'Youth Without Youth'

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BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

December 14, 2007

By now, it must be apparent to all but his most credulous admirers that Francis Ford Coppola is no longer a mortal lock for delivering masterworks like "The Godfather," "Apocalypse Now" or "The Conversation." He still is capable, however, of either infusing genre material such as 1997's "The Rainmaker" with sly verisimilitude or bringing forth something so compellingly nutty that it can't be easily ignored. "One from the Heart" from 1982 was such a movie. His latest, "Youth Without Youth," is another.

At the outset, you have to hand it to Coppola. Who else would adapt a novella by a Romanian philosopher (Mircea Eliade) into a personal testament on mortality and spirituality? And what a premise: A 70-year-old linguistics professor (Tim Roth), faced with the impending Nazi invasion in the 1930s and the collapse of his lifelong effort to define language's origins, is about to kill himself when a bolt from the blue literally restores him to the physical and intellectual vigor of his 40-year-old self.

What seems the stuff of Depression-era comic books, with their Nietzsche-esque transformations, morphs into a love story in which the newly regenerated Dominic reconnects with a long-lost lover (Alexandra Maria Lara), who, through a similar lightning-like transformation, becomes a vessel for channeling ancient tongues. If Jorge Luis Borges were inclined to blow up one of his quasi-metaphysical fables into an epic romance, this might be what it would look like on screen - except that Borges wouldn't for a moment buy into the hokum that this movie ingests with gusto.

"Youth Without Youth" meanders through its mystic and temporal realms with such glistening earnestness that you often wonder if it's all a put-on. Roth, even when his character is split in complementary halves, discloses neither solemnity nor irony. Only Bruno Ganz, as the physician who discovers Dominic's powers, carries around a suave urbanity that suggests mischief beneath the mind games.

As has been the case with Coppola's movies since the 1970s (except for 1996's train wreck, "Jack"), there's just enough greatness scattered in "Youth Without Youth" to make you wonder why there can't be more.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (R). Francis Ford Coppola's first directorial effort in a decade is a dream-like, slow-drying saga of an aged Romanian academic (Tim Roth) whose youth and vitality are restored by a bolt of lightning. It's a ruminative romance of ideas; ambitious, overreaching and, every once in a while, inspired. With Bruno Ganz and Alexandra Maria Lara. 2:04 (sexual situations, nudity, disturbing images). At the Paris and Sunshine Cinemas, Manhattan.

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'Youth Without Youth'

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