Megalopolis Is Terrible And Everyone Should See It

Where to begin?

Perhaps with Fritz Lang’s silent opus Metropolis, to which this film serves as a 21st-Century revision. Perhaps with the founding of the Francis Ford Coppola Winery in 2010, which bankrolled production outside of the studio system. Perhaps with the advent of cinema itself in the 1890s when Les Frères Lumières filmed a train pulling into a French station.

How about with the tortured cineaste-turned-vintner at the center of this bafflingly silly atrocity against art, the master filmmaker of the 70s who conceived this magnum opus in 1977 and nursed it for over four decades before finally releasing his excessive, unrestrained vision to us last month: Francis Ford Coppola himself.

Born to second-generation Italian-Americans in Detroit on the eve of World War II, Francis Ford Coppola (whose middle name honors Henry Ford, not Francis Ford, the elder brother to John and a pioneer of silent Westerns in the 1910s) belongs firmly to the Silent Generation. Hollywood in the 20th Century can be divided into three distinct eras: The Silent Era that began in the aughts when a few renegades made the first forays to the West Coast to escape the legal monopoly Thomas Edison held on movie cameras, the Golden Age that burst suddenly into being in 1927 when The Jazz Singer first synchronized sound to image and led to the studio system, and New Hollywood that began in the late 60s with that wave of bohemian excellence now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. We live in some fourth era which cannot yet be clearly defined with the benefit of hindsight.

The first of these was defined by its technological limitations, both the absence of sound and the use of sepia and blue filters on the camera lens to indicate hot and cold or day and night, while early artists developed the language of cinema. The second was defined by the growing expense of making movies that corralled most production into the rigid studio system, regularizing the business and formalizing this new language in classic, mostly black-and-white films that gradually gave way to technicolor and cinemascope. The third was defined by the collapse of this system and the end of censorship for lurid material, which allowed the art form to reinvent itself in an edgy, rebellious fashion that pushed American cinema to previously unthought-of heights.

In the history of American cinema, then, Coppola was born at just the right time: young enough to have grown up on films of Hollywood’s Golden Age and old enough to have begun working professionally just as the studio system hit rock bottom in the 60s and the door was open to hungry young disruptors that could help it rebound.

While the Hollywood Renaissance, which began with such films as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, was initially led by the industry’s own sort of Silent Generation who missed the Golden Age but learned their craft in television – the likes of Buck Henry, Mike Nichols, Mel Brooks, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, and Stanley Kubrick – Coppola was the first breakout star of the “movie brat” generation that would drive Hollywood to new heights in the 70s. This was the first generation of filmmakers who grew up with talkies, watched television as children, and attended film school. It continues to amaze me just how young an art form cinema is; the first generation to grow up in a world where film was given serious academic consideration is still alive and working today. These include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen, among others.

But before any of those names would become familiar in our mouths as household words, Coppola was the pioneer. As a film student in 1962, he came to the attention of cult legend Roger Corman, who hired him to work on a string of ultra low-budget flicks. While shooting 1963’s The Young Racers in Ireland, Coppola would get a shot at directing his first feature, Dementia 13.

His debut effort was the very epitome of art from adversity, a work made great by its rigid constraints in time and budget. Coppola wrote the horror classic in one night and Corman gave him the leftover budget from Racers as well as use of his crew for nine days to shoot it. In all, $40,000 went into the project, but the results were impressive. He also met his wife Eleanor Neil on set, a woman who would serve as his muse for six decades before passing away earlier this year.

Coppola would turn to screenwriting for the next few years as he finished film school at UCLA, directing his thesis You’re a Big Boy Now in 1966. But it would be in 1968 while directing the film adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow with Petula Clark and Fred Astaire (a disjointed and amateurish effort beyond the skills of a still-young Coppola to pull off) that he would fatefully meet his lifelong friend and creative partner – a young film school grad from California’s Central Valley named George Lucas. It was also this film, dismal though the result may have been, which prompted critic Andrew Sarris to name Coppola as the tip of the movie brat spear in his 1968 book The American Cinema: “He is probably the first reasonably talented and sensibly adaptable directorial talent to emerge from a university curriculum in film-making…”

Although he had been a working director for but seven years at this point and despite the creativity that limitations had forced upon him in his earlier work, Coppola had already begun to chafe under the studio system and wanted total creative control for himself. Nowhere near as powerful as it had been in the Golden Age, studios like Warner Bros. still controlled the money and spoke up when bearded hippies coming out of film school tried to sell them esoteric art-house cinema as profitable entertainment. Talented directors have a nasty habit of resenting the producers who don’t “get” their work while simultaneously relying on them to fund it. While the creatives are often right, they are not always right. Sometimes producers truly don’t understand great art when it hits them in the face – but many times they make helpful suggestions that improve a production’s accessibility for mainstream audiences. At the very least, the limitations they imposed force a compromise of visions that yields a stronger synthesis than either producer or director could have created alone. I’m not usually a Hegelian, but the dialectic framework applies well to collaborative creative arts: the auteur’s thesis collides with the moneyman’s antithesis, and the synthesis is great art.

Coppola rejected the notion that a studio could make any helpful suggestions early on and sought to break free from any such strictures after the release of 1969’s The Rain People (his first collaboration with James Caan and Robert Duvall) by opening his own shop with Lucas, Zoetrope Studio. Somehow, through financial ups and downs over the years, Coppola has held on to this precious little workshop of his, now called American Zoetrope, up to and including the production of Megalopolis.

Fortuna’s wheel was turning in Coppola’s favor at this point. One of his screenplays from the early 60s became the excellent 1970 biopic Patton, but only in a manner that would further reify Coppola’s hostility to producer oversight. In a 1994 interview, Coppola alleged that his original treatment’s now-iconic opening scene of Patton addressing his troops in front of an enormous American flag was thrown out in favor of a re-write. Only the insistence of star George C. Scott, who had read the original draft, restored key elements of Coppola’s script. Coppola would win his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay behind these efforts.

But the Oscar win was not enough to sustain a fledgeling studio, and certainly not enough to pay for George Lucas’s passion project, an experimental Vietnam War epic that would be told through newsreels, found-footage, and montage. This was especially true after Lucas’s 1971 directorial debut, the sci-fi thriller THX 1138 (starring Robert Duvall), left Zoetrope indebted to Warner Bros. to the tune of $400,000. If any of their artistic dreams were to come to fruition, they would need a hit.

The opportunity fell in Coppola’s lap when he was approached to direct the film adaption of Mario Puzo’s trashy beach read The Godfather. Coppola turned it down at first because he considered the novel low-brow sensationalism, which it is. But financial pressures forced his hand, and for six percent of the gross he threw himself into the project with aplomb, working with Puzo on a better screenplay and assembling a team of Greats to shoot it.

I’ll spare you my waxing about one of the greatest films ever made, but suffice it to say that every element is top-notch from the lighting and cinematography (the burnt-sepia hue casts a warm nostalgia over the family epic) to the music (so hauntingly beautiful as to bring a sting to the nose) to the pacing to a cast featuring old friends James Caan and Robert Duvall alongside Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, John Cazale, Diane Keaton, and Coppola’s sister Talia Shire. The Best Supporting Actor category that year basically consisted of Joel Grey nominated for playing the Emcee in the film adaptation of Cabaret (which I heartily recommend even if you don’t love musicals) and the cast of The Godfather. Grey won, but so did Coppola for his screenplay and for producing what was both Best Picture and the highest-grossing film of 1972. And rightfully so – at 34 years of age, Coppola had made his masterpiece, never to be surpassed but nearly to be matched by the rest of his work in the 70s. George Lucas even got in on the fun by assembling the newspaper montage that conveys the erupting gang war at the end of the first act. As Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker at the time, “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it.”

