Twixt

"There are no minor decisions in moviemaking. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down.” - Sidney Lumet. 

Twixt tells the story of a writer, Hall Baltimore, who is trying to regain his stature as a preeminent horror novelist by writing his first vampire novel. For inspiration, he hides away in an isolated, ghostly town where Edgar Allan Poe once lived. As he begins to write his novel, dark memories of a troubled past begin to haunt him while reality and alcohol infused dreams meld together into a frightening, sometimes farcical nightmare from which there is no escape. 

Twixt could have been a great film. In theory, a Francis Ford Coppola vampire movie starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning sounds wonderful. In reality, that movie turned out to be a major disappointment, brought crashing down by more than a few terrible decisions. 

First, it was shot using digital cameras. Big mistake. The pristine quality of the digital image makes everything in Twixt look absolutely awful. There's no texture to the picture, no real darkness or shadows. Everything looks too good, too perfect, making the whole visual style  of the film flat and lifeless. The effect becomes less bothersome during Baltimore’s black and white dream sequences, which avoid the disaster of the color segments most of the time and are even beautiful on occasion. Coppola can still compose great images, so it's even more frustrating that they look so poorly. However, even if this was shot on film, from which it could have greatly benefitted, or had some significant changes made to its digital photography, it still wouldn't have mattered much. Twixt is a fumbling mess of a movie, never sure of its tone or where its story is going. 

Is this supposed to be Coppola having fun with genre conventions and doing his own little thing, or is he trying to accomplish something meaningful? For most of the time, the picture comes off as dull and bizarre in its overbearing attempts to create an unsettling, tragic atmosphere. You start with a creepy looking town? Great. You have a narrator telling us why this town is creepy? Fine, but we can see that already. You then have the angry old sheriff/bat-house maker of the creepy town telling the protagonists about the resident serial killer that makes the town even creepier? You're starting to annoy me. Perhaps Coppola was trying to be humorous with that one, but he sure seemed to be taking seriously the dream sequence where his protagonist named Baltimore has a chat with Edgar Allan Poe who tells him that Eleanor, Annabel Lee, and all of the female protagonists of his poems are based on his dead wife, Virginia, a name awfully similar to Vicky, the name of the deceased daughter of Baltimore whom he also meets regularly in his dreams. Oh, and the overriding theme of the movie, if you haven't guessed, seems to be something about the protagonist coming to terms with the death of said daughter.  A bit on the nose for my taste. 

Meanwhile, when he’s not being chased by the specter of his daughter, Baltimore impersonates Marlon Brando and a gay black basketball player from the 60s. With both comedy and tragedy, Kilmer’s incredible. It's just baffling that these many disparate scenes are part of one movie. Sidney Lumet also said that he knew he was doing his job as a director well only if everyone on his team was making the same movie. No one here was making the same movie. 

Even then, some of the scenes carry real weight and a melancholy beauty, particularly when images just flow together without any dialogue as when Baltimore struggles to unsuccessfully to repress the memories of his beloved daughter. The fact that Coppola lost a son in the same way as the protagonist lost his daughter makes even the duller moments of the movie sting. Elle Fanning works wonders with the shoddy material she's given as a young girl who reminds Baltimore of what he lost. At least Coppola steers the comedic elements clear from her storyline, so she has a steady, tragic tone throughout her scenes, making them relatively coherent. While alive and well, she radiates hope. When she is betrayed, true innocence is lost.

Lumet failed to mention that one great decision can elevate a middling movie. Twixt was a great concept brought crashing down by many bad decisions. The visuals crippled it. The story dealt the death blow. Yet, with the aid of Fanning, it came back to haunt me. 

Verdict- 2/4

Twixt (2011) 1h 28min. R.