No Substance #202: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis

I saw Megalopolis last week. I’d meant to see it earlier, but I was busy and couldn’t make the time. Usually, I’m not too fussed, but I was worried I’d missed it because I am a fan of Coppola and because of all the crazy associated with it. The film opened poorly. Reviews were unkind. If you pay attention to these sort of things you’ve probably heard and you probably know that it wasn’t going to be in cinemas for long. Still, I did manage to find a session before it left.

And?

Well, yeah, Megalopolis isn’t very good.

It was never going to be. At least, that’s my defence of my interest and fascination with it. I never expected it to be great. Coppola has made some amazing films, but they were all in the seventies, and all of them over fifteen films ago. The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather II, and Apocalypse Now are an amazing run of films. It’s one of the great runs, in fact. But the fall after them is also great and also real. His last film, Twixt, isn’t great, even if I did like parts of it. The Rainmaker could have been made by anyone for Hallmark. Jack is awful. The Cotton Club a mess. Peggy Sue Got Married so very very minor (and weirdly similar to Back to the Future). We don’t need to talk about Godfather III. Dracula is probably the closest Coppola has come to a good film, but Keanu Reeves is so miscast that he is like a black pit in the film and this fault cannot be overcome, no matter how good Gary Oldman and the rest of the cast or the set designs and costumes are.

(I like Reeves just fine, incidentally. I just think he’s not the right actor to play Jonathan Harker. In fact, I think Reeves suffers in all period pieces. There’s something about his tone and delivery that represents a very modern acting sensibility and it is at odds with anything not set in the current time.)

Anyhow, with all that said, is it any surprise that Megalopolis is not a good film? No, it’s not. In fact, Megalopolis echoes many of the flaws in his previous films.

To start, it’s a terrible idea. Coppola wants to talk about America (and to a lesser degree about making film), and he wants to use a pseudo, futuristic Rome to do that. He presents a fable that isn’t really a fable about powerful rich men who are tearing apart the fabric of society, a society that can only be saved by, er, another powerful rich man who has a vision of the city that will support everyone. Of course, to do that, he has to destroy the houses of the poor, who in desperation turn to an unstable, megalomaniac who uses them for his own gains. Coppola has never been one to speak for the poor or disenfranchised in his films, but even by his stands, the plot of Megalopolis, caught somewhere between real world politics and a weird mash of Ayn Rand novels, is grotesque and intellectually insulting.

It is also given into sentimentality, most of it so simple and childish that you want to roll your eyes in frustration. The final scenes are particularly silly. Coppola’s best films are about complex relationships and situations, and he doesn’t allow himself to give into cheap sentiment, but many of his other films swim in that emotion. I sometimes think that Coppola himself believes in the answer of love or kindness, so long as they’re on his terms, or the terms of successful people, that I feel this is the real beat within his films. But at other times I think it is used structurally, and at times like a crutch, as connective tissue within the films. The latter is certainly true with Megalopolis. There’s no real discussion of the social ramifications, or unrest that any of the events cause, there’s just the rich and powerful and their lusts and desires and the occasional discussion about what the people really want. No one, of course, asks the people.

Still, Megalopolis, like Coppola’s previous films, isn’t without its moments. The marriage between Jon Voight’s Crassus and Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum produces some of the film’s best moments, including the auction of a young singer’s vow of chastity and Adam Driver’s Cesar involved in a drunken lurch through time that ends in a fistfight. The latter sadly highlights Cesar’s ability to stop time, an ability that gains no meaning or narrative coherence whatsoever, but we’ll overlook that for the time. Just as we’ll overlook Coppola’s waste of Aubrey Plaza and Nathalie Emmanuel and just about every other female and their character in the film. Still, in continuing my exploration of what is good in Megalopolis, the fall of the satellite Carthage is well done, and a lot of the scenes that split the screen into three worked well. I was, I must admit, not so enamoured by the use of the audience in the film. I’m not really convinced that someone coming out with a microphone to break the fourth wall and ask Adam Driver’s Cesar a question really works, or is necessary. It’s not something you see often, though, so there is that.

Adam Driver is quite good, as well, though there are some unfortunate moments when his character echoes Elon Musk. I don’t know if it is deliberate on Coppola’s part, or Driver’s, but you can’t help noticing it. Unfortunately it ties into the film’s notion that what the world needs is a rich, intellectual saviour to come and show the people what they really need. As I said, I don’t know if this is deliberate, or just an unintentional echo from reality. There’s a bit of conversation going around about a lot the other performances in Megalopolis, most of it unkind. Certainly, Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio is a bad performance, but it is a bad performance that is also oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Cage in Peggy Sue Got Married that I was low key fascinated by it and the idea that Coppola is willing to allow it, or can’t see it. A lot of the other actors simply don’t have anything to work with. Plaza and Emmanuel suffer the most from that, but Dustin Hoffman’s roll is remarkably thankless. Still, he isn’t asked to talk about his massive boner like Jon Voight is. Giancarlo Esposito rounds out the cast as Cesar’s enemy, Cicero, and he does a fine job with his role as the paint by numbers politician who can’t see the genius standing next to him, destroying the homes of people.

I can’t recommend Megalopolis to you. It’s honestly not a great film. I did, however, find it interesting, and I enjoyed pulling it apart and looking at it, in part because I am like that. A lot of films these days don’t require you to do that. They’re just bad, uninspired remakes or new instalments of a franchise for children or a lift from something made in the seventies so you don’t have to give it any thought. For all its faults, Megalopolis isn’t that. I am also aware that I am, perhaps, kinder to Megalopolis than it deserves. The film wants to be a deep, thoughtful creation, and Coppola is trying to ensure that, but the whole thing is very, very flawed. It’s an old man’s film, I think, and it wants to impart a message and a hope. But it’s also an old, rich man’s film, and the message it wants to impart to you is that you ought to trust your betters, for they will make a better world for you.

But that’s just bullshit, as you and I both know.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author of The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)