The greatest cinematic work Coppola ever made was not only constrained by studio demands and negotiations, but a job he was reluctant to take in the first place. Coppola might have learned from this experience that he needed an adversary against whom to strive if he was to work at his best, but the lesson seemed lost on him as he continued to resist and resent input from investors.

From the six percent gross of 1972’s top earner, Zoetrope could now bankroll the passion projects about which Coppola and Lucas had dreamed. The experimental Vietnam film had been shopped out to Lucas’s film school chum John Milius, the maniacal right-winger of the movie brat generation, for the screenplay. Before penning the first Dirty Harry movies or directing Red Dawn, Milius sought to turn his favorite novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, into a psychedelic, anti-communist epic set during the Vietnam War. He gave the project a title that harkened back to his counter-counterculture days at USC. When hippie antiwar protestors handed out buttons that said “Nirvana Now”, he distributed his own featuring a falling atomic bomb that read “Apocalypse Now!” His would be the first draft of the war movie, which endorsed the carnage of the famous Wagnerian helicopter attack sequence.

Meanwhile, Lucas directed what would become his first hit, a seminal entry in the canon of American movies that capture each decade’s suburban teenage experience, 1973’s American Graffiti starring Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard. A film that would do for the 60s what Rebel Without A Cause had done for the 50s and would in turn inspire Richard Linklater to make Dazed and Confused (1993) about the 70s as well as John Hughes’s many entries on the 80s, especially 1985’s The Breakfast Club.

More importantly, it was the first time Lucas both released a film under his LucasFilm label (soon to spin off from Zoetrope) and worked with a struggling actor named Harrison Ford, who would also appear in Coppola’s next picture The Conversation (1974) as a henchman to the mysterious “Director.” On a low budget, Coppola drew on his early Corman experience to create a claustrophobic, oppressive atmosphere reflecting the paranoia that consumes Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert (whose employee is played by John Cazale). Tight angles, confined sets, and god’s eye shots for exteriors all contribute to a wonderfully stifling experience that culminates in a slow pan across an apartment in shambles to the deranged, despondent playing of a saxophone. Coppola had followed his masterpiece with much smaller but no less excellent film, an unsettling thriller to balance his operatic epic that richly deserved its Palme d’Or at Cannes. It was helped at the box office by Coppola somehow arranging for President Nixon to become embroiled in a scandal around the use of the same recording devices and resigning later that year.

To fully cement his place as one of the Greats, Coppola in 1974 had a year not seen since Victor Fleming in 1939 and unmatched until Steven Spielberg in 1993. He directed not one but two bona fide classics. While Fleming had The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind and Spielberg would release Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, Coppola gave us The Conversation and The Godfather: Part II.

To attempt a sequel to one of the greatest films ever made is an enormous risk, but since the original cast was still available and the source material not yet exhausted, Coppola succeeded. Part II is not as good as the original, but it is damned close. Taken together the two films tell a beautiful, gothic saga of a family’s assimilation across two generations from Old World clannish honor culture to New World faustian rapacity. The burnt orange aesthetic, reminiscent of the California sunset at golden hour, was fast becoming Coppola’s trademark. In Part II, he employed that nostalgic glow in scenes of young Vito’s childhood and rise to power, while desaturating Michael’s mid-century modern environment in Nevada. Connie’s first wedding in Part I is a raucous outdoor ceremony that synthesizes American postwar consumerism with inherited Italian custom (most of which is confined to unseemly favors asked of the Don in dark, lamplit rooms that contrast with the bright sunlit world of the women and children without). Just to drive the point home, we are treated to a genuine Sicilian wedding in the second act that brings together Apollonia’s entire village on an arid mountainside in the old country, complete with a parade and full brass band.

Connie’s second wedding in Part II is a somber, depressing affair in the sleek yet cavernously cold dining room of the Corleone Family’s Vegas casino. Gone are the traditional music and joyous extended family. Gone are the trappings of the old country. The Corleones, Part II tells us, are fully assimilated Americans now. They were always criminals to be reviled, but any veneer of a code Vito may have maintained has been dropped by Michael as competition forces him to the extremes of human ruthlessness and brutality.

At this point, Coppola was unstoppable. Part II doubled the Oscar haul to six, including Best Director. It also landed in the top ten box office grossers that year. Critically acclaimed and financially successful, Coppola now had the money and clout to do whatever he pleased. What he pleased was pick up George Lucas’s now-abandoned Vietnam project, Apocalypse Now.

The year after Coppola’s double-header, another movie brat schoolmate of Lucas, Steven Spielberg, made a splash (if you’ll forgive the pun) with 1975’s Jaws. Though not his first film, the high-concept summer blockbuster starring Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman’s French Connection co-star Roy Scheider, along with Robert Shaw, not only put Spielberg on the map but proved the business case that would become the standard for New Hollywood. After Jaws, studios would forever fund themselves from a few, annual high-concept summer blockbusters marketed to teenagers and young adults, accompanied by tie-in merchandise and advertised on television. In the mid-70s, however, studios had yet to develop the risk aversion and sequel addiction that governs this defunct model today, and were therefore willing to take risks on young movie brat talent to bring them the next hit on a relatively low budget.

Lucas had by now lost interest in Vietnam and decided to try his hand at a blockbuster of his own, this time based on his favorite Japanese samurai films from Akira Kurosawa and the Flash Gordon serials with which he’d grown up. After several years of toil, he completed his original script for The Star Wars, and set about casting it with the help of Harrison Ford as a reader. Ford would prove so well-suited to the role of Han Solo in readings, however, that he secured the part that would rocket him to superstardom.

The production of what became Star Wars was a disaster from start to finish. Lucas had to cut his script by two-thirds to tell a story that could realistically fit in a two-hour runtime. Producers were stingy and constantly interfering, costs ballooned beyond expectations, and none of the practical effects worked while shooting on location in Tunisia. Most of the later scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios in Britain to save money. Many of his original ideas were thrown out, from Luke originally being a sixty-year-old general with the surname “Starkiller” to Han Solo originally being a kind of alien fish creature. His original plans for a disco soundtrack were overruled in favor of John Williams’ now-iconic score, and he had to found his own special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, to create the state-of-the-art space battles the sci-fi project demanded. He would later call it “the most expensive low-budget movie ever made.”

The result, after all of the compromises and budgetary constraints, was perhaps the most popular film franchise ever launched. Again, the young ambitious artist with bright new ideas, chafing under limitations imposed by the moneymen, created art from adversity. Having made a killing by securing all the merchandizing rights in his distribution contract, Lucas both launched a beloved franchise and cracked the New Hollywood business model. For the next two decades, he would abandon directing to serve as a producer, a big-picture ideas guy, and an innovator in special effects through ILM. Star Wars would consume him even as other writers and directors made the two sequels, including the undisputed best film of the whole franchise, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas would also collaborate with Spielberg, fresh off of his own Dreyfuss-led sci-fi release Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), to launch a second franchise based on the adventure serials of their childhood, Indiana Jones, which also starred Harrison Ford despite Lucas’s reluctance to keep using him.

Meanwhile, Coppola took on the project that nearly killed him, Apocalypse Now.

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There is a glut of essays and accounts of the extraordinarily troubled production of Apocalypse Now, foremost of which is the making-of documentary filmed by Eleanor on set called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse, so I will not rehash it all here. What matters for our purposes is that Coppola had as big a budget and free a hand as ever after his successes in the early 70s and was largely able to operate without studio interference. It would instead be the elements, communist and Islamist guerrillas, and his own cast working against him. Fortuna’s wheel turned once again.

Coppola first spent years reworking the screenplay from Milius’s original draft to one with more of an antiwar pastiche. This is communicated not as Oliver Stone later would in his heavy-handed misery porn, but rather experientially as both characters and viewer are drawn into the less-and-less sensical world journeying deeper and deeper into the jungle.

