Francis Ford Coppola was once a real cinematic titan creating indelible experiences at the movies. But Megalopolis, his overstuffed saga of the failing American empire, marks the drastic decline of his powers as a filmmaker.
Adam Driver in <citeMegalopolis. (Lionsgate Films)
The rocky American premiere of Megalopolis is a melancholy event for any number of reasons. Mainly because it marks the drastic decline of Francis Ford Coppola’s powers as a filmmaker, and it may turn out to be the failed work that ends his long career. But also because the critical commentary surrounding the film, whether positive or negative, is in general hugely depressing. The few positive reviews tend to urge upon audiences the necessity of feeling grateful for this film, or any other film that’s not a superhero movie or a sequel in a franchise or some tired reboot of a decades-old hit, because human expressivity in cinema is so clearly doomed.
But a film isn’t good because it’s the cinematic equivalent of the last dodo, a species going extinct that must be honored as it passes out of existence. Even if Megalopolis were somehow the Last True Film, it would still be a silly spectacle, a puerile mess with some pretty imagery, an ideologically rancid bore, a dud.
Megalopolis is doing very poorly with the moviegoing public and getting buried in mostly bad reviews, but it’s remarkable how carefully and kindly some critics are couching their reactions to the overblown sci-fi epic. Mindful of Coppola’s legendary film career and aware that this largely self-financed film spectacle may very well be the eighty-five-year-old director’s swan song, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes, “In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve.”
Our movies certainly could use all of that, but there are different kinds of craziness, passion, feeling, and nerve, and not all of them are salutary. For example, Dinesh D’Souza’s Vindicating Trump, a “documentary” currently playing in theaters, probably has several of those qualities.
The few positive reviews tend to urge upon audiences the necessity of feeling grateful for this film, or any other film that’s not a superhero movie or a sequel in a franchise.
Dargis also notes that Megalopolis represents one of Coppola’s more experimental movies, like One from the Heart and Rumble Fish, and “might have been more generously received . . . if Coppola’s name hadn’t been attached.”
Surely not. Coppola’s name being attached may mean higher expectations, but it also means that mostly respectful attention will be paid. Any wealthy Jane or John Doe who decided to blow a significant part of their personal fortune making a film like Megalopolis would never have gotten a distribution deal or a mainstream release at all — even Coppola struggled to get one. And if they somehow managed it, the scalding mockery in response would’ve stripped the flesh from their bones.
In case you haven’t been following this film-world fiasco, Megalopolis is set in a futuristic failing empire representing the United States of America, with New Rome standing in for New York City, where a brilliant architect named Cesar Catilina (CC, played by Adam Driver), chairman of the design authority in New Rome, strives to create inventively designed housing that will inspire the people to imagine a better way of living. However, since “the people” are watching their slummy apartment houses being bulldozed to make way for this visionary public project, leaving them homeless, CC is getting some pushback.
Throughout the film, the ordinary citizens of New Rome are represented as, essentially, the mob, clueless and vicious, unable to understand Cesar’s inspired vision that is meant for their own good. It’s no surprise when Coppola puts red MAGA hats on their empty heads as they’re urged on to riot by self-serving pols.
Aubrey Plaza in Megalopolis. (Lionsgate Films)
Also opposing Cesar’s vision is the conservative stay-the-course mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito); Cesar’s jealous, scheming, gender-fluid cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf), who tries to rally the people against Cesar; and Cesar’s lunatic mother, Constance Crassus Catilina (Talia Shire), who hates him for reasons that are never made clear.
Further complicating Cesar’s life are his current girlfriend, ambitious media maven Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who will turn on him vengefully when he rejects her; Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), a powerful banker; the mayor’s party girl daughter, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls in love with Cesar; and Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal), a teen pop star and revered “vestal virgin” who ultimately embroils Cesar in scandal.
