bizarre and mystical movie called Youth Without Youth. It stars Tim Roth in a virtuoso performance as a man who gets hit by lightning at the age of 70, and all of a sudden finds himself to be a young man again. Well, he’s like 35, but compared to 70, that’s pretty young. He has a few problems though. It seems as though the 70-year-old Roth has actually split into two 35-year-old Roths. At times this seems like it is actually two people, but more often than not it’s manifested as a split personality, where he is able to do two things at once, and talk to himself. One of those personalities appears to be good, the other evil, although it is never stated so explicitly. More than that, with his seemingly incredible regenerative powers and status as a curiosity of science, he attracts the attention of the Nazis and their doctors. Oh yeah - this movie is set in Romania in the 1930s, as the Nazis begin their plot to conquer the world.
Pursued by the authorities, and the Nazis, Roth leads them on a kinda-chase around the world, to Switzerland and Malta and elsewhere. Although really, he’s just trying to hide out and protect his true identity, and they sometimes discover him and send someone after him, but there seems to be more a vague notion the world over that certain groups would like to track him down than there is an actual pursuit. (This also produces a great, but brief, cameo from Matt Damon as an agent trying to track down Roth, likely with benign intentions, but we never find out.)
This is the first half of the movie. The second half revolves around a woman who has a similarly bizarre experience after being hit by lightning. Her name is Veronica, and she is played by Alexandra Maria Lara, in another tour-de-force performance, and seems to be the reincarnation of a woman Roth once loved named Laura. The two of them are both magnificent in this film, both together and seperately. But it just isn’t enough. The whole movie exists in this David Lynchian type of dream state, where weird stuff happens and we get strange crooked camera angles, and we’re just supposed to accept that things are just weird. And we move on. Which means that we have to quickly stop worrying about the previous scene, and we have to stop caring about what happened in that scene. Which means there is such a lack of continuity that we don’t care about the movie at all.
Youth Without Youth feels straghtforward, and to a certain degree it is, but it just feels overstuffed. Like when my girlfriend describes the dream she had last night, and has to throw in details like “the ottoman was sky blue, but the next time I went through the same room it was navy blue”. Which means a dream that she could have related in two minutes takes twenty. And that’s how this movie feels. It’s divided into two parts, each of which could have been told in forty minutes, but it takes two hours plus to get to the end of the film. The story itself is easy to grasp, and we do know what happens at the end, although the second half throws a lot of odd references and moments into the mix. I’m going to get real nerdy on you here, but the second half of this film seems to have been written by Neitzche himself. Really.
Youth Without Youth is watchable, and vivid, and features two seriously great performances by the under-rated Tim Roth and the magnificent, glorious Alexandra Maria Lara. But it’s too full of imagery, too full of oddities, and in the end, too full of itself. It’s just like that story, the one Roth references at the end, about the king who dreams he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a king. Only it takes way longer to tell it.