The experience of making the film mirrored this as well. Shot on location in the Philippines, Coppola brought his family with him as he always did to make sure his marriage held together and that he was involved in his children’s upbringing. They wasted enormous resources bringing in Italian food and wine so the Coppolas could enjoy lavish dinners each night. Little else was enjoyable.

Equipment had to be flown by helicopter to remote areas of the jungle to get the desired shots. Marlon Brando, this time cast as the insane Colonel Kurtz, didn’t show up until three months into the planned four-month shoot. In addition to past collaborators Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall, a 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne lied about his age to work with Coppola for the first time, playing a 17-year-old soldier who had also lied about his age to enlist. The original star, Harvey Keitel, was unsatisfactory and fired from the production. Coppola then flew back to LA to recast the lead role of Captain Willard with Martin Sheen, bringing Sheen back to Manila with him for reshoots.

Then a typhoon destroyed most of the set and they had to start over.

Shooting without the cooperation of the U.S. Military, who would not have allowed use of authentic equipment and vehicles for such an antiwar film, they instead rented from the Filipino military, who were supplied by their American ally. Except, Maoist and Islamist rebels from the southern islands conspired to keep these choppers and military extras occupied on the other side of the country whenever they were needed most. It also turned out that the local who had been selling them cadavers for use in the background was a grave robber, and the entire crew had their passports yanked while they were questioned by police.

When Brando finally did show up, he was extremely overweight and totally unprepared for his role. He had to be carefully filmed to conceal how obese he had become, mostly close-ups of his face with a body double for wide shots, and demanded his lines be written on cue cards for him to read live (all of which helped to make his character a larger-than-life, mythical presence as needed for the thematic climax of the movie). Sheen nearly died from a heart attack, a total medical fluke for a healthy 36-year-old. The crew, much like American draftees behind the front lines in Vietnam, spent their nights tripping in acid- and cocaine-fueled orgies to cope with the misery of the shoot. Hundreds of thousands were spent on a sequence where the characters stumble upon a French colonial plantation that the owners (played mostly by Coppola’s family) have refused to abandon, which added nothing to the story and disrupted the escalation of insanity at its point in the plot.

Coppola understandably had a nervous breakdown partway through the shoot. What was supposed to last four months stretched to more than a year, at double the original budget.

After blowing up the sets at the request of the Filipino government, which Coppola filmed and used for the explosions over the opening credits, the haunting, hallucinatory epic was in the can. The original release date had been for 1977, the same year as Star Wars. This was pushed back to 1978 by the time filming wrapped in the spring of ’77, with Coppola begging the now-rich Lucas for money to finish what had once been the latter’s dream project. He also offered his car, house, and Godfather profits as collateral to finish the film. Just three years before, Coppola had been the darling of the industry. His next project had proved so ambitious that he was back in the financial dire straights that had plagued his early career.

It was also at this time that he first conceived of a grand epic about the decadence of the American Empire, urban planning, and parallels to ancient Rome. The first inklings of Megalopolis had begun to trickle onto the page of the mad artist’s mind. But first he needed to get through Apocalypse Now.

With over a million feet of film to edit, the release date was continually delayed as Coppola struggled in the cutting room. Fights with United Artists about what to include in the final cut became contentious. Despite the constant delays, Coppola couldn’t decide on exactly what the movie should be and continued recutting it late at night in the final week before its Cannes premiere. He was especially indecisive over the ending, whether to have Sheen’s Captain Willard call in an airstrike that would be represented by the footage of the exploding set or with him slowly chugging back down the river after slaughtering Kurtz with a machete. New sound systems had to be installed overnight in the Cannes theater to accommodate the 5.1 surround sound. The Cannes audience was treated to the festival’s first-ever work-in-progress shown in competition.

But the jury felt that no further work was needed and rightly awarded this three-hour cut the Palme d’Or. Once again, despite the hell he went through, Coppola had created a masterpiece and perhaps his magnum opus. It was also at Cannes that Coppola would famously tell the press that “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane,” and “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”

Popular audiences would reward the movie as well and get him out of the hole he’d dug making it, albeit for different versions of the movie. A 70mm release ran 147 minutes while a separate, 35mm release ran 153 minutes. Regardless, the $30 million film made over $100 million in returns, freeing Coppola of his debts. Despite the critical and popular reception of his work and despite all he went through to make it, Coppola was never happy with the final product and didn’t believe he’d had the chance to properly edit a definitive version. He would spend decades tinkering with his baby, refusing to ever be satisfied with a final product. This attitude would hang over the rest of Coppola’s career as it slowly became clear the experience of making Apocalypse Now had sapped most of his creative potential.

***

The 80s were unkind to Coppola’s career. Some of his work in this period was praiseworthy, but he would never quite recapture the pre-apocalyptic magic of the 70s. His work became stale, almost rote, with few attempts at anything interesting. All of his commercial success from Apocalypse Now was wiped out overnight by his next piece, the romantic musical One from the Heart (1982). A huge box-office flop despite being a passable movie on its own, it plunged him into debt that he spent the rest of the decade struggling to pay off. He was forced to sell Zoetrope Studio’s building in 1983, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1990.

1983’s teen angst drama The Outsiders is very good and turned a profit. So is its concurrently-shot companion film Rumblefish, which did not. But neither had the vision or heft of Coppola’s work in the 70s. He didn’t yet know it, but the golden age of this man’s career was already behind him, even if Apocalypse Now was slowly coming to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made and his new works were becoming cult classics.

1984’s The Cotton Club garnered awards recognition but again lost money. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which starred his nephew Nicholas Cage, was his last true critical and commercial success, but was again a Bildungsroman that shied away from the grand scale of his earlier work. The James Caan collaboration Gardens of Stone (1987), George Lucas-produced Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and his contribution to New York Stories (1989) were all panned, and are mostly awful in this critic’s appraisal. Also in 1989, Coppola tried in earnest to start production of Megalopolis, saying at the time his movie would be “so big and complicated it would seem impossible,” and that “I want to be free. I don’t want producers around me telling me what to do.” But he didn’t have the money or a finished script, so he dropped it again.

Coppola had lost his touch, and not even returning to The Godfather could save him now. Financially desperate after the Zoetrope bankruptcy, Coppola reluctantly agreed to return to his old cash cow. The results were underwhelming in The Godfather Part III (which featured his daughter Sofia in a performance that nearly ruined the movie), but did turn a substantial profit that enabled him to make his last ambitious project before Megalopolis, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). This film is polarizing, and I certainly appreciate the gothic visuals and respect the uncompromising approach, but it should hardly be considered one of the great works of American cinema in the final estimation.

The consensus is fairly strong, however, that Jack (1996) and The Rainmaker (1997) were disappointments. As were the other films he’s made this millennium, Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011). The second of these is ok, but again feels like Coppola flailing to say something profound about family, generational enmity, and the Italian emigrant experience (this time in Argentina) that he didn’t cover in the Godfather trilogy. The other two are less than ok.

Coppola tried multiple times to return to Megalopolis, but was never ready to commit. The 9/11 attacks supposedly delayed the film because the premise also involved the destruction of large parts of New York City. Nor could he leave well enough alone with his earlier work. Coppola may have returned to The Godfather for purely cynical reasons, but 2001’s release of the 200-minute Apocalypse Now: Redux was the result of his finally deciding on a cut that he liked, one that preserved the idiotic digression to the French planation so he could feature his children in the movie.

