In ‘Megalopolis,’ Francis Ford Coppola swings high and misses - comment

‘My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, pompous embarrassing film on an important subject, and I am doing it,” said Francis Ford Coppola on an audiotape played in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about the making of his film Apocalypse Now.

He was wrong. Apocalypse Now turned out to be a flawed but fascinating allegory about America in Vietnam and how power corrupts, that was also a thrilling movie.

But if he had said that about Megalopolis, his latest film, which was just released in theaters around Israel, he would have been spot-on. Megalopolis is a passion project he has wanted to make for more than 40 years, and he recently got it financed and finally completed this allegory comparing contemporary America to ancient Rome.

It stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, a visionary architect based on Lucius Sergius Catilina, a Roman politician who tried to seize control of Rome in 63 CE. Set in a place called New Rome clearly modeled on present-day New York City, the movie is intended as a mind-blowing indictment of the worst excesses of America today. It pits Cesar against two antagonists: Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome, who is an amalgam of many mainstream politicians, and his uncle, Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), a super-rich populist who acts like a low-energy Donald Trump.

Cesar has created a mysterious substance that makes it possible for him to create the Megalopolis, a new utopian or dystopian urban landscape, depending on your point of view. His scheming, cross-dressing cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) wants to take control of the project, while the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Natalie Emmanuel), is drawn to Cesar and eventually falls in love with him.

When the movie isn’t making references to ancient Rome, it’s quoting Hamlet, and Cesar recites the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in an early scene, at the groundbreaking for the Megalopolis project. The movie was obviously inspired by the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, two stories of dreamers who destroy themselves as they battle the world around them.

Interesting on paper

While Megalopolis might sound interesting on paper, everything in it feels flat and forced. In a key scene where Cesar and Julia kiss for the first time, the special effects are intense – it looks like they are walking on girders in a pinkish landscape far above the ground – but there is no chemistry or heat between them. Emmanuel, who is best known for Game of Thrones, is very pretty but very bland, and her blandness infects most of the movie. You’ll find yourself paying great attention to the costumes, sets, and special effects because you have no interest in the plot or the cardboard characters.

It’s a sad coda to a brilliant career. If there can be said to be a king of American cinema, it would be Coppola. When a director who created such movies as the Godfather series, the first two of which are among the best movies ever made, as well as Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, swings so high and misses so completely, it invites speculation about how this could have happened.

Coppola, who nurtured the talent of slightly younger directors such as George Lucas, dreamed of creating a community of artists that would produce great works in every field, including journalism and music, as well as movies. He founded Zoetrope Studios (aka American Zoetrope) in the late 1960s in San Francisco. It produced great movies and terrible movies and movies that never got made, and the company created an internship program for teens and a magazine. There were frequent wild parties there, and almost everything about Cesar’s workshop in Megalopolis brings to mind Coppola’s fantasy of Zoetrope.

When a project stays on a director’s mind for over 40 years, it must be deeply personal, and I suspect that Coppola identifies with Cesar, and that this movie is a metaphor for his fight against the studio system to make movies that are personal and audacious.

But when he shook off the corporate studios, during the zenith of Zoetrope in the early 1980s, and made One from the Heart independently, it turned out he had little to say. It took place in Las Vegas and was filmed on stylized sets, telling the story of an unhappy married couple (Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) who separate, have flings with Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski, respectively, and find their way back to each other.

It unconvincingly extolled the virtues of marital bliss, amid interesting lighting and meticulous production design, while the publicity touted it as a “unique new vision.” But nothing was new there, except perhaps the director’s megalomania, which prevented him from seeing the script’s obvious flaws. Recently, some perverse movie critics have reevaluated the movie, but no viewer without an agenda could truly praise this lackluster film. Without the need to fight the adversarial suits and their often ridiculous demands, he didn’t have the same creative spark.

The ups and downs – and bankruptcies – continued, and when he was making Gardens of Stone in 1986, a tragedy altered the course of his life: his older son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, was killed in an accident at 22. Sam Wasson quotes Coppola in his biography, The Path to Paradise, as saying, “After that, I realized that no matter what happened, I had lost. That no matter what happened, it would always be incomplete. The next day, I could have all my fondest dreams come true: Someone could give me Paramount Pictures to organize the way I would do it and develop talent and technology. And even if I did get it, I lost already.”

This sense of loss might have meant that he felt he had nothing to lose, given him a sense of freedom. But Megalopolis, his vain attempt to weave a gorgeous, meaningful tapestry out of all the stories and obsessions that occupied him for his entire life, is the work of a man foundering.

It brings to mind another quote from Hearts of Darkness, the one that ends the documentary: “To me, the great hope is that now these little 8-mm. video recorders are coming out and some people who normally don’t make movies are going to be making them, and suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camcorder, and for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will really become an art form.”

Sadly, Megalopolis is nothing but professionalism, a display of what a huge budget can buy, with nothing to make you care, the opposite of the “beautiful little film” he was hoping to see, that he was dreaming he would make.