Jon Peters Reviews: Youth Without Youth

“Youth without Youth” is brimming with ideas and a strong visual style. It’s an interesting piece from a director, al most forgot: Francis Ford Coppola. He’s keen on making films again, unfortunately this film, his first in years, is a pretty failure.

Facing the end of old age and the real possibility of not finishing his life’s work, a book on the origin of language, Dominic (Tim Roth) heads to commit suicide. By chance during a rain storm, lightning strikes him, burning half his body and nearly killing him. Oddly, his body starts to regenerate new skin, teeth, and his health, but in a twist of events, the regeneration has caused him to age in reverse. From an 80 year old to mid thirties, his new found gift has attracted the attention of the Nazis.

Critics haven’t been kind to the film. I found it reminiscent of Darren Arnofsky’s “The Fountain”. Both are slow and meditative, Coppola using fades and images layering onto of each other, to create a dreamy story of reversal and second chances. Using these as his theme, the cat-and-mouse game between Dominic and the Nazis is also interesting. The first half of the film is pretty engaging and I liked where this could go.

The film went off track shortly there after, in which the youth and Nazi angle was dropped and the film switched focus to another chance encounter for Dominic: the reappearance of his long dead love, Veronica.

Here, he now has the chance to finish his book as he has found out that after she fell accidentally into a rocky hole, she has the ability to speak ancient languages. Each new fit she speaks an even earlier language, and in hopes Dominic awaits and sees if she’ll lead him to the first language.

The problem is Coppola never gives a reason to care about Dominic finding the first language. He focuses too much on an uninteresting Veronica and drops his original, much more interesting angle of Dominic new found youth. This is probably where most critics jumped ship, seriously, during these scenes the film, which was already a slow paced film, just snail crawls. Eventually characters stop growing, motivations switch and most go unrealized.

It’s a shame the return of Coppola comes to this, a return hampered by inconsistent motivations. The film follows a more personal approach like his daughter has been doing with her films and visually it’s stunning, but it’s the final third that trips it up. Ultimately, it’s just for the curious to see what Coppola has been up too, most mainstream tastes will run.