When a moviemaker creates a masterpiece, it is likely to affect how he conducts the rest of his career. This seems to have been the case for Francis Ford Coppola, who, as we all know, pulled up stakes for the Philippines in the mid-1970s to make a masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. It is still regarded as one of the most stylistically sinuous and thematically allusive of all films about the Vietnam War, but it was not birthed without great pains, including the termination from the cast of the original Captain Willard, Harvey Keitel (replaced by Martin Sheen), the reluctant participation and inconvenient weight gain of Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz, and the intervention of extreme weather events, including a typhoon that torpedoed the sets.
Yet Apocalypse Now’s success—it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival upon its debut in 1979—gave Coppola no inducement to say, “Phew, I dodged one—let’s play it safe next time.” Instead, the film’s obvious greatness and enduring popularity evidently persuaded him to dream up more movies that, in their financing, making, and even very conception, willfully invited disaster. This was painfully evident in his follow-up feature, the 1982 musical One from the Heart, which he financed independently and produced on the grounds of his Zoetrope Studios. It was a box-office calamity and left Coppola in a financial quagmire. No matter: Coppola ever since has continued his quest to reproduce the hectic but fruitful circumstances that led to Apocalypse Now. In recent years, he has busied himself with increasingly opaque, aggressively esoteric, sometimes self-funded films such as Youth Without Youth (2007) and Twixt (2011). This approach has surely been validated in Coppola’s mind since, when he has consented to work within the studios, he has come up with the likes of Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Jack (1996)—though, in fairness, he also made the entirely creditable adaptation of John Grisham’s Rainmaker (1997).
Yet the near-total artistic and commercial failure of Coppola’s latest dance with disaster seems to confirm that he took the wrong lesson from Apocalypse Now: in order for a film to be great, it does not need to have been bankrolled with about one hundred twenty million dollars of its maker’s own money, as Coppola’s Megalopolis was. And it does not need to have been contemplated by its maker for more than forty years, as Megalopolis also was.
In fact, for a film to be great, it does not have to be incomprehensible, pretentious, or present contemporary American as analogous to ancient Rome. It does not need to name its lead characters “Cesar” and “Cicero,” include misplaced monologues from Hamlet, or feature a cast that includes legitimately good mainstream performers (such as Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza) alongside the ranks of canceled outcasts (Dustin Hoffman), cast-offs (Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight), or the simply forgotten (D. B. Sweeney and Balthazar Getty).
Surely each of these things counts as a risk, but to applaud a dare is not to applaud the final result. And there is precious little applause to be heard for Megalopolis, which was released in theaters late last week to box-office returns that would make a first-time indie filmmaker feel properly chastened.
Megalopolis unfolds in a once-magnificent city called New Rome during some vaguely late-twenty-first-century moment—far enough in the future, anyway, that time can be stopped and started at will and buildings can be safely constructed with some weirdly malleable new substance. Yet despite the project’s promise of whisking the viewer away to some richly imagined future, the contemporary metaphors cling and clang like pots of pasta in the Coppola kitchen.
You see, the volatile, decaying New Rome is just a riff on New York, and the pie-in-the-sky architect Cesar Catilina (Driver) is unquestionably self-projection on the part of Coppola—a starry-eyed utopian whose grand plans for a vibrant new development called Megalopolis run afoul of officials with their feet planted too firmly on the ground, such as Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The angry masses who resist Cesar’s plans for their future—and who are riled up by his adversary Clodio Pulcher (LaBeouf)—are obvious stand-ins for the red-hat-bedecked, chaos-causing M.A.G.A. proletariat (one protester even carries a sign bearing the slogan “Make New Rome Great Again”).
Regrettably, the metaphors offered here are highly imperfect and difficult to make sense of. Cesar is depicted in unambiguously heroic terms, but isn’t the character actually fairly close to Trump, an actual builder with a comparable sense of grandiosity? And if so, wouldn’t the hoi polloi be rallying around him rather than resisting him? Never mind: such thoughts would have required Coppola to rewrite none-too-subtle narration that asks things like “When does an empire die?”
Its imprecise contemporary parallels aside, one of the big problems with the movie is that Coppola’s much-vaunted world-building is nothing to write home about. The panoramic views in the computer-generated shots of New Rome are whatever the opposite of majestic is—like something found on the cutting-room floor of a Star Wars prequel—but at least they have more size and scope than the live-action material, which, even when depicting a parade, a crowd gathered for a demolition, or a vengeful mob, looks woefully underpopulated. To borrow a folk song popularized by Pete Seeger, where have all the extras gone? Megalopolis looks like it did not cost enough. There seem to have been about three movie cars used over and over again, including a police car rather pitifully emblazoned with the letters “NRPD” (New Rome Police Department?)—and because we know, while watching, that Coppola footed the bill, we wonder how much that paint job cost. If this movie cost one hundred twenty million dollars, inflation must be worse than I thought.
Megalopolis is undercooked visually, but it is overcooked—practically twice-baked and deep-fried—narratively. Coppola is not a natural writer, so he labors in search of greatness. To be sure, the central Cesar storyline is relatively compelling. As we know from The Fountainhead, novel and movie alike, trail-blazing architects make for good, surprisingly active protagonists, and Driver can deliver lines like “What if what connects power also stores it?”—or pledge that Megalopolis will include a garden for every citizen—with a measure of authority and conviction. But the side characters suggest a discarded Kurt Vonnegut novel. Aubrey Plaza plays a T.V. reporter given the name Wow Platinum, which at least is a break from the relentless Roman-style names of everybody else—including Jon Voight as Hamilton Crassus III, no less. Coppola aims to critique hedonism and decadence with send-ups of the shallow media and a scene set at a modern Colosseum, but he himself has a constitutional weakness for excess; the film seems to be an example of that which it holds in contempt.
These stretches of the film really do suggest Vonnegut-level satire, or—worse—Tom Robbins-level satire. But, having never before shown a gift for generating intentional laughs—let’s not forget that this is the director who made Jack—Coppola must answer for such crimes against cinema as having Hamilton Crassus III, wearing a Robin Hood costume, attempt to kill Clodio Pulcher by way of bow-and-arrow. As Julia, Mayor Cicero’s daughter and Cesar’s lover, Nathalie Emmanuel delivers the most creditable, least cartoony performance—we know this because Coppola routinely cuts to expressive, lingering close-ups of her for no apparent reason other than she seems to be actually into her role.
Megalopolis could be dismissed as merely incompetent were its message not so warped. In the final act, Coppola ditches the satire and goes straight for sincerity: Cesar attempts to win buy-in from the aggrieved protesters by delivering soaring oratory about the future of humanity or some such—a denouement which undercuts the film’s alleged warnings about tyranny. Is not Cesar’s architectural-based despotism itself rather tyrannical? Yet Coppola presents it as virtuous. Oh, well. Again, it’s too late for another rewrite. The film actually ends with the Pledge of Allegiance as redrafted by Coppola and with a weirdly environmentalist bent—“weird” since quixotic architects à la Robert Moses are not necessarily known to be conservationists, are they? Again, no rewrite is possible.
I am second to no one in my admiration for Coppola, especially his intimate-scaled psychological studies, such as The Rain People (1969), The Conversation (1974), and Rumble Fish (1983). You’ll get no argument from me on the merits of The Godfather films or Apocalypse Now. And I have been known to mount aggressive defenses of plenty of gargantuan, expensive, and widely disliked epics, including Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), and even Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). But with Megalopolis, Coppola seems to have convinced himself that the surest path towards greatness is chaos—and, in this case, the result is, well, chaos.
