On demand: "Drift"

Anthony Chen's contribution to the huddled masses of 21st century cinema's migrant movies is a smaller, more intimate affair than most of its predecessors. Drift's heroine, Liberian girl Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo), has already got where she's going: a sunkissed Greek isle where others travel for leisure and pleasure, while she beds down in a cave, a shaven-headed citizen of nowhere, with only the clothes on her back and scraps of official documentation to show for herself. The issue facing Jacqueline is what's next; it's a migrant movie that dramatises a different kind of transitional period, more psychological than geographical. Chen joins her as she begins to address and process the tumult she's already endured: helpful flashbacks describe her life in Liberia and London, where Erivo sports longer locks, a Stockwell accent, and signs of prior privilege. Back in the present, there's a relationship of some kind with an American tour guide, who represents an easy-breezy freedom and is embodied by Alia Shawkat at her most relaxed. (Practically her first onscreen act is to offer Jacqueline a stick of chewing gum, a gesture that assumes a greater poignancy once we realise it's the closest the latter has received to a free meal for some while.) Amid the rubble and ruins of various fallen civilisations - first ancient bathhouses, then what's been left of an abandoned apartment complex - Drift begins to show us gradual and often haphazard rebuilding, first of a life, then of a trust in our fellow man.

For a while, I wondered whether the film was in fact being too easy-breezy to do full justice to its protagonist's experiences. With good reason, we are suckered by the idyllic scenery - but then you wouldn't have to look too far along the horizon, most immediately to the Lampedusa to which the migrants clung in 2016's documentary Fire at Sea, to see such narratives playing out on golden shores such as this. Within the context of this film, it allows Chen to play with notions of tension and release. The flashbacks capture a slow creep into bloody civil war, the walls closing in on Jacqueline's well-to-do, once-untouchable family, where the present-day action permits the camera (like the heroine, like us) to pause, breathe, relax, take stock. Drift is at its most effective in these quieter, more reflective moments: scenes involving Jacqueline's English contacts (including Honor Swinton Byrne as an upwardly mobile pal who won't for a moment have to worry about armed men invading her back garden) land somewhere between sketchy and soapy - Chen hasn't the budget to fully flesh these characters out - while the dialogue that washes in like the tide in the second half is a touch plain and utilitarian, a means of closing any remaining gaps. Yet the film remains persuasive - and quietly moving - so long as it stays close to two performers you'd probably follow to the ends of the earth, and simply lets them be. With her Tim Roth-like internality, Erivo is particularly adept at suggesting degrees of hurt and pain without saying a word; yet handed a restaurant's complementary bread basket, she turns visibly childlike, and her rare smiles feel like hard-earned rewards. Shawkat, meanwhile, infuses a slightly underwritten part with a spirit - a liberated, adventurous warmth - you might well want to find waiting for you at the end of a long, winding and dangerous road. Drift's essential modesty appears to have counted against it - it lands on streaming off the back of a surprisingly cursory theatrical release - but in the company of its two fine leads, it nudges towards an understanding of what and who we need to heal and move on, and how, in even the clearest of conditions, that progress isn't always as easy as it might first look.

Drift is currently available to rent via the BFI Player.

On demand: "Laapataa Ladies"

Given the ideological violence, codified or otherwise, which has set audiences running from the cinema in their droves over recent months, it's a relief to be confronted with a Hindi film that still feels capable of gentility, that isn't merely thumping us around the head with a recruiting manual for the better part of three hours. Kiran Rao's Laapataa Ladies is a deft and endearing fable, set in a 2001 that seems like tangible ancient history, and founded on an amusingly simple muddle involving nervy newlyweds who've barely tied the knot when they unknowingly stumble towards partner-swapping. Bumfluffed groom Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava) gets the shock of his young life when the bride he's dragged off the midnight train to meet his parents lifts her veil to reveal a face he's never seen before; the mix-up, it transpires, was the result of a surfeit of veiled brides travelling on the same cross-country service, and some decidedly suboptimal seating arrangements. Such a breach of nuptial decorum would probably in itself be enough to sustain a feature-length comedy-drama, but screenwriter Sneha Desai, working from a story by Biplab Goswani, also explores complications involving the other corners of this accidental love quadrangle. The other woman, the progressively minded Jaya (Pratibha Ranta, who presents with something of Sonam Kapoor's poise), realises this snafu might actually work in her favour, swiftly torching the SIM card connecting her to her betrothed as if she were Jason Bourne; it's thus no real shock when we discover said betrothed, the brooding Pradeep (Bhaskar Jha), is a possessive drunk who's been accused of burning his first wife. And then there is the hardly small matter of Deepak's abandoned beloved, the spooked, unworldly, doe-like Phool (Nitanshi Goel), who descends from the fateful train in an unfamiliar part of the countryside, and finds herself at the mercy of complete strangers.

