Lions Gate sent me out a copy of Tetro, and while it’s going to be unusual for a whole lot of reasons, it’ll likely still be worth your time to work your way through it if for no other reason than the sheer novelty of it all.

Tetro follows young Bennie, who’s gone to visit his elder brother Angelo down in Buenos Aires. He discovers that brother Angelo–who’s now going by the name of Tetro–isn’t the man he once was. In fact, in a lot of ways, Tetro’s life looks like a disaster. But the more Bennie learns about Tetro’s life, the more he learns about his own in the process, along with that of their father Carlo, a famous, wealthy symphony conductor. And you’re going to spend about two hours learning it all right along side Bennie and even Tetro.

Tetro isn’t so much a movie as it is an experience, like opening a window into a strange new world, like the Fallout universe, both modern (even a bit futuristic) and retro at the same time. While most of the world is in black and white, the past is almost universally colored, including some parts that probably shouldn’t be. Let me put it this way: I’ve seen movies like “Tales of Hoffman” before, and I’ve universally panned them in review for being too patently lunatic to be any good.

And while the experience is deep, rich, and varied wildly, the experience also quickly wears out its welcome with an entirely too long runtime of just over two hours. They’re bouncing around from point to point, and there’s so little in the way of coherence to hold it together that it’s almost an endurance test to see if you can manage to stick around for the ride long enough to get all the way through. And once you do make it through Tetro, the ending isn’t even worth it, a strange, jumbled mess of images that, assuming they even have a point at all, utterly escapes me.

That’s the worst part of this–this should be a masterwork, especially considering it’s a Francis Ford Coppola–but what we get is this incoherent, babbling sludge pile that can only occasionally be bothered to make sense. And when it DOES make sense, it’s entirely too busy being a poorly realized waste of time, jammed with cliches (the last fifteen minutes will be home to one of the oldest ones in the book) and just downright dull.

Maybe I just didn’t get it, but man, it didn’t take long for Tetro to go from interesting look at a strange parallel world to being a preachy boring mess.

And thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in giving this sludge a four out of ten.  Sure it was interesting, but it just couldn’t manage to go anywhere interesting nor do so in a fashion that was worth watching.