This was actually the first version I saw, inadvertently, as a teenager. For a friend’s birthday, I borrowed the DVD from our local library to watch in the birthday boy’s basement with all the guys. What we had planned as a two-ish hour viewing stretched to nearly three-and-a-half, with tonally-confused scenes later in the cut diminishing the beautiful madness of the first half of the movie. We actually gave up just before the end and went home since it was well after midnight, and I still haven’t lived down mistakenly borrowing the wrong version. In my defense, it was the library that messed up by putting the DVD for the Redux edition in the case of the theatrical cut, so the one I grabbed off the shelf appeared to be correct at the time. We also didn’t know what “redux” meant when we saw it on the DVD menu, but maybe that should have tipped us off that something was off. Either way, this incident is still brought up to me today, eleven years on.

And this wasn’t even the final version, since Coppola released the “Final Cut” in 2019. Perhaps this was to help fund Megalopolis, but it fits the pattern of his inability to restrain himself. This version, at least, cut 20 minutes and was more akin to the Cannes screening. He also released a new edition of The Godfather Part III with a comically long title, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, a new version of The Cotton Club called The Cotton Club Encore, and even a director’s cut of his first movie, Dementia 13, that removed scenes added by producer Roger Corman. It’s as if anything anyone else forced him to do or criticized in his releases had to be “fixed” – Coppola seems driven to prove producers and critics wrong, even when they’re obviously right.

Lucas’s career would parallel his old friend’s falling victim to his own excess. Given a creative spark and loads of constraints from the studio system, Lucas gave us the Star Wars original trilogy. Years later, independently wealthy, with far better special effects technology pioneered by his company, with sole writing credit and total final cut privileges, he gave us the Star Wars prequels. If you need explained to you why these movies are bad, see here. Lucas also couldn’t leave the originals well enough alone and re-released them multiple times, endlessly tinkering with small details while erasing film history in the process.

Similarly, Coppola made great art when he genuinely had something to prove and people telling him “no.” Without true adversity but nonetheless convinced he had something to prove, Coppola failed to live up to his former glory and was so wracked with anxiety about this that he obsessed over “fixing” his movies for decades, with little to show for it. Both Lucas and Coppola grew ever more resentful of the system that made them, convincing themselves that it held them back rather than examining their own artistic shortcomings.

Through it all, Coppola made and squandered several fortunes. To fund Megalopolis himself, to have full creative control, he needed to make a new fortune in the early 2000s and personally finance the opus. With none of his movies turning big profits (if they did at all), he re-edited his old classics and tried to raise money through DVD sales. Ultimately, he started a winery to raise the money.

The Francis Ford Coppola Winery (whose website currently features a banner advertising Megalopolis and tours of its set) opened in 2010, four years after he partnered with his family (his daughter having made her mark in Hollywood as well) to purchase the historic Chateau Souverain in Sonoma County, California. In addition to his own vintage and successful marketing campaign that has gained his wines mainstream acceptance (and they are pretty good), he aspired to make the winery itself an experience. As Coppola put it, “When we began to develop the idea for this winery, we thought it should be like a resort, basically a wine wonderland…A place to celebrate the love of life.”

Modeled after the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, the forerunner to modern amusement parks, the winery now has a swimming pool adorned with fountains, a full menu developed to Coppola’s precise tastes and paired with each wine they produce, live music and dancing, and lawn games. As always, Coppola could not contain himself and went over the top with this endeavor as well.

The winery has been a smashing success like his movies haven’t seen since the 70s. Revenue from the resort-like winery itself as well as wholesale distribution of the wine earned him a new fortune that funded expansion to two new properties. In 2021, after collecting checks for Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut and The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the 82-year-old Coppola sold most of his equity and the flagship property to his business partners for $500 million, while retaining the newer vineyards in Napa Valley and Oregon. Of this, he budgeted $100 million for Megalopolis with a reserve fund of $20 million for reshoots. Finally, he felt he was ready to dive in on the film whose script had evolved over four decades.

Coppola made his view that Hollywood has become a machine for directors to pay off the debt owed on past productions, a kind of Roman debt slavery, clear at Megalopolis’s Cannes premiere. Reportedly influenced by David Graeber’s communist screed Debt: The First 5000 Years, Coppola brought this highly myopic view to his great unfinished work. It does not seem to have occurred to him that he could have avoided this cycle by making artistically meritorious but profitable films like he did in the 70s instead of supposedly-cerebral esoterica no one was terribly interested in seeing.

Which brings us to Megalopolis.

***

Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS: A Fable is fascinating as an object lesson in an artist peaking at the mid point of his career then slowly sliding, descending in quality with each passing release, all the while promising his fans (and no doubt himself) that The Big One was coming, soon, just around the corner, after just a few more films and a few more vintages. It is likewise a fable, if you will, that warns against giving directors too much creative control – yes, studios edit movies to death or write them by committee and produce schlock. Yes, the greatest films usually come from a singular creative vision. But everyone – even this critic, if you can believe it – requires an editor. Indeed, striving to make art while chafing under the strictures of the studio system or constrained by arbitrary limitations of budget, equipment, weather, and geopolitics is what made Coppola’s 70s films so meritorious to begin with.

Free of constraints, Coppola’s grand vision, his magnum opus, is a goofy disaster. It’s incomprehensible. It’s unbelievable that a human being could make something like this and consider it a masterwork. It’s narratively and thematically incoherent, jumping from one half-baked idea to the next without proper pathos or payoff. It’s self-serious. And best of all, it’s hysterically funny in just how solemnly it takes its own ridiculous premises.

Megalopolis is a film that demands to be seen at least twice, perhaps three times to be properly understood. I must confess I was not completely sober while viewing this film in IMAX, but then neither was Coppola while making it. Reports from the set indicate that he began each day by getting high and then throwing out the plan in favor of whatever he spontaneously dreamed up. One crew member told The Guardian:

He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it.

To be fair to Coppola, he denies the precise allegations. But the production was clearly a disaster from start to finish. Unlike Apocalypse Now, where fate conspired against him, the problems with Megalopolis‘s production were almost entirely of Coppola’s own making.

Filmed in Atlanta starting in fall 2022, Coppola decided to buy an abandoned motel, converted part of it into a studio, and housed his family in it as they shot the movie. It is now open as a combined hotel-studio for future productions. He was rewriting the script, overseeing a major construction project, and trying to film his masterpiece all at once. This would cause anyone to crack under the pressure, but he did not make it any easier on himself or his crew with his fickle vacillations. According to another crew member, “We had these beautiful designs that kept evolving but he would never settle on one. And every time we would have a new meeting, it was a different idea.”

All of this illustrates the utter lack of discipline that began with Apocalypse Now. Coppola simply cannot help himself and lets every project, from the winery to the hotel to the movie he’s supposed to be working on, get away from him. It certainly didn’t help that he refused to be satisfied with any of the crew’s work, firing the entire visual effects team a month into shooting and axing one of the art directors when he started to go over budget. Soon, the entire art department quit over his impossible demands and filming style.

Regardless of whether Coppola was being a jerk to them or they just didn’t get his vision, much of the movie had to be created with CGI instead of relying on the beautiful sets the art department created. Some of these survive in the final cut – and they are impressive – but they are quickly buried under a pile of computer generated crap.

The cast were mixed in their response to the constant script changes. Allowed to improvise many of their own scenes or write them day-of, veteran improvers Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, and Shia Leboeuf reportedly loved the on-set approach. Others, potentially including Dustin Hoffman and Giancarlo Esposito, were reportedly frustrated at having the script and their character work yanked away without warning. Those who lean towards Coppola’s self-important artist ethos were given the freedom they clearly think they deserve on every set, just as Coppola enjoyed the creative freedom he felt he deserved throughout his career with his own money. Those of a more journeyman persuasion disliked the lack of structure and felt the whole thing was a bit much.

