COPPOLA <i> by Peter Cowie (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $22.95; 277 pp.) </i>

Life hasn’t been kind to Francis Coppola in recent years. His son Gio was killed in a boating accident in 1986; Zoetrope, his studio company, has struggled since 1982’s flop, “One from the Heart”; his contribution to last year’s “New York Stories” brought the worst reviews of his career. It’s nice, consequently, to come across a book that focuses on his considerable accomplishments. Peter Cowie is a serious student of film--the European publishing director of Variety, he has written critical biographies of Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles--and recognizes that Coppola’s strengths and weaknesses are the products of a singular vision. Coppola himself defined the problem this way in 1977: “I am willing to risk everything for my work.”

The author obviously agrees with that self-analysis, and there are times when one wonders whether Coppola cast a spell on him. Cowie writes at one point that “none of Francis’s houses was on a scale commensurate with his enormous income”--and then lists a home in Los Angeles, a mansion in San Francisco, two apartment buildings, a Marin County hideaway, an apartment in the Sherry Netherland in New York and a writing room at the Algonquin. Most of the time, however, Cowie does retain a critical distance; he notes, for example, that Coppola’s applying state-of-the-art film techniques to fluff like “One From the Heart” was “a perfect example of form colliding with content.” For “Apocalypse Now” Cowie has much praise, rightly so, and he criticizes Rona Barrett for breaking a press embargo in order to be the first to christen the film “a disappointing failure.” The film became profitable despite mixed reviews--an ironic result, considering Cowie’s speculation that Coppola “may perceive success in the American context as damaging, even a sell-out.”

What Cowie does best is demonstrate how closely Coppola’s approach to film is rooted in what he calls the director’s “European mind.” Italian to the core, a lover of cooking, cappuccino, children, and Cahiers du Cinema, Coppola emerges as a man bent on understanding the divisions and allegiances that make up community life. In the “Godfather” series he explores the closeness of families; in “The Conversation,” the nature of communion and communication; in “Tucker,” creativity’s threat to the status quo. These are profound topics, and while Coppola often handles them with a heavy hand, he doesn’t always take himself seriously. Coppola once wrote, paraphrasing Euripides, “Whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes successful in show business.”