The opening hour suggests farce slowed down to the pace of an Ealing comedy, the better for us to savour this script's generous story and character beats, and the jokes that bubble up organically from its premise. Phool sees her name inscribed in an exasperated stationmaster's lost-property ledger, alongside the umbrellas and spectacles; an openly corrupt police chief (the terrific Ravi Kishan), who accepts bribes in the form of banknotes or songs, commends Deepak on managing to throw off his other half mere days into wedlock ("I've been trying for years"). In the span of attitudes and personalities it describes, Laapataa Ladies qualifies as a triumph of casting: even the walk-on roles are filled perfectly, and some cosmic matchmaking is evident between the leads. We're never allowed to believe Shrivastava's shy, sleepy Deepak stands a chance with Jaya - not when he's so felicitously paired with Goel's Phool. If the film eventually shades into seriousness - towards notably higher stakes - it's led there by the women. Not just the brides, forced to make their own ways in a society offering them scant encouragement, but those around them, like Manju Maai (Chhaya Kadam), the lived-in chaiwalli who takes the hapless Phool under her wing, telling her the greatest con ever pulled on the fairer sex - limiting their potential in one fell rhetorical swoop - was the notion of "the honourable woman". In a better world, one so wise and so pragmatic with it would be running her own country; here, she's frying bread pakora and hoping things work out for the best. Rao and Desai wear their feminism lightly, setting out characters rather than statements, but those characters' interactions do serve as a rallying call for women to be more forceful about who they are and what they want to be, where they're going and what they say and do there. (The better not to be so interchangeable - or, worse still, dispensable.) The point gets underlined by the elegant, outgoing Ranta and the adorable, homely Goel, giving the most skilfully differentiated and affecting performances in the entire film. "Learn to keep your eyes down," Phool is instructed by her family early on, the kind of dyed-in-the-wool, long-in-the-tooth non-wisdom that proliferates in stagnating societies. Rao's eyes remain open, alert to change and forever forward-facing, which is why Laapataa Ladies works so well as entertainment, but also - particularly in its home stretch, which gifts us the gleeful, Shakespearian spectacle of justice being properly served - as a vision of how India might well better itself, far away from all the flags and guns.

Laapataa Ladies is now streaming on Netflix.

In memoriam: Vincent Friell (Telegraph 27/04/24)

Vincent Friell, who has died aged 64, was an actor whose career describes an entire history of Scottish film and television, beginning with the cult indie comedy Restless Natives (1985) and proceeding to appearances in Danny Boyle’s era-defining Trainspotting (1996) and Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share (2012) via episodes of Taggart, Rab C. Nesbitt and Still Game.

In Restless Natives, directed by the American import Michael Hoffman from a script by Ninian Dunnett, the dark-browed, 6’3” Friell – a gangly, shrugging presence in the John Gordon Sinclair mould – starred as the lovelorn Will, one of two underemployed chancers who become unlikely, Dick Turpin-like folk heroes upon holding up tour buses with toy guns. Set to a stirring score by Big Country’s Stuart Adamson, it echoed Bill Forsyth’s beguiling, better known efforts at modern Scottish mythmaking; much like Gregory’s Girl (1982), it lingered long in the imagination. 