All in all, the guiding principle in the creative process seemed to be fuck it, why not? at every turn. It almost became a challenge to see how many dumb ideas an auteur could cram into two-and-one-quarter hours. The result can only be described as a magnificent catastrophe.

The trailers were a meta-commentary on the recent history of Hollywood before the film even began. A jarring mix of Marvel movies and prestige Oscar bait, they appealed to the two types of people who go to see a Coppola release in 2024: film fanatics wondering if he can recapture his 70s glory (and might even defend some of his mediocrities like Dracula) and more general audiences who like the Godfather franchise. Between complaints by casual movie-goers that they’ve never heard of any movies up for Oscars and critics pining for the days when Best Picture nominees were also in the top ten grossers, much ink has been spilled on the divergence between these two groups of late. Pauline Kael’s desired merger of commerce and art has become alien to us, and the contrast between popular and prestige entertainment could not have been starker as we jumped from an ad for Venom: The Last Dance to one for Small Things Like These.

Then the film began.

***

Let me see if I can explain the premise. It’s sort of a 2001 meets The Aeneid, but it’s so much less than that.

We lay our scene in New Rome, which is New York City with a Roman makeover. It’s unclear what type of polity this is because sometimes they act like the whole republic is a city-state (making the mayor the head of state?) but sometimes refer to “America,” as if there’s a continental nation outside of it. New Rome is suffering from late-republican decadence and decay; crime and homelessness plague the streets while the elites binge on party drugs at fashion week. A fable for America’s current state, the film is framed through Laurence Fishburne’s voiceover as a Gibbonian historical analysis of why the empire fell, a perspective from a future for whom we are the ancients, and the “ancients’ ancients” he refers to are our ancients from classical antiquity. Except, there don’t appear to be any computers in this world where everyone uses typewriters or pen-and-pad, but they do have USB drives and holograms. They also have smart rings but no phones, but also QR codes. Aesthetically, the interior design belongs to the 70s, except when it looks more like art deco from the 1920s. In one montage, we cut from an electronics-store window full of 70s television sets to a contemporary flatscreen in an apartment showing the same event.

With me so far?

It appears that the culture of New Rome is a transposition of Roman culture to the New World, with images of Kronos randomly flashing across the screen and public rituals conducted around vestal virgins to please “the gods.” But also “God” is sometimes referred to in the singular, and “Christ” is used as an expletive.

In the midst of this opulence, New Rome’s mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is embroiled in a bribery scandal. Once again, Coppola has somehow arranged for New York’s actual mayor, Eric Adams, to be indicted for similar crimes the very week of the film’s release. Now that’s art!

What’s not art is that every time Cicero walks into a crowded room on the red carpet (which happens way more times than you’d expect in a two hour and eighteen minute movie), the same canned recording of a crowd booing is played. I’m not sure what to call that.

Either way, Cicero seems preoccupied by his hatred for the object of his pill-popping med school dropout of a daughter Julia’s (Nathalie Emmanuel) affections, our protagonist and obvious Coppola analogue Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver). Whether he’s supposed to be Julius Caesar or Lucius Catalina, Coppola hasn’t decided. What he has decided is that this man is a genius architect and tortured artist who was acquitted for the murder of his wife in a case Cicero brought as DA some years ago, as well as the inventor of a miracle building material called megalon that he wishes to use to build a model city in the center of New Rome called Megalopolis. He’s also a city planner endowed with immense power to level neighborhoods in pursuit of his vision, inspired by Robert Moses.

Until Julia is able to seduce him, he carries on with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, and yes that’s actually her name), who is meant to be a stand-in for Maria Bartiromo during her rise as a financial reporter in the 80s. His project is financially supported by his uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), the city’s richest man and owner of a large bank. Crassus’s crass, cross-dressing grandson Clodio (Shia Leboeuf), an unholy cross between a dime-store Iago and Donald Trump, has a longstanding rivalry with Cesar and seeks to outshine him in more than just the tabloids. Laurence Fishburne plays Fundi Romaine, Cesar’s driver and assistant who narrates everything for us in voiceover but is also framing it as though he’s a historian from the distant future reporting on events he didn’t live through. Except when he’s not.

Oh, and Cesar can freeze time by shouting “TIME STOP!”

This is established in the incompetently-edited opening scene, where the rhythm of the cuts does not appropriately build the tension necessary to enthrall the audience in Cesar’s attempt to throw himself off of the tall building that houses his office. He uses his superpower to avoid falling to his death, and does so in a manner that suggests and artist pushing the limits of the possible. This is likely what Coppola was going for by opening with this scene, but the lack of subtlety and poor application of montage theory boded ill for the remainder of the runtime. Julia can, for some reason, see him freeze time and is immune to the effects of its powers, giving them a reason to fall in love.

If Megalopolis already sounds like an overloaded mess, just wait. As we sweep down to the streets, we are suddenly immersed in a Kamala Harris campaign infomercial, simultaneously a meditation on the passage of time and existing in the context of what has been and an anti-capitalist indictment of economic inequality that offers unsatisfactory platitudes leftover from midcentury liberalism as an antidote. And yet, the film also betrays Coppola’s deep-seeded social conservatism in its lionization of family and its pro-life disposition. It is probably most accurate to describe Coppola as possessed of a Catholic social democrat’s sensibility, which will have hilariously underwhelming implications for the film’s climax. It also leads to such jarringly out of place statements as when Cesar is asked by a tabloid reporter if he’s into women or men and replies “Girls. Everyone likes girls.” Or when he is asked what architectural institution is most important to society and responds, “Marriage.”

Perhaps due to a personal aversion to masturbation, Coppola has elected to use his art for self-gratification instead. That would at least explain the hackneyed tormented creative schtick he imposes on Cesar, a character who at one point refers to his own “Emersonian mind,” whatever that means. It would also explain his ridiculous thematic contention that an architect can be the deliverer of a decadent society because he dares to grapple with the human conditions in a manner everyone else has become too vapid to do themselves. Megalopolis attempts to argue that public beauty can elevate our souls, that aesthetics can deliver us from spiritual rot, and it all comes off like a stoned undergrad with a guitar who thinks he’s the first person to realize that society is phony, man.

***

Before delving into my litany of mockery and exasperation at the creative choices in this project, allow me to cover what is done well. The strongest elements are the utterly unhinged visuals. Shooting without a plan, almost every scene takes place on a minimalist set in front of a green screen, the rest of the world filled in by ultra-low budget CG. Were this a video game, I’d say the graphics were unfinished, especially the comically under-textured buildings of New Rome’s skyline.

But this allows the film to fully embrace the unreality of its setting, taking place in a kind of Lynchian ethereal plane where hot and cold light dominate much of the world around our characters. This repeated visual motif, the on-screen division between a sepia orange and day-for-night blue, harken to the color filters put on early film cameras in the Silent Era. On some level, this may have been meant as a commentary on the early history of cinema itself, how technological advances have moved the medium from filters on cameras to CG as equally unreal renderings of the world in service of fiction. Or maybe it reflected Cesar’s soul riven between the past and future, his grief for his deceased wife and his artistic impulses to create something great. Or maybe it was supposed to be America’s political polarization between Republicans and Democrats. It was probably all three because fuck it, why not?

In that spirit, abstract imagery randomly inserts itself throughout the run. Some of this was the subjectivity of the characters, especially in a long sequence where Cesar goes on a bender and starts to hallucinate that the world is sideways and that he has more arms than Shiva. It was one of the more immersive portrayals of intoxication ever put to film, and proved that Coppola still has some of the old magic.

But most of it was distracting and self-indulgent. The knees of a statue of blind Justice buckle as Cesar rides past in his car, collapsing to the ground in anthropomorphized fashion until she crumbles like old stone into a ruin. Get it? The side of a tenement is suddenly cast over by shadows of barking wolves, a favored symbol of ancient Rome and a reminder that wolves are at the gates. Get it?

