Review: "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise: The Authentic Cut" - Francis Ford Coppola's new cut of "Twixt" (2012)

Okay, here's my long book report. I went back and forth between the versions for a couple of hours, but I may have missed some small trims here and there.

For those who have never seen it, "Twixt"/"B'Twixt Now and Sunrise" is a low-budget ghost story that Coppola made back in 2012. It was based on a dream of his (the best part of the making-of documentary is when they play his original voice memo recorded after the dream). It stars Val Kilmer as a "third-string" horror novelist named Hall Baltimore. While on a book tour in a small town, he is approached by the sheriff (Bruce Dern) with an idea for a book about local murders that he thinks involve a supposed vampire (Alden Ehrenreich). It starts out fairly comic, but Baltimore begins having dreams involving a murdered girl named V (Elle Fanning) and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin), who provide creative inspiration and clues to the mystery.

It's a low-budget movie that received fairly poor reviews when it came out and contributed to the perception that Coppola was in decline (although I think the two films he made prior to it, Youth Without Youth and Tetro, are unsung masterpieces). Indeed, it feels very low-budget, and even the cinematography by accomplished DP Mihai Malamaire (The Master, Jojo Rabbit) sometimes seems a bit amateurish, as do some of the performances. Nevertheless, Twixt does have its fans. While I never really counted myself among them, I did find the movie interesting, and it had some really good isolated scenes. This new cut focuses on the good and mitigates the not-so-good.

As a side note, I believe Coppola used to tour with this movie and its composer, Dan Deacon, and they would do "live" presentations of the movie where Coppola would edit the movie live to live accompaniment by Deacon. How I wish I could have seen one of those performances! So regardless of this movie's reviews, it still deserves a spot in the history books for this detail alone.

The following review contains spoilers because I will be comparing and contrasting two cuts of the movie: the 2012 version known as "Twixt", and a new cut of the movie released on Blu-Ray this week called "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise: The Authentic Cut", which is about 8 minutes shorter by my estimation and contains numerous substantial revisions (but no new footage). The spoiler-free review is: "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise" is a much better version of the movie, and brings more sharply into focus why this is a surprisingly personal film for Coppola, as it deals with the death of his son in the late 1980s in a boating accident.

I'll refer to the two versions as Twixt and B'Twixt.

The changes:

- The principle change is the movie ending four minutes earlier in the story. B'Twixt now ends with the scene with Hall Baltimore and Edgar Poe on the cliff. The only new footage in the movie that I noticed is the final shot of the movie being extended slightly to let the final moment linger, and the new title card appear before the credits roll. The final sequence is also edited slightly differently. In Twixt, we cut to Baltimore in the middle of Poe's final line, splitting Poe's line over two shots. Now his final line plays over one shot, and then we cut to Baltimore's reaction. This way, the second-to-last shot of the movie is Baltimore absorbing Poe's message before the movie ends. Helps it land, I think.

- A little bit of the deleted final 4 minutes (V waking up in the morgue after Baltimore removes the stake from her heart) has been used earlier in B'Twixt, around 38 minutes in, when Baltimore is trying to begin his new book and he's doing impressions. In Twixt, he ends up in a reverie thinking about his daughter, then he goes to the morgue. The reverie has been replaced with a shortened version of the stake removal scene, presented as a fantasy instead of the daughter reverie. The daughter reverie is moved to the end of the movie and incorporated into the cliff scene. The music from the daughter reverie in Twixt replaces the "Nosferatu" song as the end credits music in B'Twixt.

- Two sequences are combined. In Twixt, the process of Poe telling the story of V and the murdered children was split into two parts. After the scene where Poe describes his process for composing "The Raven", Poe tells Baltimore a little bit about the mass murder of the children. The rest is told at the climax. In B'Twixt, the story about the murder is moved to the climax of the movie and combined with the rest of the murder sequence. In combining the two sequences, Coppola also shortened them substantially. Trims include: making lemonade; Poe addressing the camera to say "But the monster caught her and put her in chains in he vault"; and all of the screaming as V is chained up.- When Baltimore visits Flamingo in B'Twixt, most of Flamingo's dialogue has been removed. Now he just recites French, Baltimore remarks "You're educated. You know Baudelaire." Flamingo responds, "I know the dreams of Baudelaire", speaks some more French, and then the sheriff arrives. In Twixt, they have a longer conversation about the missing girl before the sheriff arrives.

- In all, there are over four minutes of trims before the cliff scene, and another four minutes after it (besides the stake-removal scene which was moved earlier and substantially shortened).

Generally speaking, I think the trims made the movie more dreamlike. By withholding Baltimore's reverie about his daughter, we don't know much about what happened until the last scene of the movie. The same is done with the murdered children. By not connecting as many puzzle pieces until the end, I think it makes the middle of the movie more dreamlike, and the ending more emotional.

Removing the climactic scene in the sheriff's station/morgue was a good idea, too, because now there are no "real life" scenes after the sheriff realizes that Baltimore is onto him and hits him over the head. There are now no "real" horror scenes in the movie aside from that moment. It's left implied that the sheriff is the stake killer, but that's the only resolution we get.Also, by combining the two Poe-narrated Chickering Hotel scenes, and removing the final sheriff's station scene, the number of times we re-visit certain locations has been cut way down. I think this makes the movie feel bigger, because we aren't re-using locations so much. And it makes the narrative flow better and feel less episodic, especially in the second half.

Pretty sure the first 38 minutes of the movie are identical, although I may have missed some subtle nips and tucks. Also fairly certain there is no new footage besides the extended final shot.

Another great Coppola re-edit, imho. It's still not one of his major works, but it does feel like Coppola was being more emotionally and artistically authentic, removing the more commercial stuff and committing to making it an arty and personal ghost story. I would be very surprised if anyone preferred the original cut.

Definitely recommended that Coppola fans give this another shot.