As with most myths, the film required some degree of legerdemain, particularly in the scenes that required Will and sidekick Ronnie (Joe Mullaney) to make a high-speed Highland getaway on a motorbike. “I don’t drive, and I have an aversion to any form of speed,” Friell later admitted. “The first time we were on the bike, Joe revved the engine. He went one way, I went the other, and we were never let on the bike again. In the film, it’s not Joe and me on the bike.” 

Friell was born in Glasgow on January 17, 1960, one of five children for the actor and Labour activist Charlie Friell and his wife Mary. He made his screen debut among the suspects in Killer (1983), the ITV miniseries that first introduced audiences to the character of DCI Jim Taggart, played by Mark McManus. Such was Friell’s dependability and versatility that, after spin-off Taggart (1985-2010) became a ratings juggernaut, he returned to the show, playing three further, entirely new roles. 

The close-knit nature of the Scottish industry meant Friell repeatedly worked with the same performers in different contexts. He appeared with Gregor Fisher on the period miniseries Blood Red Roses (1986), before taking two separate roles on Fisher’s breakout vehicle Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) and playing a landlord in the BBC’s fondly remembered, Fisher-led revival of The Tales of Para Handy (1994-95), based on Neil Munro’s books. He appeared alongside stage colleague Robert Carlyle in prison drama Silent Scream (1990), and then watched Carlyle become a star as Begbie in Trainspotting, where Friell played Kelly Macdonald’s baffled father.

More TV work followed, in Jack Docherty’s adworld sitcom The Creatives (1998), as a detective alongside Adrian Dunbar and Ray Winstone in ITV’s Tough Love (2002), and as a developer trying to take over the Clansman pub in Still Game (2002-2019). Friell belatedly returned to film in the indie Fast Romance (2011), which won BAFTA Scotland’s public vote for Favourite Scottish Film; in a marker of how far he’d come since his Restless Natives days, he played the Procurator Fiscal sentencing the wayward young hero of The Angels’ Share to community service.

Friell’s final screen credit came with the comedy short Jim the Fish (2015), although he remained a bedrock of regional theatre. In 2013, he toured Scotland in Paul Coulter’s one-man play Linwood No More, playing a worker laid off from the factory that produced the Hillman Imp and the Talbot Sunbeam; in 2017, he played a crime novelist confronted by harsh reality on the London-to-Glasgow train in Simon Macallum’s Late Sleeper.

Restless Natives – which remained a mainstay of the BBC Scotland schedules, lent its name to a popular podcast presented by the actor Martin Compston, and even spawned a stage musical, currently touring the UK – achieved a newfound prominence in the 21st century after being reissued on DVD. Among the bonus material was an interview with the now middle-aged Friell himself: “It’s a lovely feeling to think […] there’s going to be a whole new generation who are going to see it. I hope it stays around for years, so that it can become a nice novelty factor, that there was this wacky little Scottish film made in 1984 that’s going to stay the course.”

He is survived by his wife Alana Brady and two children, Connie and Jude.

Vincent Friell, born January 17, 1960, died April 14, 2024.

Bad babysitters: "Abigail"

With original ideas apparently at a premium, the movies have taken to smashing pre-loved concepts together, much as prehistoric Man did flints, in the hope of creating sparks. The process is being prominently demonstrated by Adam Wingard in Screen Three's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; over in Screen Five, however, we find arguably the process's nimblest practitioners, Wingard's V/H/S shooting buddies Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence. This pair previously gave us 2019's Ready or Not, which had a lot of fun mashing up the meet-the-parents comedy with the slasher-splatter movie; their latest Abigail sees them and writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick splicing the heist movie with an altogether different horror genus. It's the old story of criminals who get more than they initially bargained for, in this case a ragbag of muttering oddbods first seen in balaclavas - the best medium-budget Universal money can buy: Melissa Barrera (survivor of the directors' iffy Scream reboot), Dan Stevens, Kevin Durant, Will Catlett, Kathryn Newton and the late Angus Cloud - who've been contracted by third-party Giancarlo Esposito to kidnap a pre-teen ballerina (Alisha Weir) with the aim of squeezing a ransom out of the girl's millionaire father. If you've seen the trailer, an example of producers spoiling their own movie, you'll already know young Abigail is plenty capable of defending herself, which means the film's opening half-hour plays as slick preamble with a side order of set-up. Yet smart playing ushers us past the clanking of plot mechanics, while also fanning out - like cards on a table - a set of personalities you're almost sad to see getting torn up. Torn up they must be, though - that 18 certificate's not for nothing - because Bertinelli-Olpin and Gillett rightly understand their best chance of striking sparks is to give these elements a resounding ketchup-bottle thump: the red stuff goes everywhere, with one particular effect that bears repetition and never gets old or tiresome or any less marvellous to behold.

