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What is it about the Coppola family that makes the substance of Francis Ford Coppola’s films so often driven by what happens behind a family’s closed doors?

It’s never exactly a positive situation, either: his Godfather trilogy is about the implosion of a family, the fall of a son and an effort to sustain a lineage. The final famous frame of The Godfather is of a door closing Michael Corleone from view of his loving wife, sealing his own doom.

Then there’s the behind the scenes element of his films — the casting of family members such as Talia Shire and Sofia Coppola in her much derided performance in The Godfather Part III (which, if I may go on record, isn’t half as bad as it’s usually said to be). Then there’s Carmine Coppola, Francis’ father, who composed much of the scores for the Godfather films as well as for Apocalypse Now.

And of course, Sofia went on to make Lost in Translation.

And then there’s the whole wine label thing.

So what’s there to complain about? The New York-raised director belongs to an Italian-American family of great recipes, great talent, and great entrepreneurship. For all the affection Francis Ford Coppola has for his family, has he ever made a film that paints family in a favorable light?

Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, maybe. But those aren’t really families in the sense of the word that I mean.

Tetro, Coppola’s latest film starring Vincent Gallo and the incredibly talented newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, is the most domestic film the director has ever made. Ehrenreich, as Bennie, seeks to uncover the mystery behind his older brother Tetro (Gallo) and his mysterious writings. There’s complicated themes of incestual undertones, and as I mentioned in my review of the film, an amazingly simple Oedipal story that brings the focus full swing to the performances, which are great across the board.

The film was written by Coppola himself, and it shows: a lead character whose a writer struggling under the shadow of his composer father? It’s broad symbolism, if you have a fairly strong knowledge of Coppola, but it serves Tetro well. The film is more relaxed and comfortable than the director has shown himself capable of in years.

Of course drama is rooted in conflict — it’s not a mystery why there’s a wall of misunderstanding and mystery between the two brothers in this film. No wall existed between the Corleone family — that’s why so many of them ended up dead.

It’s simply curious to me that a man’s affections for his family — when in the hands of a writer and director — has seemingly no outlet but to paint it in a favorable and nearly always sappy light (Elizabethtown comes to mind), or to damage it by embedding it within destruction. Coppola takes the latter route — he shows his adoration and admiration by showing off family recipes and pitting siblings against one another.

Perhaps to F.F.C., ruination of the family structure is the sincerest form of flattery.