Francis Ford Coppola’s new film crumbles under its own absurd weight.
The greatest sin an artist can commit is to allow time to pass them by unnoticed. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened to the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Somewhere along the way, the man who laid the groundwork for American cinema lost the plot and never got it back.
Coppola’s latest film, the $136 million, CGI-laden disasterwork Megalopolis is evidence of just how far Coppola has fallen. Megalopolis is a dizzying conundrum, a film that spirals from one green screen scene to the next as stilted dialogue and unsure acting awkwardly pace the blockbuster.
Coppola, who has worked on the project for decades, clearly sees the film as a warning. Set in an alternate version of the United States, the city of New Rome is plagued by corrupt politicians, patrician families, failing infrastructure, and moral degeneracy. The depravity and the cowardice from the ruling elite accurately parallels that of our time and so too does the futuristic precipice we as a civilization now find ourselves gazing out upon.
The same palette that marks the film from start to finish (radiant gold, brawny silver, and Apple-store white) were also on display Thursday evening, in the real world, during Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s audacious presentation of his new fleet of Cybercars and Robovans and Optimus robots. Musk is not unlike the main character in Megalopolis, architect Cesar Catilina, whose visions of a utopian future clash against the harsh realities of power and currency.
In similar ways, the film is about Coppola, too. His well-documented disputes with the major film houses during the productions of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather prompted the filmmaker to create his own studio, Zoetrope. Instead of begging the big studios for their money and approval, Coppola’s production team purchased a 10-acre lot in Hollywood and set out on a utopian vision of studio filmmaking, in which a roster of top directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, and actors would mingle on location to produce the type of work that often struggles to reach fruition in the narrow creative band that now mostly produces Marvel spinoffs.
Zoetrope’s first film, Coppola’s One From the Heart, was a financial and critical flop. As he was known to do, Coppola blew through his budget, taking on loans with extremely high interest rates that would saddle the director with debts for years to come. Set workers, who adored Coppola, continued work on the film even though he couldn’t pay their wages. When the film was finally finished, it took an eccentric Canadian oil tycoon to furnish its distribution.
After less than a month in theaters, One From the Heart only managed to make $800,000, a far cry from recouping its $28 million budget. Soon after, Coppola was forced to sell the Zoetrope lot and with it, his dreams of making big-budget pieces outside the purview of Old Hollywood.
Coppola would spend the next decade digging himself out of debt and, as a result, struggling to push his own pictures forward. Which brings us back to Megalopolis, a film that Coppola wrote while mired in debt.
As much as Megalopolis is a film about an America led astray and the wild scale of our future to come, the film is also a personal anecdote of ambition and setback which mirrors those that Coppola experienced himself. Coppola sets out to explore the limits of artistic freedom in the face of dogmatic bureaucracies, and what he conjures up is not unlike what he himself experienced battling against studios who refused to finance his greatest dreams.
Megalopolis is Coppola’s great dream, but the 81-year-old filmmaker simply can’t get out of the way of his best laid plans. The film is so self-serving and strained that I felt unsure at times whether it even wanted to be seen, a suspicion that was warranted as I entered a completely empty theater only days after its release. As the film slinks from one elaborate set piece to the next, one senses Coppola was so preoccupied with his own myth-making that he simply forgot to make a film worth mythologizing.
Much ado was made about Coppola’s decision to self-fund the sprawling project. To do so, Coppola sold off parts of his Sonoma County wineries and plowed more than $100 million into production and promotion. Critics couldn’t help but note the similarities to Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now, which was also a giant, self-funded gamble by Coppola, who piled his own fortune into its making when major American studios balked at the price tag associated with the sprawling war film.
Although the creation of Megalopolis embodies the same independent ethos that drove the creation of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s newest film fails to gin up the same ethereal qualities of his Vietnam-era fever dream. Where Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen succeeded in creating deep, soulful representations of war gone awry, the dry and bulky performances of Nathaniel Emmanuel and Giancarlo Esposito fail to find similar footing. Most of the star-studded cast in Megalopolis serve only as cameo bait. No one, from Dustin Hoffman to Jason Schwartzman, puts in a memorable showing outside Shia LeBeouf, who plays Cesar’s jealous cousin Clodio, a New Rome playboy who spends his nights partying and his days conniving.
The film does have its moments. Is it beautiful? It is. In fact, in parts, the film holds its own as one of the most beautiful films to ever grace the silver screen. But beauty alone does not make a film, especially a two-hour narrative-driven blockbuster. While Megalopolis succeeds visually, it fails as a story.
The film director Quentin Tarantino has spoken at length about his fear of creating a late-career dud that colors his filmography unfavorably for audiences in the decades and centuries to come. Watching Megalopolis, I couldn’t help but think of Tarantino’s warning. Here was Coppola, the American auteur, whose The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and The Conversation stand among the greatest films ever made, wandering aimlessly through a gold-plated globe with only a few of his most ardent supporters to watch in horror.
Megalopolis is unlikely to recoup even a fraction of its massive budget. As of this writing, the film has only collected $10 million at box offices worldwide, and whispers of its inclusion in this year’s awards season have come because of its artistic design, not because of its story or famed director.
A month before the film hit theaters, Coppola found himself in hot water. The first trailer for the film opened with quotes from top critics who lambasted Coppola’s previous masterpieces before they rose to prominence. There was one problem—Coppola invented the quotes. Lionsgate, distributor of the film, pulled the trailer and apologized. Nothing so fittingly explains the problem with Megalopolis: Coppola and his inflated ego. Had he been able to sidestep desires to reclaim his status as the bad boy of American film, perhaps Megalopolis could’ve been a hit. Instead, it’s a garbled, bloated mess.
Spectacular? In some ways, yes. A failure? More than anything he ever made before.
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