"Megalopolis"
My review of Francis Ford Coppola's audacious late career film: Is it any good?
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
October 23, 2024
Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film Megalopolis, a screenplay he’d been noodling with since the 1980s?
Before answering that question, though, let’s set the stage.
Italian-Americans had been riding high in popular culture in the 1950s, with Frank Sinatra as the dominant singer of the age. But then came the back-to-nature hippie 1960s, which left urban Italians weirded out. Finally, in the 1970s, Italian filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, and Michael Cimino kicked off a legendary decade in movies.
Coppola had the best 1970s of them all, winning an Oscar for cowriting Patton, then making three perfect movies in a row: The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II, and concluding his decas mirabilis with the imperfect but staggering Apocalypse Now.
Since then…well, the late, lamented 2Blowhards blog observed in 2008:
As far as the world is concerned, Francis Coppola is someone who occasionally—all-too-rarely, in fact—delivers rounded, worldly, stately narratives that feature a moving amount of warmth, mass, and dignity. He’s a grown-up entertainer/artist—William Wyler with some additional splashes of blood and tomato sauce. But as far as Coppola himself is concerned, Francis Coppola is an enthusiastic, inventive kid, amusing himself with dolls and toys—a born innovator bounding between surrealism and the early New Wave, playing mischievously and irrepressibly with ideas and styles.
So, his many films since Apocalypse Now hadn’t made much of a mark, although the biggest problem with Godfather III was probably out of Coppola’s control: As Michael Corleone, Al Pacino’s preferred acting style had evolved from ominously taciturn to shouty.
Read the whole thing there.
Reading the whole back story of the creation of megalopolis, I expected the passion to come through in the final product, even if it was flawed and uneven. Yet even with the incredible cast and weirdness of the film, it managed to have the one unforgivable trait for a film: it was boring as hell. Seriously, it was a tight 2 hour run time and felt like it was about twice that. The dialogue was atrocious (“you’re being anal… I’m feeling more oral”), the plot made no sense. I’m a fan of David Lynch and other directors who leave a lot of ambiguity and incoherence in their plots, but this was just all over the place. It was trying to tell a story and did so poorly. There were so many aspects of the world that just made absolutely no sense as well, for example it was pretty comical that in the futuristic hi tech super city, the method of transportation was a people mover that moved roughly the same speed as walking.
"Script doctors are relatively cheap. But Megalopolis seems to be a movie conceived by an octogenarian watching History Channel specials on the Roman Empire while mainlining Viagra."
Steve continues his war against the conclusion paragraph; I think he's convincing me (along with there being no good reason not to introduce every example with "for example". Turns out it's like using "said" for a dialog tag. It doesn't matter if it reads repetitious. Using alternatives makes the reader conscious you are trying to avoid repetition.)
I'd like to see more movies in universes in which Christianity never displaced classical Roman culture. I assume that's what's going on in this movie. If we were a polytheistic society, would there have been no psychological need for wokeness to develop? If the worship of Zeus went out of style, people could just switch to Apollo when arguing with those damned Bacchus fools.