Coppola's Megalopolis

Thankfully, Coppola has the money to survive this failure

                 

I cannot say that Francis Ford Coppola has been one of my favorite film directors. In 1966 he made a slightly  above average coming of age movie called You’re a Big Boy Now. This allowed him to direct two  rather nondescript feature films, Finian’s Rainbow and The Rain People.

In 1970 he co-wrote the script for the film Patton which won an Oscar. When studio chief Robert Evans was looking for a writer/director for the film adaptation of The Godfather, he decided to go with Coppola, due to his experience, his Oscar and the fact he was Italian.

That decision created a commercially successful but also one of the most highly praised film series of recent times. I disagree about the latter, which means about as much as spitting into hurricane Helene.  But, very briefly, Coppola was praised for turning what people thought was a middlebrow novel into a highbrow film. In my view, what he really did was take a lowbrow novel and turn it into an Irving Thalberg  type of long, lush middlebrow production—the kind that Hollywood adores.

Since The Godfather was such a smash he was allowed to do a personal project. Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliant Blow Up, Coppola wanted to make a film in which his protagonist would be entrapped by his own technical expertise.  In Blow Up it was by photography, in Coppola’s The Conversation it would be audio surveillance.

The result was his best film, and one of the best American pictures of the seventies.  Gene Hackman is superb in the difficult leading role of Harry Caul. As the heavy, Harrison Ford gave his best performance. Walter Murch’s editing and sound design are superlative. And Murch’s handling of the triple climax at the end, where Caul discovers a murder, then, to his shock, discovers who was behind the murder, and finally that they know he knows their secret-- this is beautifully pyramided by sound and image for maximum impact.

After the success of Godfather 2, which won even more Oscars than the first film, Coppola took up a project that no studio wanted to back: an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness.  The original writer, John Milius, transferred it in setting and time period to the American participation in the Vietnam War.  Which was a rather large leap.  Because Conrad’s work was based around the Congo and its brutal colonization by King Leopold of Belgium; and Conrad’s antagonist, Kurtz passed away naturally, he was not murdered by the narrator Marlow (Willard in the film.). Except for two or three striking set pieces, I was not impressed by Apocalypse Now. In fact, I think the documentary about the making of the film, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, released over a decade later, explains why the picture comes off as bloated and pretentious.

The saga of Coppola since extends from his solvency problems after the failed One From the Heart; his experiments in digital photography—The Outsiders and Rumble Fish—and his return to Hollywood normalcy to get out of debt e.g_Peggy Sue Got Married, Bram Stroker’s Dracula, and The Rainmaker.  But he has always had a desire to be his own man and not be beholden to the studios.  This is why he went into the winery, resorts and publishing businesses, which he did very well at. Unfortunately, the films he has made under those circumstances have been, to be mild, kind of mediocre, to the point they could not get mass distribution: Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt. In these films, specifically after Tetro, Coppola has stated that he has not been trying to make films to be successful. That he has retired from being a professional director. Instead he sees himself as a student who wants to discover what making movies is really all about through self-financing small, low budget films. This was in preparation for his pet project Megalopolis.

Megalopolis is anything but low budget. It reportedly came in at north of a hundred million. And a large part of that was guaranteed from Coppola’s own fortune.  As far as I can see, there really is not a lot in the picture that is new technically or stylistically.  The one exception I noted was that Coppola, at times, goes beyond using a split screen into using a triple image screen.

He has given out different versions of what the story is based upon. But clearly the origins come from the Catiline conspiracy during the latter days of the Roman Republic. The film makes this obvious by calling the city it takes place in New Rome.  And the two major characters are Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a visionary city planner. In reality, Cicero was the consul who put down the rebellion led by failed consul candidate Cataline.  But Coppola has also said that Catalina is modeled on the legendary New York City urban planner Robert Moses, which is kind of odd considering some of the serious criticisms that have been leveled at Moses since the eighties.

This time period parallel is announced at the beginning: the film cuts from an old style Roman building with columns, to a skyscraper horizon shot.  The two main characters, at the start, are in opposition to each other. Mayor Cicero is all for the status quo, no matter what faults in New Rome--which clearly is meant to recall New York. Cesar, who heads an agency called Design Authority, has a new invention called Megalon. This is a revolutionary bio-adaptive  construction material. In one instance, it allows people to walk on a stream of water. Cesar wants to use this in order to design and build a futuristic city.  When he announces his plans in a televised speech—in which Coppola has Cesar use Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” oration-- he is attacked by Cicero, who smears him about the mystery of the death of his wife—Sunny Hope-- and the alleged disappearance of her corpse. About which Cesar has created a secret shrine of her lying in a bed, which he visits.

In two of his recent films, Youth Without Youth and Twixt, there was a strong accent on fantasy. That continues here. I believe Coppola means Megalon to be symbolic. Cesar also has powers to stop time, and he uses the Megalon element to heal what should have been a fatal wound to his face after an assassination attempt by intended fascist usurper Clodio. As the reader can see, if Megalopolis belongs to a genre, it is that of dystopian science fiction.

