Summary
Abe walks into the Tucker residence one afternoon handing out gifts to all of the children. It's clear that he's become part of the family, and we see a new softness in him as he asks Tucker if they have a car. Reluctantly, Tucker says they do, and they start to enjoy a celebratory martini. But just then, they're interrupted by Preston Jr., who runs in talking about a fuel leak. In the garage, Alex is inspecting the car when it collapses, almost crushing him under it. He's safe, but Tucker barely even registers that he was in danger in the first place, so Eddie chews him out for only caring about that piece of junk car, and not anything or anyone else. This perpetuates a freakout in which Preston starts punching the blueprints of his car and talking about watching his own crucifixion at the unveiling in Chicago.
At the factory in Chicago, Tucker meets with the PR team who want to make a newsreel about him and his family to attract stock investors. Once again, Tucker bristles at the priority of appealing to investors, but he clearly loves the attention that PR gives him. We see cars start to pile into the factory's parking lot on the big day of the unveiling. A giant band plays, newspeople broadcast, and balloons float around. As Tucker and his crew struggle to make last minute repairs to the car so it can back up, one of the ushers at the event blabs to a cagey man who appears to be a private investigator about the car's woes. We soon watch this man call Senator Ferguson.
The crowd is going nuts, chanting, "We want the car!" so Tucker goes out in his snappy double-breasted suit to entertain, and brings out a troupe of dancers. Just as the crew is about to bring the car out, it springs a gasoline leak, so Tucker continues to stall, to boos. Right when Tucker announces the car is coming out, the gasoline on the ground catches fire, so he stalls some more and announces a feature that RJ Bennington exclaims has already been removed from the car.
When Tucker finally unveils the car to the crowd they go nuts, and all of the brass in the Tucker company seems pleased. It's a dazzling red car with the sleek, futuristic design that the early ads promised. Of course, the driving of the car is kept to a minimum. We really only see it descend from the rotating platform and drive a few feet. Then, we cut to a commercial for the Tucker automobile, boasting of its innovative construction and safety features, with a smiling little girl in the front seat.
After the event, we watch Bennington talk to some other execs about how much of a thorn in their sides Tucker is, so he devises a plan to let Tucker go off on a publicity tour while they take control of the company's affairs. This commences a sequence of Tucker showing off his car: schmoozing, boozing, and soaking up attention. While Preston is away, Abe takes the Tucker family to look at the mansion they just purchased. The Tuckers are moving on up.
Back at the factory, Tucker's team is working on hammering out the car's engineering and design, but the men Bennington hired are encroaching, frustrating them more and more. It's clear that the Tucker team is being cut out of the process as Bennington works towards making the car significantly more conventional. The tension between the two factions hits a precipitous moment when Vera barges into a board meeting. Bennington tries to brush her off and refer Vera to his wife to plan a social engagement, but she informs him that there's nothing social about her visit. Bennington tries a series of misogynist tactics to get out of answering Vera's serious questions, but finally addresses one: they raised the car's selling price because Detroit was making it hard for them to get cheap steel. Vera is unsatisfied, and leaves the meeting by throwing their drawing of the car's redesign on the ground.
Preston is in the middle of recording a radio commercial when he gets a call from Vera telling him about the changes Bennington is trying to make, and as soon as she tells him they're getting rid of the Waltz Blue color option, he says he's going to rush back. When Preston meets with the board, Bennington tells him that they've eliminated the rear engine, disc breaks, fuel injection, and seatbelts, all features that made the car unique. Bennington makes a big fuss about how his contract says that he's in total control of the company. Preston asks Abe if that's true, and Abe says they needed to give him some control to get people to buy stock, but that he didn't know the total control was in Bennington's contract. Tucker asserts that it is his company, and the power struggle is on.
Analysis
This is an interesting segment of the film, and one that feels fairly separate from the rest of the action so far. This part of the film—when Act 2 is kicking into high gear—is a notably darker segment when the jokes seem to turn dour and all of the actors' mugging falls flat. Here, we start to see the director that Francis Ford Coppola used to be known as: the dark genius, the great teller of stories about problems larger than the ambitious men who got caught up in them.
Take the allegorical aspects about corporate America that comprise this part of the story. We watch the rise of RJ Bennington and see the Tucker company infested by the very corporate trappings that it was designed to disrupt and dismantle from the outside. Here, we see resonances with Coppola's first Godfather film, often read as an allegory about corporate America and its antithesis of the American dream. But while The Godfather dwells on the corrupting influence of American greed, Tucker becomes an exploration of a wider system where the US government and corporate America work hand in hand to consolidate power by weeding out the small upstart that threatens to shake the system.
So even though Tucker has this unrelentingly upbeat tone and characters who are so positive that they get kind of irritating, Coppola uses the film as a vehicle for a critique about America that resonates with his thornier New Hollywood-era work, like those Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. Reading this film in that backwards-looking context of the New Hollywood movement is a fruitful exercise, as it helps us see both the nuance Coppola managed to work into this film as well as what he had to sacrifice. After all, this is as family-friendly as it gets, and the director's soured reading of the American Dream is ultimately waved away by a few lines at the end when Tucker says that he achieved his dream even if he lost the company.
But remember that when Coppola originally conceived of Tucker, it was supposed to be the story about how Tucker's dream died, and how Tucker died with it. This is the part of the film where we see Coppola's original ideas start to surface, as Preston Tucker emerges as a complicated man. He's an idealist who lies through his teeth to anyone he meets. He's tenacious to the point where he's willing to undermine his own company. And more importantly, he's an ambitious man who ruffles feathers, and never quite grasps the gravity of the situations that he falls into. We see a lot of fatal flaws in Preston Tucker during this part of the film, even if they're pasted over with Jeff Bridges's magnetic smile and a never-stopping uplifting jazz soundtrack.
