Self-Portraits [TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM & THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST]

This originally appeared in the August 19, 1988 issue of the Chicago Reader. –J.R.

TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Written by Arnold Schulman and David Seidler

With Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen, Martin Landau, Frederic Forrest, Mako, and Dean Stockwell.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Paul Schrader

With Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Verna Bloom, Randy Danson, and Andre Gregory.

While it might initially seem like a shotgun marriage to consider together movies as different in tone and subject as Tucker: The Man and His Dream and The Last Temptation of Christ, it is worth noting first of all that these films represent comparable watersheds in the careers of their respective directors. Even if we put aside that Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese are contemporaries (born in 1939 and 1942, respectively) with Italian and Catholic backgrounds, and that both became star directors during the same period — with Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972 and Scorsese’s Mean Streets in 1973 — we are still left with the fact that their latest features are both intensely personal projects, nurtured by their creators over many years and through a number of vicissitudes. Read more