"Megalopolis"

My review of Francis Ford Coppola's audacious late career film: Is it any good?

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Celluloid Caesar

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.