We’re never entirely sure what’s real and what’s a character’s hallucination, which is fine as far as it goes but really goofy much of the time. There was some genuinely beautiful use of montage and split screen as Cesar’s sketches of his model city became animated and started to consume the reality of the film. I would have been emotionally overwhelmed by the imagery if it hadn’t been suddenly interrupted by an Elvis impersonator holding an American flag while crooning “America the Beautiful” from atop a soapbox.

Another element that sort of works is that many dialogue scenes play out in long takes, which gave the actors space to improvise and use the set as a stage. The camera follows them as they dance around each other, and swings between characters rather than cutting. It infuses the dialogue scenes with the energy of the actors playing off one another like live theater.

The sex scenes, too, rang true in their brutal honesty. Bordering on the pornographic, the seduction between Leboeuf and Plaza as they conspire against Voight’s Crassus captured a small degree of the authenticity the team was going for with their broad remit for improvisation. Whether this was the right tone for a film meant to be a grand epic with civilizational implications is another matter. The two performers deserve credit for their coital characterization, as do Driver and Emmanuel for their more tender, intimate boudoir scenes.

Thematically, the great success was the portrayal of the effect a great muse can have on an artist. Julia’s entry into Cesar’s life, which he of course resists at first, leads to an honest romance that no doubt reflected Coppola’s own experience with his wife of 50 years. Until I saw Megalopolis, I hadn’t realized how few movies accurately capture the feeling of being truly in love, how that empowers you to be your best in other aspects of life and inspires you to produce and build for the future.

Otherwise, the only consistently good sequence in the entire production was the wedding in the Colosseum, to which all of New Rome’s elite were invited. Grace VanderWaal appeared as Vesta Sweetwater, a stand-in for ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgin and a teeny bopper in this world. It was perhaps the sole clever adaptation of ancient Rome to the modern day in the entire movie, as Vesta’s virginity is commodified as fetish for the old men of New Rome. Like the ancients, they donate to keep her a virgin, which is necessary to maintain favor with the gods. When it is publicly revealed that she’s a fraud who has been deflowered, she abandons her girl-next-door bubblegum music for sexually explicit punk rock as her next career phase like so many child stars in real life. This, I believe, was meant to be played for laughs. That it was accompanied with a montage of newspapers informing us that teen pregnancy is skyrocketing in New Rome probably wasn’t, but we all laughed out loud anyway.

During her performance of an original song in the wedding sequence, the ethereality started to get to me and I felt like I was floating. I began to think, almost hallucinate, that I was at a screening of The Room with a talk-back by Tommy Wiseau that I had attended with the same friends a few years ago.

The Room is, of course, a 2003 independent film produced, written, directed by, and starring Tommy Wiseau, a wacky and mysterious character who showed up in Hollywood in the 90s with delusions of grandeur. Somehow, he scraped together $6 million to make a movie he earnestly believed was a thought-provoking masterpiece of a romantic drama, but which was executed with such obvious incompetence at every turn that it comes off as parody. The sound is incorrectly mixed, the camera does not adequately cover the action, the editing is mistimed, the story makes little sense and includes loads of extraneous filler, and the acting and dialogue are hilariously off-kilter.

Dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” by Entertainment Weekly, The Room is almost an instruction manual on how not to make a movie and the foremost example of a subgenre of movies so blatantly inept in their formal elements that they develop a cult following. The fact that Tommy himself is so earnest about the product makes the whole thing all the funnier. The French have a word for this: nou-nou, which is far more elegant a label than “so-bad-it’s-good,” which we largely use in this country.

After The Room bombed but found an audience among those who mocked it, Tommy was happy for the attention and now tours the country for screenings. So when he came through DC, I felt it my duty to go support independent film. A group of us duped one of our friends, who was oblivious to the existence of The Room and the entire so-bad-it’s-good movie circuit, into coming along to see “an art-house classic from the 90s.” He was not prepared for what he was about to endure, but neither was I prepared for the heartwarming community we were joining.

But first, we met the man himself. Tommy was as wild and wonderful as ever, wearing sunglasses indoors as greeted viewers from behind a clear plastic shield despite COVID being well in the rear-view mirror. He wore latex gloves as he signed copies of The Room on DVD just to be safe. My unsuspecting friend believed himself to be in the presence of an actual great filmmaker, which is clear from his excited grin in the photo we took with Tommy. He became somewhat suspicious when he started noticing that most of the audience, largely older millennial men, were wearing costumes. Many were dressed up as Tommy himself. All were in dire need of deodorant.

We took our seats as close to the front as possible, and he began to frown as each group that entered in costume was cheered by those already assembled, usually offering up a classic line from the horrendous script as a greeting. Two particularly girthy fellows tossed a football back and forth in front of the screen, in honor of a famously pointless scene. It was perhaps the most wholesome community I have ever found in a movie theater.

Then the film began.

To be a part of a live audience sharing our love of nou-nou is a transcendent experience. To quote along in unison with every terrible line, to shout “water!” every time it appeared on screen, to laugh at the framing of every shot – it’s beautiful. Even the overwhelming body odor and sting of plastic spoons striking the back of your head as 300 people hurl them at the screen all at once become enjoyable. We clearly outed ourselves as novices to this kind of screening by sitting in the front (practiced hands know to find a seat in the back so as not to be showered with spoons every few minutes), but it was an initiation of sorts into a wider community. We were lampooning the film together, but we did so with love and formed an intangible connection to one another through the shared ordeal.

The Room is all of 99 minutes, but my friend didn’t last an hour before abandoning us without warning and going home. Our prank was all the richer for it. I only regret he did not have the pleasure of waiting for the talk-back with Tommy after the film’s conclusion, wherein he previewed his long-awaited next project, a monster movie called Big Shark. Each of the questions the irony-worshipping millennials asked him dripped with barely-disguised mockery, but his answers bordered on nonsensical so nobody felt bad. When asked “For your next project, why Big Shark and not Big Octopus or, say, Big Crocodile?” he responded “Haha nice try, why not Big Eel? Next question.”

Coppola’s latest is similarly due for the nou-nou cult-classic circuit. Perhaps it too can one day draw hoards of sweaty men in their late 30s who shout the cringiest lines along with the soundtrack while throwing things at the screen.

***

But getting back to Megalopolis, the rest of the movie did not work well. For all of the pleasing visuals, most of the movie looked terrible. One of the most impressive aspects of Megalopolis is that $120 million could look so cheap. The most egregious example is a scene where three different characters are following one another in chauffeured cars where it is painfully obvious they are sitting in box rigs being swayed by crew members in front of green screens. They did not even have fully-realized cityscapes drawn in the background to cover the green screens, just orange light. It began to feel like a parody of a Coppola film. The geography between the three cars makes no sense at all, which is fine for the detached style Coppola is going for, but it mostly drew laughter from the audience. There’s a right way to do it, à là Sin City. This was the wrong way.

Coppola’s most audacious attempt at the avant-garde is a bigger flop than the box office returns. Cesar at one point gives a press conference where 80 percent of the screen is blacked out and he occupies a square in the lower third, speaking direct to camera. Coppola intended for each screening of Megalopolis to have an actor planted in the audience asking the questions live in between Driver’s canned responses to create an immersive experience. The blacked-out screen sort of made sense – the smallness of the frame Cesar occupied reflected the smallness of the questions being asked, how he feels boxed in by the midwits of the press. No doubt a reflection of Coppola’s own feeling, it was nonetheless logistically impossible to pull off so he had to settle for recording the questions from off-screen reporters to play in the soundtrack. Color me skeptical that the original plan would have worked. Given the box office numbers, there would doubtless have been many theaters where a single audience member sat alone with the actor shouting the questions.

