MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tucker’: Coppola’s Paean to Dreamers

“Don’t get too close to people,” Abe Karatz’s old-country grandmother used to warn him, “you’ll catch their dreams.” It wasn’t until years later that he realized he had misunderstood. “ Germs . . . you’ll catch their germs.”

Abe Karatz is one of the best characters in “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (at the Bruin and Chinese theaters). But his grandmother’s warning comes much too late for Francis Ford Coppola. Standing close to his first Tucker Tornado, at a car show when he was 8 years old, Coppola obviously caught Preston Thomas Tucker’s dream. Not only of a visionary car in every American’s garage by 1948, but of an even more romantic notion: that America looks fondly on its loners, its dreamers, its crackpots. And that whether they make ballpoint pens or vast, unflyable airplanes or oddball movies, America will have a place for them.

Looking around you today, you could have your doubts. (You need look no further than this week’s newspapers reporting the obstacles confronting Martin Scorsese.) But during the time that Coppola gathers you inside his glorious, warming movie, you won’t have a doubt in the world. It’s a film for rainbow-riders, happy-enders, cockeyed optimists. The spectacle of Tucker brought low by the Detroit Big Three isn’t Coppola’s point; it’s the fact that he made his dream real. It’s the sight of 50 Tucker automobiles, in colors like burnished Life Savers, driving round and around a federal court house as if they were on some elegant race course.

In outline, Preston Tucker’s story is simple and debilitating. A successful inventor, he came out of World War II with the dream of a revolutionary car--safe, streamlined, almost salaciously beautiful. Virtually on the strength of charisma alone, with a cadre of devoted mechanics (Frederic Forrest, Mako) and with the help of a businessman he met on the commuter train (Martin Landau’s meticulously shaded Abe Karatz), he secured a factory and managed to turn out one sample car. Using that, he sold dealerships and finally began the manufacture of 50 cars.

Its innovations challenged Detroit, which charged him with fraud and effectively put him out of business. “Do not monkey with the big boys,” is the story’s clear, Brechtian message.

Strangely enough, Coppola, or more likely his executive producer, George Lucas, hasn’t allowed writers Arnold Schulman and David Seidler to let this story grow dark. In a way it’s a shame, shadows bring characters into richer relief. Certainly in his full-throttle portrait of Tucker, Jeff Bridges’ raffish energy never grows cloying and his performance has enough moments of self-awareness to let us know he knows we know better than his Smilin’ Jack act. Yet he is in a movie that persists in presenting the best of all possible worlds, even as they are crumbling away.

However, it’s still a dazzling show. Tucker lived balanced between his passion for his big family and his flair for showmanship, and Coppola clearly loves both these sides of him. Demonstrating that love, Coppola has used Joan Allen as Tucker’s keen, lovely wife, Vera, and he has handled the hoopla surrounding the launching of “The car of tomorrow--today!” in a style that Buster Keaton might applaud. There are fanfares and Tuckerettes in front of the curtains; flash-fires and disasters behind them. (Those priceless album photographs under the end credits prove that even the excesses of the Tuckerettes weren’t exaggerated.)

Stylistically, the film is a dream. (Dean Tavoularis--production design; Vittorio Storaro--cinematography; Milena Canonero--costumes; Joe Jackson--music. Priscilla Nedd--editor. Is anyone surprised?) But in every case, the style has a reason. The enormous posters of Nicola Tesla and Robert Goddard, flanking Tucker’s fateful courtroom, are spectacular, and also cannily chosen. These fellow-inventors are men of exactly Tucker’s stripe.

In the film’s most mysterious and beautiful moment, Tucker and Howard Hughes (Dean Stockwell, in a performance with a miniaturist’s perfection) stand in the hangar of the Spruce Goose which shimmers eerily at this late hour. Hughes has summoned Tucker to help him beat the Washington weasels at their own game, yet at heart, it’s something purer than that: the meeting of two men who know a little something about the realizing of dreams.

‘TUCKER:THE MAN AND HIS DREAM’

A Paramount release of a Lucasfilm Ltd. production from Zoetrope Studios. Producers Fred Roos, Fred Fuchs. Executive producer George Lucas. Director Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay Arnold Schulman, David Seidler. Camera Vittorio Storaro. Editor Priscilla Nedd, Music Joe Jackson, additional music Carmine Coppola. Production design Dean Tavoularis, art direction Alex Tavoularis. Set design Bob Goldstein, Jim Pohl, set decoration Armin Ganz. Costumes Milena Canonero. Sound design Richard Beggs. Sound Michael Evje. Associate producer Teri Fettis. Title design/production Colossal Pictures Inc. With Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen, Martin Landau, Frederic Forrest, Mako, Dean Stockwell, Lloyd Bridges, Elias Koteas, Nina Siemaszko, Christian Slater, Corky Nemac, Anders Johnson. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).