I was hoping that Megalopolis would be a spectacular success for Francis Ford Coppola, who is one of my all-time favorite movie directors. The Godfather: Part II (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) always were and will always be on my list of Top Ten Movies.
I was hoping for one more, crowning, career-topping achievement— perhaps one last cinematic masterpiece from an aging, revered filmmaker.
But that was not to be.
Coppola struggled to bring this project to the big screen for over three decades. When he finally did, he had to largely fund the project himself. It was a project plagued with problems. Despite a warm reception at Cannes, early reviews were mixed but largely negative.
There were high hopes for Megalopolis, with comparisons to Fritz Lang’s classic silent epic Metropolis (1927) and Ayn Rand’s novel "The Fountainhead." If anyone could make a movie like this, it was Coppola.
Sadly, Megalopolis barely resembles Coppola’s earlier work. Following the heart-stopping opening sequence showing Adam Driver’s character, Cesar Catilina, stepping off the ledge of a towering skyscraper and then stopping time itself, the movie quickly descends into a quagmire of dense, probing dialog and soap opera style staging and direction.
Stylistically, the film is somewhere between Federico Fellini, David Lynch and possibly Yorgos Lanthimos, whose recent Poor Things (2019) jarred audiences with its wildly imaginative imagery. It is a movie that is dreamlike and surreal on the surface skating along on a powerful, underlying narrative current involving history, politics, philosophy, power, greed, and of course love.
It's a lot to pack into one movie. You sense trouble when the main character starts reciting Shakespeare in the first reel. Overall, the script seems to be a compilation of Coppola’s favorite quotes, gathered over a lifetime and then cut and pasted into a non sequitur screenplay.
There is an inescapable feeling that the cast had no idea of how to handle the material and that Coppola was unable to guide them. Reportedly there were a lot of last-minute changes on set. Parts of the movie seem completely improvised and awkward, despite the all-star talent in front of the lens and behind it.
Megalopolis certainly has the look of an Avant-garde, experimental film. It anything, it is boldly and unabashedly unconventional. When unconventionality works, it can rise to the level of true art (consider the work of Bergman, Antonioni, or Godard). But when it fails, it can be disastrous.
Megalopolis is a major, unwatchable misfire. And while great film directors occasionally make bad movies, the misstep here is monumentally unfortunate. As mentioned, Coppola is an artist in the autumn of his stellar career, struggling to still make movies. As he has done in the past, he has risked his own wealth and well-being to make the movies he wanted to make. He believed in his talent, he gambled, and he won. He went on to make more movies.
These days, great filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese are finding it harder to get the financial backing to green light their projects. A stumble like the one Coppola may face at the box office could be career ending, and that would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions for movie lovers everywhere.
Coppola aggressively pushes the boundaries of mainstream cinema in Megalopolis. Visually, he throws everything at the audience including the proverbial kitchen sink. True to form, he even ventured into breaking the fourth wall at the preview screenings, by having what appeared to be a reporter from the audience step in front of the screen, an hour and 23 minutes into the movie, and interact with Adam Driver’s character, Cesar.
When it was screened in Pittsburgh, I was asked to play the part of the reporter, lip-synching a question that was recorded on the movie soundtrack.
As with other elements of the film, it was designed to throw the audience a head-spinning curve, and I was reminded of the legendary antics of William Castle back in the 1950s whose horror movie screenings included fake skeletons flying over the audience’s heads on wires and pulleys. It was a moment that connected with bygone, break-the-rules movie showmanship from Castle, a fellow risk-taker, who incidentally financed his first movie, Macabre (1958) by mortgaging his house.
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