The transparent parallels between the post-war career of automobile entrepreneur Preston Tucker (played with Tom Swiftian boyishness by Jeff Bridges: an inventor out of Jules Verne) and director Francis Ford Coppola's own Zoetrope story -- a couple of maverick visionaries bucking the system and, for all the creative compromise and financial disaster, turning out a few cars and a few films respectively -- are too embarrassing to go into. The movie is embarrassing enough already on its literal level as an old-fashioned, one-sided, lionizing specimen of what the Hollywood trade paper Variety would classify as a "biopic." The old-fashionedness spreads self-consciously into narrative techniques and stylistic gimmicks as well. These, in much the way that historical epics set in earlier periods strive to copy the painting styles of the time, are in basic concept not very imaginative as a means of evoking the Forties. But to call them unimaginative in concept is not an adequate dismissal. So much active imagination, of whatever low order and pragmatic nature, goes into these things, together with so much hard work, so much traffic-management, so much filigree of stage business and throwaway dialogue, that the movie manages fairly often to be tolerably entertaining. Entertaining, that is, in the manner of a dancing elephant. Most of the time, however, what we are calling the "elephant" -- the overloaded production of period clothes, cars, wallpaper, crockery, etc., etc., not to mention the colored lights and pea-soup atmospherics -- does not really dance. It just stands there, looking preeningly handsome, proudly majestic, while the relentless and relentlessly cheerful background music tries to convince us that the thing is livelier than it looks. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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