Actually, Abigail is relatively sparing with the grue up until the point all hell breaks out - it gets stored up, for a more spectacular splurge - and that time allows us to see just how attentive these filmmakers have been in matters of construction: they both need and want their bricolage of old-movie odds and sods to withstand even the fiercest of hammer blows. There are precedents here. Abigail shares something of From Dusk Till Dawn's wriggly, borderline serpentine shape, but crucially not its winkingly ironic tone, allowing it to land some emotional beats involving the Barrera character's relationship for her son; for a while, I also wondered whether we were watching Home Alone re-envisioned from the perspective of the Pesci-Stern characters. Yet its most apparent virtues are those of the stronger Saw films: inescapably tight plotting that gets only tighter still upon the revelation of who exactly all these strangers are, and some quietly excellent and unnerving production design (by the versatile Susie Cullen). The so-called safe house to which our anti-heroes escort the girl turns out to be deceptively cushioned, with a whole host of dark spots, secrets and shadows lurking behind the artefacts. (Trust me, you don't want to see what's in the basement.) In confining itself to the one big house, Abigail is visibly operating within the same parameters Ready or Not did - not necessarily a limitation, given how enjoyable the latter film was - but it also holes up with an even better ensemble, who quickly win us over in the guise of weary capitalist footsoldiers, screwed over by management and eviscerated by the job in hand. It's a rare horror movie where you sort of want everybody to survive for potential sequels, notably the spacey, suggestible Newton, the dimly uncomprehending Durant - Elon Musk x Hulk - who gets major laughs just from being more outwardly terrified of his pipsqueak charge than anyone, and the cherishably sarcastic Stevens, who in a parallel universe would be enjoying Bradley Cooper's career, but in this one appears ecstatically happy to have become the thinking person's Jeff Fahey. If the Screen Actors Guild had an award for Best Doomed Souls, this shower would win at a canter.

Abigail is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 19-21, 2024):

1 (1) Back to Black (15)

2 (2) Civil War (15) ***

3 (3) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

4 (4) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A)

5 (new) Abigail (18) ****

6 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12A)

7 (6) Dune: Part Two (12A) **

8 (7) Monkey Man (18) ****

9 (27) Varshangalkku Shesham (12A)

10 (8) The First Omen (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Abigail

2. Close Your Eyes

3. Monkey Man

4. Evil Does Not Exist

5. Aadujeevitham/The Goat Life

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Dune: Part Two (12) **

2 (28) Dune: Part One (12) **

3 (4) Oppenheimer (15) ****

4 (3) Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (12)

5 (13) Argylle (12)

6 (2) Wonka (PG) ***

7 (6) The Holdovers (15) ***

8 (new) Dune: Double Pack (12) **

9 (5) Barbie (12) ***

10 (1) One Life (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Fallen Leaves

2. The Holdovers

3. The Three Musketeers: Part II - Milady

4. The Taste of Things

5. Priscilla

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Trading Places (Friday, Channel 4, 1.25am)

2. Cape Fear (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.40pm)

3. The Shop Around the Corner (Saturday, BBC2, 2pm)

4. Step Brothers [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)

5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.35am)

Double faults: "Challengers"