The main plot is the conflict between Cesar and Cicero over the future of New Rome: will it continue with all the problems it has, or will Cesar be allowed to construct his dream city of Megalopolis? That opportunity is made distinctly possible when a huge satellite crashes and burns in the city.

There is a subplot that impacts the conflict between the main antagonists. That includes billionaire Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), his wife Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and a sexually promiscuous political provocateur named Clodio (Shia Labeouf). Continuing the Roman parallel, this last character is based on Publius Clodius Pulcher,  a politician and street agitator during the days of the republic and First Triumvirate.  The Voight character is, of course, based on the immensely wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus of the First Triumvirate, which included Julius Caesar and Pompey.

Wow Platinum, who used to go with Cesar, marries Crassus. Then, she seduces Clodio into a plot to embezzle her husband’s money.  When Crassus discovers this, he kills his unfaithful and thieving wife with a bow and arrow, and wounds Clodio with same as he tries to escape.  This wounding leads to Clodio’s downfall at the hands of his own followers.  As a reference to Mussolini, Coppola ends up with Clodio hanging upside down.  All of this now convinces Crassus to back Cesar.

The other connecting tissue in the plot is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). She is Cicero’s daughter.  First visiting Cesar to spy on him, they eventually fall for each other.  They even have a child.  Although the mayor resists at first, after the threat of Clodio—which forces him underground—he decides to finally join forces with Cesar.  And in the last scene, with Clodio eliminated, the former rivals are on a podium in front of a crowd, with the child in the foreground.

I should add, the narrator of the film is Cesar’s driver, Fundo Ramone.  He is played by Laurence Fishburne, who has been with Coppola since 1979 and Apocalypse Now.

Its an intricate plot, and its an ambitious dramatic schema.  As I did with Killers of the Flower Moon, I saw the film twice. The reason I did so was because I wanted to be sure about the certainty and causes of my initial disappointment. 

 Because of the film’s dramatic conflict and the political speeches that it entails, I expected there to be some compelling, even memorable, oratory. For me there wasn’t.  Which is puzzling, considering the fact that Coppola is a pretty good writer. But there is little that is soaring, or piercing in the speeches.  Dramatically and imaginatively, there should have been. For a good example of this: there is a crosscut near the end of the film with Cesar and Cicero speaking. Compare that to the crosscut between Crassus and Spartacus in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. That 1960 sequence really is memorable, as the two opposing characters explain their reasons for the upcoming battle. To me, that did not happen here.

Which relates to another shortcoming.  In Spartacus, that opposing bit of dialogue was carried out by Laurence Olivier as Crassus and Kirk Douglas as Spartacus.  The former was, at times, a great actor—and he was superb in Kubrick’s film; the latter was generally a good actor. And the performances by those two men enhanced and enlivened the conflict. 

There is not anything like that in this film. There is not one superior performance in the picture, let alone a memorable one. I have never been able to explain the success of Adam Driver. Especially since it really began with The Report,  where he was given an acting lesson by Annette Benning: she made him look like an amateur. But in Hollywood, nothing succeeds like failure. And if one takes a look at Driver’s films since, most of them have bombed: Marriage Story, The Last Duel, Ferrari, White Noise, 65,  Annette, The Dead Don’t Die. So, from past performance the man cannot really open a film—which Coppola really needed for this picture. You don’t have to be handsome to be a leading man, but if you are not then you have to have a strong personality that you can flex—Humphrey Bogart—or have some real acting ability—George C. Scott.  For me, Driver has neither, and his performance is dull and uninteresting, thereby creating a hole at the film’s center.  To me, the same qualification applied to all the other leading parts.  Coppola simply did not push them hard enough in order to coax them out of the average.  For me, the only exception to this was Dustin Hoffman, who is in maybe three scenes.

The above two shortcomings are accentuated by the fact that this is a character/dialogue driven film. It does have some notable special effects, photography and images.  But unlike say 2001: A Space Odyssey or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that is not what the film is about.

In addition to this, there are too many scenes that go on too long. For example the large scale bacchanal scene of the wedding reception for Crassus and Wow Platinum. This featured male and female no holds barred wrestling plus a chariot race with a driver who resembled Charlton Heston. To me, that scene could have been cut by 40 per cent. And the lighthearted scenes, of Cesar at work running his office, and the romance between him and Julia, these for me did not work.  And they have never been Coppola’s forte as far as I can tell. Therefore on a large scale dramatic level, and even on the small scale personal level, Megalopolis never takes off.

Coppola is a gambler, let us give him credit for that.  And he has the money to do so due to his outside investments. But, at least for me, the dice came up snake eyes on this one. I am glad he will be able to sustain his losses.  Whatever his liabilities, we need someone like him in the film business.