Coppola's personal tragedy results in stillborn movie

 B'TWIXT NOW AND SUNRISE (2022)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

When Francis Ford Coppola works on any film, it either has to be epic or scaled down as an experimental feature ("Rumble Fish" comes to mind as the latter example). "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise" is certainly scaled down as a peculiar nightmare movie about intermittent writer's block mixed with the eccentric town where the town's clock tower has different clocks that run at different times. Either this is Coppola aiming for Ingmar Bergman territory with a personal twist or just a loose, informal narrative that starts strong and then travels a zillion different directions. I am sure the original version of this movie isn't any more focused.

Val Kilmer is a ponytailed author named Hall Baltimore, a sort of low-rent Stephen King, who has written a horror book about a Witch Hunter. His book sales are not fantastic and the latest book signing is at a hardware store! One person gets an autograph, a jaunty sheriff named Bob LaGrange (Bruce Dern) who is a true fan and has ideas for a horror story. The sheriff has a young girl in a morgue with a stake through her heart! Mr. Baltimore has no interest in seeing the girl's face but the town holds a certain fascination for him. Outside of the unusual clock tower, there is also a run-down hotel that Edgar Allan Poe used to frequent. There is also a goth biker community where one chalky-faced, probable vampire named Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich) quotes Baudelaire in French. Oui, oui, would you like to eat a croissant with your Baudelaire order? Lest I forget, there is some young girl in a tattered white dress with braces on her teeth (Elle Fanning) who might be a vampire as well. Meanwhile, Mr. Baltimore needs his publisher to give him an advance based on this gothic horror tale idea that he may or may not share with the sheriff who originated the idea in the first place.  

The dream sequences utilize the color red quite effectively, especially in the dilapidated hotel where several kids might be buried underground. As I said earlier, "Rumble Fish" also isolated bursts of color in its black-and-white imagery. Still, "B'Twixt" doesn't have much of a pulse and its opening scenes with narration by Tom Waits carry more of a charge than anything else in the film. There is something deeper in Baltimore's guilt over the death of his own daughter (mirrored by a real-life tragedy that befell Francis's own son) and some of that springs to life towards the end of the film, but that is too little and too late. Would you believe we get a ridiculous Ouija board scene, and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe advising Baltimore on how to end his novel? We are also saddled with a cartoonish, hellishly laughable version of a nightmare descent that is all inside Baltimore's head. It's just not half as stimulating as the opening and closing passages of this stillborn movie.