The great theme of the movie was, of course, Coppola’s own artistic anxiety that his limited time on Earth will run out before he is able to accomplish all of his outstanding projects. I’ll let you, dear reader, be the judge as to whether this one was worth the effort to squeeze in before God calls the 85-year-old director to join His kingdom.

If any of these themes strike you as too subtle, fear not, for the voiceover narration will carefully explain everything you’re supposed to take away from the movie immediately after it happens. For example, the film opens with Laurence Fisburne’s voiceover posing the question “When does an empire fall?”, which you think is meant to hang over the rest of picture as its story answers the question. But after two-and-a-half scenes, the voiceover returns and tells us the answer is “It falls when its people stop believing in it.” Amusing enough in execution, this becomes even funnier when one realizes that the movie itself barely attempts to demonstrate this beyond some clumsy orange-man-bad overtones near the end.

Partway through the first act, Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia takes over as narrator for some reason and starts to explain to the audience what we are literally seeing in front of us. Cesar enters some strange temporal plane where his deceased wife appears on a bed, not alive but not decayed, and holds her hand in mourning.

“He still loves her,” Julia helpfully explains to the dullards among us without the very high IQ needed to appreciate a Coppola film.

Pauline Kael wrote in that same review of The Godfather that, “A hack director solves the problem of pacing by making only a few points and making those so emphatically that the audience can hardly help getting them (this is why many of the movies from the studio-system days are unspeakably insulting).” The tragicomedy of Megalopolis is that Coppola has gone from transcending to embodying this phenomenon.

Each conflict that is introduced is resolved almost immediately. At one point, Cesar goes on a booze-and-drug-fueled bender and loses his power to stop time. Approximately five minutes later, after Julia tells him “an artist can never lose his power” (GET IT???), it magically comes back. His powers are not absent for nearly long enough to matter and their restoration is completely unearned.

Similarly, there is an attempt on Cesar’s life carried out by a little boy I have to assume is a Coppola grandchild making his on-screen debut. The child is introduced in one of many homages to Coppola’s own past works, staring vacantly through a chain-link fence like young Vito in The Godfather Part II. An assassination attempt on Cesar should practically write itself, but rather than having the political elite hatch a conspiracy to stab him to death, Coppola instead elects to blend it with A Man for All Seasons by having Leboeuf’s Clodio loudly ponder if no one will rid him of this meddlesome architect. There is an entire scene of Cesar speaking to the child and signing an autograph that ends with the kid drawing a pistol and shooting him in the face.

This was one of the few truly shocking moments, but only because everything leading up to it was so dumb that I fully expected the movie to waste our time with a pointless scene of Cesar speaking to a child played by Coppola’s grandson. That unintentional achievement aside, this conflict, too, was almost immediately discarded since it turns out megalon can be used to heal gunshot wounds through the eye and reconstruct one’s face because, say it with me, fuck it, why not?

Rather than allow the assassination attempt to succeed as in the original Shakespeare, Coppola seeks instead to comment on how our own Faustian progress has removed us from the consequences of death. Our society has become so divorced from age-old hardships that it has lost touch with timeless questions of humanity, those which give great works of art resonant pathos, because technology has advanced too far for us to any longer fear death or truly know love. But that’s almost certainly giving him too much credit.

Perhaps if Coppola, after expending so much effort to give New York a Roman face lift, had bothered to use a single Roman historical event to help guide the plot (besides the assassination of Julius Caesar he lacked the balls to follow through on), it would have been interesting. Something like, oh, I don’t know, the Catilinarian Conspiracy? You know, the deadly power struggle between a guy named Catalina and a guy named Cicero? No? They’re just going to be friends at the end? Ok.

At times, the rapid disposal of conflicts shortly after their introduction leaves one with a sense that large chunks of the film are missing. Astoundingly, a filmmaker infamous for three-hour-plus self-indulgence has made a movie that is too short. It certainly feels like an entire subplot following Dustin Hoffman’s character, a Shylockian henchman to Mayor Cicero named Nush Berman, in his battle with Leboeuf’s Clodio. In one scene, Cicero dispatches Berman to “take care” of Clodio. The next we hear of him, Clodio is speaking of him in the past tense as someone he “went up against and won,” with a quick cut-away to Hoffman getting crushed under a falling CG pillar. It was difficult to imagine any explanation other than Hoffman backing out of the project once he saw what a shit show it was becoming and Coppola deciding to kill him off using canned footage in front of a green screen.

The most comical of the quickly-abandoned plot threads comes when reporters announce that an old Soviet-era satellite is on a collision course with Earth. Likely meant as an illustration of the ruins of an empire, this time the long-defeated rival to New Rome, imposing themselves on the superficial and vapid culture that has taken hold in the United States, it really serves only to introduce a ticking clock. Jason Schwartzman (who is also in this movie through literal nepotism; he is also Coppola’s nephew) later anxiously tells us that the initial calculations were wrong and that the satellite is careening right for New Rome and will surely demolish the city. What seems like an excellent premise for a harrowing climax where Cesar must use his power to save city is, incredibly, never mentioned again. Maybe it crushes the city after the movie is over, but more likely this was a remnant of that original script delayed by 9/11. I can’t imagine any other explanation for this absurdity other than the script originally had the satellite level large parts of New Rome, setting up a conflict between Cicero and Cesar over how to rebuild. Amazingly, Coppola cut this destruction from the movie since it’s apparently still too soon, but kept the satellite in, only to not use it at all.

Furthermore, Cesar is introduced having already invented megalon and won a Nobel Prize for it. Perhaps instead of yet another scene of Shia Leboeuf playing transvestite, we could have followed the creative process that led to the miracle substance? Is the creative process not the object of the film’s exploration? Would that not have been more compelling for both creator and audience? Since Cesar lost his wife around the same time, wouldn’t the story of a brilliant architect inventing something that revolutionizes his craft while his marriage deteriorates and ends in death make for a true artist’s tragedy?

To the extent there is an overarching conflict, it is the enmity between Cesar and Cicero that turns into a romantic melodrama when Cesar and Julia get together. This starts as a political power struggle (which was odd since Cesar does not have much of a political base, only pop culture fandom and a license to bulldoze buildings) and devolves into a family soap opera. This storyline does not suffer from truncation, but is no less abrupt in its resolution. To win over Julia’s mother (Rosie Perez), Cesar need only show her his model city and blow her mind with its unimaginably futuristic technology, like…a moving walkway. And…an escalator. Made of megalon. That’s actually how it happens.

To win over the more skeptical Cicero, it takes is an unexpected pregnancy (clumsily foreshadowed by Cicero’s dream of a full moon grabbed by a limpid hand shooting out from a milky-white cloud clearly meant to suggest insemination), and the grandpa-to-be goes to Cesar to announce his unilateral disarmament. He even hands his former rival a dossier with exculpatory evidence he had suppressed during the first wife’s murder trial to…give his future son-in-law kompromat to use as leverage if he’s ever a less-than-perfect grandfather? I’m beginning to think this Cicero guy isn’t a very skilled politician.

Not that it matters, because apparently all that’s needed to win the day is a Great Dictator-style speech serving up center-left, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along platitudes as profound. I should clarify: by the “win the day,” I mean resolve yet another short-lived conflict introduced about halfway through the film. This one makes an antagonist of Clodio, who, jealous of all his cousin (did I mention he and Cesar are related? They are) has achieved and lusting after Julia, abandons his drag repertoire to become Donald Trump. I know that sounds like Mr. Garrison in South Park. It’s not meant as parody.

Unbelievably, the streets of this fictionalized New York are teeming with MAGA types – it seems Coppola and Jussie Smollett labor under similar delusions – hungry for anti-elite, nativist rhetoric Clodio is more than happy to serve up. With barely-disguised slogans like “fight like hell” and “take our country back,” the effete Clodio recasts himself as machismo and inspires the Roman mob to riot.

