Critics reviews

The mechanics of the plot hardly matter; it’s how they’re bash-beamed into your brain by Coppola with such off-putting, blaring grandiloquence.

Evoking both the melancholy romanticism of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the lushly artificial sets of such MGM evergreens as Singin' in the Rain, the film takes place during a Fourth of July weekend, in a warm-neon Las Vegas built entirely on the soundstages of Coppola's soon-to-go-bust Zoetrope Studios.

Its cruel effects on Coppola's life are a bitter irony: the movie is an intensely personal film about the agonizingly high personal price of grand-scale Hollywood filmmaking.

Much of the spectatorial pleasure involves the beautiful, complex set design, colorful lighting and general cinematographic hubris—DP Vittorio Storaro makes every shot look like it took a week to stage, and set decorator Leslie Frankenheimer would wind up transporting much of the film's expensive neon lighting to the set of BLADE RUNNER.

Alternating between the banal and the sublime, One From the Heart is a visually stunning musical that restricts all its songs to the soundtrack in the form of bluesy romantic numbers written by Tom Waits and sung by the rasping Waits and Crystal Gayle.

It's a triumph of style as substance. Coppola might not have succeeded in making his "live film," but he pointed the way towards a cinema so dazzling visually and musically that dialogue and plot and even characterization somehow don't seem to matter. Waits and Coppola wrap their mundane world in layer upon layer of stardust and glitter.

One from the Heart is not only an important marker in cinematic history—that is, as the death knoll for ’70s cinema—but a movie musical that’s a lot more fun than such hollow efforts as the overly edited Moulin Rouge (2001) and Chicago (2002).

[B]ut for all his efforts it stubbornly remains a bold experiment in style and technique that doesn’t work. The reason remains the same too: the baroque visual lushness supplied by two masters, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Dean Tavoularis, plus the contributions of a clutch of special effects wizards, still overwhelms a very simple love story about two attractive, likable and very ordinary people whose relationship hits a snag on the fifth anniversary of their togetherness.

Coppola visualizes his deliberately plebian story with the kind of visual sensibility of the most elaborate historical epics mated to hallucinatory science fiction evocations of completely alien worlds. One is a giddy, nonstop series of volcanic explosions of too much cinema, the elaborate artificiality enforcing rather than contradicting the story.

It’s a melancholy, mature film, trying hard to argue that its down-to-earth lovers are not just settling for each other, and that the abandonment of romantic fantasy can lead to deeper romance.

It isn't very good, but at least the highly touted technology is put firmly in the service of the (sometimes painfully sincere) emotions that Francis Ford Coppola wants to communicate, which is more than you can say for Apocalypse Now.

In ''One From the Heart,'' Mr. Coppola has combined richly imaginative sets and backdrops, bluesy music by Tom Waits and drifting, overlapping action to create a throughly American romance with a Las Vegas setting.