Critics reviews

People hated this film. Really, really hated it. And so it was cropping up out of nowhere for me to take home and devour. I was confused by its sudden appearance but that night I wasn't complaining. I was stupefied into speechlessness. "Youth Without Youth" was so beautiful it hurt. How had anyone not loved this?

Handsomely mounted, "Youth Without Youth" is full of flourish, Old World decor, and intricate camerawork, but these touches are not enough to involve us in its dry and rather preposterous story.

The director's first film in a decade is a sweetly muddleheaded vanity project - a languorous European art-drama of the sort Visconti and company were turning out in the early 1970s while Coppola was off making "The Godfather..." At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

There is such a thing as a complex film that rewards additional viewing and study, but "Youth Without Youth," I am afraid, is no more than it seems: a confusing slog through metaphysical murkiness. That it is so handsomely photographed and mounted, and acted with conviction, only underlines the narrative confusion.

The movie has been labeled “stilted,” “soporific,” and “a pretentious, meandering mess.” But you certainly couldn’t call it conventional, predictable, or pandering. This film is stubbornly, almost insanely, itself, and the convoluted journey it makes... can’t help but evoke the filmmaker’s long strange trip of a career.

Mr. Coppola has created some strikingly beautiful images in “Youth Without Youth” - his framing remains impeccable, as does his sense of color, proportion and pictorial harmony - but too many of these lovely, mysterious visions have the aspect of private reveries, dreams still locked inside the dreamer’s head.

The film is too smart and committed to be dismissed. I keep thinking of the scene in which Roth is unbandaged at the hospital. Underneath the bandages, he's 40 years old, but somehow his eyes still look 70. You can see 10 movies in a row without coming across a moment that arresting.

There is something quixotic about Coppola saddling up and tilting at these windmills of his own construction... But it's the sort of promising oddity that Coppola should have made as a very young man, before going on to his mature masterpieces. Appearing now, fizzing with pretension and gibberish, it makes Coppola looks as if he is suffering from age without age: exhaustion without wisdom.

This a movie packed with Ideas -- note the capital "I" -- so it's probably not supposed to matter that the thing is incomprehensible. While a movie doesn't have to make literal sense to be good, a filmmaker can't be so lost in his own universe that he forgets his job is to open it out to the rest of us. And that, apparently, is what has happened to Coppola here.

What’s important in the matching of one image against the next is creating an emotional truth, and, while initially engaging, "Youth Without Youth" doesn’t have sufficient legs to be anything more than an interesting exercise.

["Youth Without Youth"] is easily [Coppola's] most radical [film], but his renewed sense of discovery comes with a fatal lack of clarity, as if he finished without successfully paddling his way through a sea of abstraction. It's somehow both incomprehensible and not experimental enough; the more Coppola hangs onto his stilted narrative, the less vibrant his free-wheeling ideas become.

In fleshing out the novella by philosopher and professor of religion Mircea Eliade, it appears Coppola has taken the seed of an idea, messed with its DNA and sprouted a mutant Tree of Knowledge with tendrils going off in all directions. It looks beautiful, but there's a total lack of focus.