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| Images courtesy of Lionsgate |
Francis Ford Coppola has been developing Megalopolis,
a sprawling gargantuan crossbreed of pure cinema between Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come and Richard Kelly’s Southland
Tales, for forty-seven years.
First imagining the project in 1977 while filming Apocalypse Now
before actively working on the script in 1983 with plans to shoot in 1989 in
Rome before a series of financial failures postponed the film
indefinitely. Circa 2001, he attempted
the film again doing table reads with notable actors but following the
September 11th attacks Megalopolis fell to the wayside
again. Circa 2019, Coppola revived the
project once more, selling a portion of his winery in California to plunk down
$120 million of his own money into the film.
Against the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a tumultuous production
including but not limited to creative differences, longstanding habits of
firing cast and crew members at the drop of a hat and more infamously
allegations of sexual misconduct on set followed by hotly debated evidence
posted online, here at the end of all that at long last is Megalopolis
picked up by Lionsgate and released theatrically in IMAX.
Though Coppola maintains his earlier work was equally
polarizing, citing “reviews” for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now for
their divisiveness, one thing struck me while watching Megalopolis and
it circles back to his late-wife Eleanor Coppola (to which the film is dedicated)
and her documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Throughout that splendid and revealing
nonfiction portrait of the uphill battle to film Apocalypse Now, Coppola
in between takes shirtless, bearded and clearly in over his head offhandedly
remarks “Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie”. This is important to consider now, decades
later, coming from the man who envisioned perhaps the most pompously
self-aggrandizing gargantuan piece of artistic pretension in a great
while. “That’s a filmmaker’s greatest
horror, is to be pretentious”. At long
last, Coppola’s own words have circled back like a homing missile flying
aimlessly before regaining sight of its target and detonating years of legacy, risking
everything in his carefully constructed empire on a movie somehow worse than
his New York Stories segment Life Without Zoe.
Conceptually the film does have real ideas in it, transposing
the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC into a fictionalized fusion of New York
and Rome aptly dubbed ‘New Rome’ involving a controversial architect Cesar
Catilina (Adam Driver) utilizing a material called megalon (Godzilla vs.
Megalon?) with the ability to control space time to rebuild the city
metropolis following a major humanitarian disaster. Butting heads with corrupt Mayor Franklyn
Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and catching the romantic eye of his daughter Julia
(Nathalie Emmanuel) while fending off the advances of conniving news anchor Wow
Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) and murder attempts by his cousin Clodio Pulcher (a
completely unhinged Shia LaBeouf), Cesar continues to push ahead with his new
vision of the city leveling old buildings while Roman statue icons of the past
collapse and fall. In between all of
that are sequences, often broken up into triple vertical split screens, that
inject into the brain like Fluid Karma from Southland Tales as (in both
cases) the film and its chief creator seem to lose sight of what it intends to
be about.
The biggest, craziest, most outlandish movie mess of directorial
artistic hubris to hit mainstream multiplexes in lord knows how long, Megalopolis
is the kind of sprawling overblown star-studded disaster only the navigator
steering the then-sinking ship that was Apocalypse Now could’ve
envisioned. You can absolutely sense the
chaotic plumes of marijuana smoke generated for Apocalypse Now here with
many performances for renowned character actors and leading movie stars tasked
with pushing past the eleventh level but never clicking once onscreen. Maybe the most baffling directorial passion folly
since Barry Levinson’s vastly superior and oddly prescient Toys, Megalopolis
feels like an array of elegantly crafted stage set pieces with a confused
cast unsure of what to do in between long stretches of standing around. Only Shia LaBeouf seems to get the maniacal
weird energies farted out on set while everyone else dodders about trying to
maintain some semblance of dignity onscreen ala Sir John Gielgud in Caligula.
Let’s talk about the heightened operatic kabuki theater
acting style of performers asked to overplay their lines. While you can see this style of theater
working in prior Coppola pieces, here almost every main character is absurdly
over the top without there being a reference point as to whether the surrealism
is intended as madness or comedy. Adam
Driver as the central architectural genius uses what he learned off of working
with Leos Carax on the equally strange but much more satisfying Annette,
giving a performance that inspired uncomfortable laughter from the crowd at
last night’s screening. Giancarlo
Esposito, that great actor from Spike Lee’s movies, tries his best to hold his
own in Coppola’s world but feels somehow stunted here. Aubrey Plaza does her best to play up the sassy sleazy news
anchor as a sexy near-Grecian goddess but otherwise comes off as another
ridiculous cartoon caricature. Coppola
summons almost as many major New Hollywood players from his 1970s heyday as he
can including but not limited to a doddering foggy Jon Voight, Laurence
Fishburne as the film’s omniscient narrator, Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter in
glorified cameos, Balthazar Getty, Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney
and even Dustin Hoffman show up in this.
Oliver Stone and Richard Kelly should form an unholy union of movies
that try to cram in as many thankless cameos and bit parts as possible…actually
no.
Where the film succeeds is purely from a cinematographic end
with Romanian The Master cameraman Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s luminous and
striking practical photography compounded with special sequences lensed by Koyaanisqatsi
cameraman and Baraka director Ron Fricke. Though much of it consists of actors standing
in front of a green screen later edited in post, close-ups of actors’ faces,
snorricam shots, triple vertical split-screen effects and fantastical saturated
colors do still signify Coppola’s impeccable eye for visuals even if he might
be losing his storytelling touch. The
score by Argentinian composer and frequent Coppola collaborator Osvaldo Golijov
is fine if not a little weird and off key.
Having composed soundtracks for Youth Without Youth, Tetro and
Twixt, his fourth collaboration with the director is serviceable if not
a little peculiar at times going for big thundering drums and some nebulous
measure of ambience.
The visual effects are a source of controversy as Coppola,
in time honored tradition, fired the film’s effects team after ballooning
production costs moved the film to largely green-screen shots before the head
of the art department up and left the film.
While not new for Coppola, in the past his efforts have conjured up some
extraordinary vistas many of which still loom as some of the greatest in cinema
history. But here, despite the lavish
set pieces the film’s CGI has an odd artificial quality reminiscent of David
Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis despite Coppola’s use of miniatures for the now
famous revealing shot of Adam Driver looking across the city through a
scope. Coppola conjures up a number of
hallucinatory vistas of Roman emperors and goddesses coming to life and falling
over and scenes of a Soviet Russian satellite crash landing to Earth with
fireballs raining down over the city feel like Cloverfield captured by
security cameras.
Whatever fate the film and its director have ahead of them,
this is curiously becoming something of a trend for Adam Driver having starred
in Terry Gilliam’s equally long-gestating disappointment The Man Who Killed
Don Quixote. Like with Gilliam’s
passion project that got made come Hell or high water, the end result after all
the back-and-forth controversies surrounding it is neither fish nor fowl and
serves as evidence of a once great artist now at the end of his rope. For all of its outlandishness and tomfoolery
blasting across the screen, it never really comes to life and by the end of
what feels like a self-congratulatory sermon we’re left feeling exhausted and
exasperated. Whether it is the George A.
Romero Day of the Dead scenery chewing, whether its the shapelessness of
the piece itself, whether it serves as a bloated exercise in masturbatory ego
stroking, something is amiss about this Southland Tales 2.0 by way of Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s Bardo car accident.
There’s never been anything quite like Megalopolis before for good
or for ill and while I’ve enjoyed more than my share of misbegotten
narcissistic vanity projects that have come and gone over the years, let us
pray this is the last of it we’ll ever seen onscreen again.
--Andrew Kotwicki