It is happening again. Every word printed under the sun is telling you the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers is the greatest thing since sliced focaccia, and the film those words have been attached to turns out, like the majority of Luca Guadagnino projects, to be all of the following: tanned and sheenily watchable, not unhealthy for the wider cinema in its approach to the body and to the libido in particular, strenuously photogenic and saleable, and yet naggingly surfacey, fundamentally piffling, recording only a series of poses struck as they would have been in the filming of any tennis-themed promotional spot for a fashion, jewellery or fragrance line, its feet stuck on the baseline where sensuality tips over into outright decadence. In everything from its erratic understanding of oncourt code violations to a climactic whirlwind apparently fashioned from every last fast-food wrapper discarded through history on an American sidewalk, it is both too much and entirely unpersuasive: hot air at best, an overinflated, overpraised heap of nothing elsewhere. Who is the worst of this generation's so-called "great" directors, Guadagnino or Denis Villeneuve? It will all boil down to what you are most willing to endure in a cinema: the latter's flatly incontrovertible dullness, ambience as a substitute for character and life, or the histrionic hyper-exaggeration of the former, borne out once more in the tiresomely flailing limbs of Challengers' central, Jules et Jim Courier ménage à trois.

In one way, it's apt the film's organising slugfest should very nearly be decided by a time violation, given Guadagnino's tendency to overshoot everything, even the routine exposition setting up who's playing who and where. I suspect this is what people are misreading as Movie Art, but it's really just artfulness: you soon begin to miss the way a Hawks or similar could tell a story like this inside 100 minutes, with brisk wit rather than endless huffing-and-puffing. Il Maestro shoots the tennis in intensified single shots, so there's never any sense of court coverage or back-and-forth, the sudden variations of movement and pace that make watching actual tennis such an absorbing pleasure. His grabbiness reaches a nadir in the POV shots of the finale, complete with pumped fists entering the frame: it looks terribly naff for something being praised to the rafters as angular style, like a Lucozade advert you might have glimpsed in the breaks during Surgical Spirit on ITV in 1992. What back-and-forth there is here is built into screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes's ADD-inducing structure, which opens in 2019, flashes back two weeks, returns to the present, flashes back thirteen years, and proceeds in much the same haphazard way thereafter. It takes a full forty minutes just to get its central threesome in the same room, which in itself suggests something about the way our screenwriters have lost the ability to merge backstory and action with the deft hands of a Boris Becker drop shot. Instead, Challengers incessantly jerks its audience around for 131 minutes: it's Surf Dracula, done as a tennis movie.

If you're a die-hard stan of any of these players - as the younger reviewers seem to be - then you may emerge happier. In the course of 131 minutes, you'll witness two or three carefully choreographed, intimately coordinated makeout scenes; these knowing winks to a sex-starved audience are broadly as sexy as Tim Henman, because Guadagnino is trading in that coyly teasing, kit-on sex most commonly used to sell us on khakis and cola. If you come this way anticipating raw, authentic passion, forget it: the fact Challengers is being framed as some sort of boundary-testing erotic breakthrough strikes me as speaking only to the limited imaginations of most film critics. More regrettably, the Guadagnino "touch", such as it is, just opens up more time to ponder the aspects of writing and casting that make little-to-no sense whatsoever. Maybe I missed a memo along the way - maybe it was among the papers swept away in that whirlwind - but there is surely no way Zendaya, seventeen years young at last count, can reasonably be playing mother to even a small child: she still looks like she hasn't had breakfast yet, let alone a baby. (The movie guiltily admits as much by disappearing the kid after the opening fifteen minutes, the better to proceed with Uncle Luca's Polysexual Fun Times, no strings attached.) The boys, meanwhile, are exactly that: klutzy, sniggering nerds, rather than the whey-fed jocks they would have become on the actual tennis circuit. Not for the first time, a major American studio release points up what happens when you abolish the star system and elevate kids who've barely lived to positions of movie responsibility for which they hardly seem qualified. 