This leads to…well, nothing, really. There’s no mention of an upcoming election where Clodio might face Cicero. There’s no reform they are pushing for, except perhaps immigration restrictions they don’t fully articulate. This, perhaps, could be said to accurately encapsulate Trumpism: All style, no substance, the appearance of fighting privileged over any real conflict or results. Except, that could ironically describe the movie itself: An imitation of an intellectual’s epic without anything real to say. And Coppola himself misunderstands this very phenomenon – at the end, the mob turns on Clodio after discovering he has taken over the Crassus family bank and fortune. He is strung up by his heels in humiliation, but in real life Trump’s supporters are fully aware of his wealth and privilege and respect it. At no point will his phoniness lose him followers.

Either way, Coppola builds to a grand climax where Cesar addresses the crowd to establish the new political order and lay out the agenda. Once again, I was laughing out loud at just how underwhelming the dramatic speech turned out to be. Instead of discussing anything relevant to what had just transpired, Cesar starts giving an esoteric dissertation on the nature of time. The crowd is rapt, as if these normies would care about a second-rate college lecture by a professor whose zeal was long ago dampened by the comfort of tenure. Cesar sees a bright new future where we all get along and technology advances to serve the common good. In short, Coppola seems to miss the lessons of the last twenty years about both technological progress and social cohesion, while convincing himself that what ails our society is that we don’t have enough West Coast progressives lecturing the masses. We end on a shot of the happy family from an angle lower than any Orson Welles achieved in Citizen Kane, accompanied by the newborn child of Cesar and Julia accidentally stopping time and having no way to restart it (Cesar and Julia are suddenly no longer immune). At least they’re safe from that satellite.

All this for a film with an all-star cast that seems to be competing to turn in their career-worst performances, with two exceptions. Driver is serviceable enough as Cesar but it is difficult to look past his pompous line-reading. At first, Nathalie Emmanuel seems to be stealing the show with her sincere performance as the secretly-clever young socialite. But then the British actress abandons the generic American dialect she was pulling off perfectly well for an attempt at a New Yark accent that sounds more like a speech impediment, except for when she accidentally slips a British vowel back in during the fashion show scene. Why she didn’t just stick with the generic American is beyond me.

One of the exceptions is Aubrey Plaza, who is playing Aubrey Plaza. This is completely incongruous with everyone else’s Shakespeare in the Park schtick, but Coppola let her get away with it, and it induced convulsions of laughter in this critic, especially when she improvises the line “Goddammit Jerry!” during the botched unveiling of a statue she commissioned.

The other exception, and the only great performance, is that of Shia Leboeuf. He fully embraces just how goofy his character is and plays it up with delight. Normally, directors are telling him to take it down a notch. This may be the only case where his naturally hammy approach actually fit the material. When he manages to publicly humiliate Cesar with a deepfake, Leboeuf brings himself to tears of joy, totally selling a psychologically broken trust fund baby striving to matter among the city’s elite. “Revenge tastes best in a dress!” he quips through running mascara.

Giancarlo Esposito gives a performance that can only be described as Frasier Crane meets Boss Tweed. At once prissy about his attire as a member of the fragile elite and unbothered by his growing unpopularity as a hard-knuckled machine politician, the defining feature of both the script and his performance is incoherence.

Jon Voight doesn’t seem to know where he is or what he’s doing, or frankly what a movie is. He delivers his dialogue as though he’s either plastered or just learning to read. At one point, he explains the costume his wife has picked out for him ahead of a ritzy event by saying “I’m to be Robin Hood” with a bizarre stress on Hood that indicated he was reading the script off a cue card like Brando once did.

This is to say nothing of the abysmal dialogue.

Characters sometimes talk as though they’re in Shakespeare knock-off, and Cesar even recites the entire “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet in an early scene for no discernible reason. Later, he is drawn into a Marcus Aurelius quote-off with Julia that seems designed to communicate to the viewer that Coppola has read Meditations. Ditto when Cesar’s mother Constance (played by Coppola’s sister Talia Shire and sharing a name with her character from The Godfather) asking Julia if she’s heard of string theory. Ditto the random Rousseau quotes. I thought at first this was commentary on how all Western culture has been reduced to simulacra, but then Julia explained what we were actually supposed to take away from the scene: “Don’t just quote your philosophy, Daddy,” she tells Cicero, “embody it.”

Pretentious statements from the voiceover, like when Julia tells us that we in our time (which is ancient to her) have forgotten the “lessons that blew across the Aegean” from our own ancients, abound. If only Coppola had heeded the lesson of one particular young man who was literally blown across the Aegean until the beeswax holding together his wings melted, this movie would have remained an intriguing what-if for the director rather than an international embarrassment.

The self-serious speechifying is more than offset by the stilted lines that pass for witty repartee. In between Cesar explaining to Julia that he is too much of an intellectual to date her when they first meet, she sees the award he won for inventing megalon and exclaims “Wow, a real Nobel Prize!” Then she notices a prescription pill bottle on the ground and examines it, remarking “Oh, it’s expired.” Cesar replies “Actually, Nobel Prizes don’t expire.”

In another scene, Cesar is working on a design when Laurence Fishburne’s character tells him “Good idea,” to which he responds “Thank you. I liked the idea myself.”

The pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue is overwrought to the point of tedium, but it is also frequently interrupted by crass, postmodern attempts at humorous subversion. An actual line in this movie, uttered by Jon Voight as an interjection into an otherwise emotional family argument, is “What do you think of my boner?” accompanied by a hard cut to the as-yet-unseen tent he’s pitching with the covers of his convalescent bed. Credit where it is due, a few moments later, this is revealed to actually be a small bow and arrow (why not a gun? They have guns, I’ve seen them! Oh, wait, he’s dressed as Robin Hood so I suppose it must be a tiny arrow) that he uses to murder Wow Platinum and shoot Clodio up the rectum as he turns to flee. All you can do is laugh.

Not everyone in the theater with me had given themselves permission to embrace the mirth of the movie, but I was unencumbered by any such inhibition. By the middle of the runtime, the entire theater had come round to my view of things and guffawed along with me as each line of dialogue became more baffling than the last. Everyone clearly had a better time the moment they stopped taking the movie as seriously as it took itself.

We all clapped at the end when the dedication to Coppola’s now-deceased wife Eleanor was displayed. It was an old fashion movie-going experience – we were bonded as a crowd of strangers for having endured it together, much like I imagine early audiences for The Room felt. I genuinely wanted to remain in my seat and watch it again, immediately.

Ultimately, Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS: A Fable is hilariously terrible, that so-bad-it’s-good quality the French call nou-nou. Everyone should see it because it illustrates what happens when a once-great artist is given total creative freedom, $120 million, and no excuses for the final product. It is a reminder that while an auteur’s vision is a necessary element of a great film, it is not sufficient; the movies are, after all, a collaborative art form. Not just producers but actors, set designers, a second writer – all can help strengthen the vision the auteur is chasing. Coppola’s megalomaniacal disaster is a fable after all, just not in the way he intended.

Before I sign off I would like to here issue my own full-throated “TIME STOP!” and reflect on this review. If you found it to be an overlong, inchoate mess of competing ideas warring for thematic dominance while choking under the weight of excessive, pretentious verbiage playing at some vaingloriously ill-conceived notion of profundity, then congratulations: You now have some sense of what it feels like to sit through Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS: A Fable. I only wish this review were as specifically hilarious in its ghastliness as the film so it might be half as enjoyable, but I am sadly not the master Coppola is.

I do agree, however, with the rating Coppola gave his own film on Letterboxd: Five stars, an unsurpassed monstrosity.