MOVIE REVIEW : A Nightmare Odyssey Into Filmmaking : Documentary: Ironies course through ‘Hearts of Darkness,’ which chronicles troubled shooting of Francis Coppola’s 1979 ‘Apocalypse Now.’

Movies about movie making often plunge into one of two traps: they’re smugly celebratory or murderously iconoclastic. “Hearts of Darkness” (at the Hillcrest Cinemas) is neither. Taking as its subject the hellishly troubled shooting of Francis Coppola’s 1979 “Apocalypse Now,” it’s about an endeavor so vast and chastening, you can’t describe it as either triumph or fiasco. Like the chaotic war whose soul Coppola’s movie tried to catch, it takes us to territory where concepts of “victory” or “defeat” are meaningless.

Was “Apocalypse Now,” a Joseph Conrad-derived Vietnam epic that shared the Cannes Grand Prix and grossed $150 million, the watershed film it still seems to many? Or a Waterloo?

The “difficulties” of “Apocalypse” are legendary and “Hearts of Darkness” seems to show them all: a 16-week shoot that swelled to 34, a $12-million film whose budget soared to $31 million. A movie where one leading man (Harvey Keitel) was fired, his replacement (Martin Sheen) suffered a heart attack, and the other star (Marlon Brando) showed up fat and cranky; where a real war raged close to the sets and a monsoon destroyed many of them.

Writer-directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper--working from nearly 60 hours of footage shot by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, during the 1976 shoot, plus recent interviews conducted with both Coppolas, co-scenarist John Milius, George Lucas, actors Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, Frederic Forrest and others--have constructed an almost hypnotic document. All the interviewees are salty and unsparing, of themselves especially. Milius is bearish and hilarious; Eleanor idealistic, precise; Coppola nakedly open.

“Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make happy,” goes the saying. And Coppola--who seemed to straddle the filmmaking world Colossus-like going into his “Apocalypse,” fresh from the first two “Godfather” films and “The Conversation,” seems trapped in the axiom. The film deals with a number of things--theater and warfare, obsession, ‘70s America paranoia, the grandeur and folly of both art and commerce--but, at its dark core, it’s built around something very simple and purely terrifying: the spectacle of someone raised to great heights, who sees a chasm open beneath his feet.

It’s a nightmare odyssey: an “idi-odyssey” as Coppola himself calls his project--and it’s full of the wild irony and savage absurdity movies usually can only give us when their subjects are true. “We were bad boys,” Sam Bottoms mentions--speaking of marijuana, LSD and amphetamine use--but the badness here is mixed. Is it the sin of rebellion against the Establishment? Or the sin of rebellion trying to become the Establishment--and taking on all its attendant arrogance and waste?

All this crystallizes in the central irony of the “Apocalypse” shoot: the fact that Coppola was making a movie that essentially attacked the morality of superpowers battling guerrillas, with the assistance of a government, Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines, fighting the same kind of war only miles away from many of the locations.

It’s obvious Bahr and Hickenlooper deeply admire Coppola and his achievement. And well they should. Even when we hear Coppola attacking his own film--calling it “pompous” “pretentious” “bad” or out of control--a scene or two, like Robert Duvall’s “Valkyrie” ride, is always enough to recall the power and beauty he wrought from his hell. And, even when we learn of Brando’s weird intractability, we can only marvel at the authority and magnetism of his improvisations.

It’s ridiculous to say, as some critics have, that “Hearts of Darkness” is a better film than “Apocalypse Now.” But, observing the offscreen chaos that afflicted the film, we can see why it was a hell. In the first two “Godfather” movies, Coppola seemed to achieve the impossible: combining major artistic achievement with spectacular box-office success, mastering art and business. In “Apocalypse Now,” he wanted to score another double coup: create a huge, adrenaline-churning Irwin Allenish spectacle and something deeper, more private, filled with the times’ terror.

Amazingly, he almost did. And the horror behind that “almost”--Kurtz’s Horror, the horror of Vietnam, of ambition itself--is what “Hearts of Darkness” (Times-rated mature for language) gives us so wrenchingly well.

‘Hearts of Darkness’

A Showtime presentation of a ZM production, in association with Zoetrope Studios, released by Triton Pictures. Directors/Screenplay Fax Bahr, with George Hickenlooper. Documentary footage director Eleanor Coppola. Producers George Zaloom, Les Mayfield. Executive producers Doug Claibourne, Fred Roos. Camera operators Larry Carney, Eleanor Coppola, Bill Neal, Doug Ryan (Philippines). Les Blank, Shana Hagan, John heller, Igor Meglic, Kevin O’Brien, Steve Wacks. Editors Michael Greer, Jay Miracle. Music Todd Boekelheide. With Francis Coppola, Eleanor Coppola, John Milius, Martin Sheen, George Lucas, Frederic Forrest, Larry Fishburne. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (For language).