Even with its exasperating chicanery and insultingly rote characterisation (unimpeachably sensible head girl, silly-billy boys), Kuritzkes's script might have been pulled into functioning shape by the right personnel, by which I may mean credibly adult humans. As it is, it's just the kind of juvenilia that has to beg for an audience's indulgence: a Superbad-level sex comedy, with bust-ups like high-school tiffs, removed of anything truly amusing and replastered with logos and abysmal EDM meant to counter an inherent lack of propulsion and charge in the material. (The score is credited to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: both should have their Goth cards revoked.) Guadagnino, the Boris Johnson of cinema, proceeds with the relentless wiff-waff of any other hype man: Challengers builds to an inconclusive crescendo, offering empty highs but only a tentative result. Clearly, that's been enough for the more excitable first responders, but I can't in all honesty be that thrilled by a movie that so conspicuously bears out a crisis in screenwriting, a crisis in what's left of the star system, and that its maker would be better off throwing in his lot with the blue-chip brands he clearly longs to promote than trying to tell an involving or meaningful story. I wonder whether what's really being reviewed here is our collective memory of a time when the movies would have aced this sort of thing; but now they struggle to get past the first round of basic critical thinking, and go on almost as long as Mahut-Isner.

Challengers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Eleanor Coppola (Telegraph 22/04/24)

Eleanor Coppola, who has died aged 87, was an artist, writer and director whose eye for the chaos and carnival of cinema shone through one of the foremost films about filmmaking: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), an Emmy-winning documentary fashioned by directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper from the reels of footage Coppola shot behind the scenes of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s legendary Apocalypse Now (1979). 

Filming partly to gather marketing material for United Artists, and partly to alleviate boredom instilled by a notoriously attenuated shoot in the Philippines, Eleanor caught scenes as dramatic as Apocalypse Now itself: a budget spiralling out of control, monsoon-strafed sets, and serious breakdowns in communication between the actors and their self-doubting director. “I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I am making a bad film,” Francis was heard lamenting. “We are all lost.” 

Such scenes articulated a heightened if fraught marital intimacy. Roger Ebert noted how Hearts of Darkness “strips [Francis] Coppola bare of all defences and yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker.” (Coppola himself half-jokingly retitled the documentary “Watch Francis Suffer”.) In his gossipy New Hollywood history Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind suggested the shoot brought pre-existing tensions between Eleanor and the straying Francis to a cyclonic head. 

The pair had met on the set of Francis’s first film, the Roger Corman-backed, Irish-shot Dementia 13 (1963), where Eleanor, two years older, was the assistant art director. Eleanor became pregnant soon afterwards; the couple wed the same year in Vegas and remained married until her death. 

After furnishing Francis’s American Zoetrope studio in orange and royal blue when it opened in 1969, Eleanor reportedly inspired the characterisation of Kay Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Despite the turbulence of the 1970s – during which Francis took to introducing Eleanor as “my first wife” – she raised all three of the couple’s children while also proving instrumental to the success of the Coppola wineries. 

In her thoughtful 2008 memoir Notes on a Life, Eleanor reflected on the compromises entailed by marriage and motherhood: “Over the years I stopped whatever I was doing to go on location with Francis and the children. I sincerely tried to be a good wife and mother... For a variety of reasons, I haven’t created a body of notable work in my life when many around me have, and I haven’t yet made peace with that truth.” 

Eleanor Jessie Neil was born on May 4, 1936 in Long Beach, California, one of three children to political cartoonist Clifford Neil and his wife Delphine (née Lougheed). She studied applied design at UCLA before pausing her career as a tapestry maker. 

Yet in later life, after her children Roman and Sofia had established their filmmaking credentials, Coppola found a creative second wind, directing two semi-autobiographical features: Paris Can Wait (2016), in which Diane Lane takes a scenic French break from bigshot husband Alec Baldwin, and the portmanteau Love is Love is Love (2020) in which, asked the secret to her long marriage, a philandering producer’s wife (Joanne Whalley) replies “Don’t get divorced”. 

While promoting the former, Coppola told one interviewer: “I grew up in the Forties and Fifties, [when] a woman’s role was to support her husband and make a nice home for him. I was frustrated that I didn’t have much time to pursue my interests. Young women today have no concept of that. My daughter and her generation […] take for granted that they’re going to do whatever is their calling. There’s not going to be a question of their role or if they have to give it up because they’re a wife and a mother.” 

She is survived by her husband, and two of her three children, Sofia and Roman. Her eldest son Gian-Carlo died in a boating accident aged 22 in 1986. 

Eleanor Coppola, born May 4, 1936, died April 12, 2024.