The only people who are consistently pro-Cesar are his driver and right-hand man, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), who also narrates the film; Jason Zanderz (Jason Schwartzman), a devoted member of Cesar’s entourage; and the mayor’s lively wife, Teresa Cicero (Kathryn Hunter). Otherwise, it’s all cutthroat power moves and manipulative sex among the plutocrats.
The ordinary citizens of New Rome are represented as clueless and vicious, unable to understand Cesar’s inspired vision meant for their own good.
A lot depends on whether the character of Cesar can hold the center of the screen as a compelling antihero. He’s an apparently cold visionary serving a higher ethical cause who is uninterested in the lives of ordinary people, but he’s also a tormented man mourning the death of his beloved wife. And it’s a little startling to note that Adam Driver, an excellent actor, just can’t pull it off. Whether he’s miscast in this Great Man role, or badly directed, or the role is just stupidly conceived from the get-go, Driver flounders around within its perimeters, trying to punch across one big emotive scene after another that seems disconnected, unmotivated, and faintly comical.
The opening scene features Cesar atop a skyscraper, stepping out fearfully, bent on suicide. You cinephiles out there will recognize immediately Coppola’s wholesale lift from the Coen brothers’ movie The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), especially when Cesar steps off the ledge and then immediately uses his magical gift for stopping time to prevent his own death. There’s poor Adam Driver, his gangly, stork-like body hanging forward in space as he gazes down on the street far below, looking silly.
In The Hudsucker Proxy, which is a comedy, the main character’s suicide is ultimately halted by the powers of the “timekeeper,” a wise old black man who lives in the clocktower at the center of the representative modern city, a clocktower that is the key to the workings of the whole world. He also narrates the film’s events. (Megalopolis has Fundi Romaine as the wise old narrating black man.)
This is only one of a series of pointless quotes from other films. Another is the scene when Julia Cicero comes to Cesar’s skyscraper penthouse office to meet him for the first time. Coppola stages it in terms of another crucial first-time meeting in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes (1948). In that scene, the avid young up-and-coming composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) arrives at the penthouse office of brilliant ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) to collect an angry letter he wrote that, on subsequent reflection, he realized was childish.
Lermontov is a Great Man wearing an opulent robe and being served an elaborate breakfast, and Walbrook’s soigné ability to convey the finicky insularity and true eccentricity of genius is the key to the whole scene. Lermontov is apparently indifferent to the concerns of young Craster, but he recognizes something interesting in the hotheaded composer, and their fateful exchange leads to Craster getting hired to work with the ballet orchestra, the beginning of a great career of his own.
In Megalopolis, Cesar is being served his Great Man breakfast by Fundi Romaine when Julia Cicero comes to his penthouse office to collect a tabloid photo she’d angrily defaced and mailed to him that, upon subsequent reflection, she realized was childish. Cesar announces his indifference to Julia Cicero and all other people who aren’t visionary intellectuals like himself. But then he sees something interesting in the hotheaded young club princess, and their fateful exchange leads to a love affair that blah blah blah.
Still from Megalopolis. (Lionsgate Films)
It’s a terrible scene, awkwardly staged in fruitless imitation of an infinitely better film, and it really shows off Adam Driver’s plight in the ill-conceived role of Cesar Catilina, being made to announce in crude dialogue what should have been implicit in every look and gesture. Plus, Cesar’s love life is not nearly as interesting as Powell and Pressburger’s study of the drive for artistic greatness, a harrowing process even if it comes off, that powers The Red Shoes.
Other movie references include the underwater floating-death scene from Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) and a random quote from the 1945 film noir/melodrama Mildred Pierce, given to Cesar’s viper of a mother: “I think alligators have the right idea — they eat their young.” At one point, Cesar recites Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. There are probably many others I didn’t catch, and certainly there are a number of shots commemorating the eerie power of silent cinema.
The constant reflexivity, calling attention to film as film, such as a shot of the image we’re looking at blistering and burning and melting away as if it were highly flammable old-time celluloid, is a metamove that entirely eludes me. What is Coppola trying to convey in so many references to the history of film? What has it got to do with his already overstuffed saga of the failing American empire that supposedly echoes the fate of the ancient Roman empire? No idea, beyond the assumption that obviously it obsesses Coppola, so into the film it goes.
This is a film that makes you feel sorry for actors, even very well-paid actors, because nothing can compensate them for their participation in some of these mortifying scenes. I never thought I’d write “poor Shia LeBeouf,” but his Clodio character is grotesquely conceived, and has him cackling malevolently over his evil plots like a Halloween witch in a badly done haunted house tour. Coppola has no problem treating seriously the old cliché of fluid gender and sexuality as markers of depraved weakness that made studio-era Hollywood biblical epics and sword-and-sandal sagas so campy and hilarious to later generations.
This is a film that makes you feel sorry for actors, even very well-paid actors, because nothing can compensate them for their participation in some of these mortifying scenes.
Judging by this film — and the sexual harassment scandals surrounding its production — Coppola also has no problem sidelining women into demeaning traditional roles, even in a portrait of a futuristic society, so he trots out the faithful, supportive wife; the hot, scheming mistress turned power-hungry harpy; the bouncy half-dressed bit-part players in purely decorative roles; and so on. Aubrey Plaza does everything humanly possible with her cartoonish role as the mistress-harpy, but there’s no way to salvage the ludicrous way her role is written and directed. Her confrontation scene in an elevator with Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia Cicero (“Look, bitch!”) is like some pre-catfight face-off featuring Joan Collins vs. Linda Evans in the old TV soap opera Dynasty. As for that sex scene with Shia LeBeouf . . . let’s just all try to move on and forget.
As Julia Cicero, British actor Emmanuel (Game of Thrones, the Maze Runner and Fast and Furious franchises) is hopelessly out of her depth. It’s downright cruel to have cast a pretty but limited actor in a leading role she’s by no means ready to carry. Meanwhile, extraordinarily gifted actor Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth) is wasted in a tiny role as Mayor Cicero’s devoted wife.
Old Coppola hands like Laurence Fishburne (Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, Gardens of Stone) and Talia Shire (the Godfather films, New York Stories) seem to know the drill and more or less escape with their dignity.
Even with the foreknowledge that filmmaking is a very taxing job and that few directors can keep doing it effectively decade after decade, Megalopolis is a grim, demoralizing experience. It’s incredible to recall that Francis Ford Coppola was once a real cinematic titan creating indelible experiences at the movies.
Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. (Paramount Pictures)
Think of the opening of Apocalypse Now (1979), with the Doors’ “The End” on the soundtrack and the shots of Martin Sheen’s drugged-out face in that hotel room, with superimposed images of the ceiling fan turning and helicopters flying and the jungle burning, right before his traumatized meltdown. You can still see it and hear it, can’t you?
Think of the death of hapless Fredo Corleone (John Cazale) in The Godfather Part II (1974), out in the little fishing boat on the lake at sunset, muttering his last Hail Mary before he’s murdered by his brother’s henchman. You can picture it, right?
Think of Rumble Fish (1983) in gleaming black and white, and the pool hall boys watching former gang leader the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) play a solitary, elegant game of pool, one of them reverently noting that he’s like “a prince . . . royalty in exile.”
Think of the introductory scene of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), with the gruesome battles in black silhouette against the hallucinatory red sky filled with the smoke of battle and the roaming shots over ancient maps of Eastern Europe. And then the departure of Romanian knight Dracul (Gary Oldman) when he goes off to fight the Turks after a passionate parting from his doomed wife, Elisabeta (Winona Ryder).
Well, I could go on and on.
But as for Megalopolis, once the initial shock has passed, I doubt I’ll remember any of it, even the complex montages of superimposed imagery, which Coppola always did beautifully. The veil of mercy will be drawn across the entire miserable experience, leaving only the memory of great Coppola films of the past.