It’s hard to resist the spectacle of a man lighting $120 million of his own money on fire. Which is why I accepted a friend’s invitation to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. The legendary director of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now has supposedly had the idea for this movie in his head for decades, and had tried for most of this century to get onto screen. Yet the uninhibited product of his long labors is such a bizarrely misconceived and poorly executed film that I struggle to put into words at full-review-length how bad it is. I salute those — such as our Armond White — who can.
Taking Megalopolis seriously is quite difficult. It has a story, but it consists of a series of events that do not flow naturally from one to another. Its dialogue is wooden. Its thematic intent, at least, is clear: often too clear. Two obvious messages do emerge from how Coppola portrays the struggle of eccentric genius architect and urban planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) to achieve his vision of redesigning New Rome, a stand-in for New York City in a Romanesque alternative version of America, as he faces various personal and political obstacles. Both messages are at least as defective as the rest of the movie.
Coppola has said that he intended Megalopolis as a kind of revisionist take on the Catilinarian conspiracy. Catiline was a demagogic Roman politician who sought to overthrow the Roman republic, promising, among other things, an abolition of debt. Cicero, a rival politician, discovered and suppressed Catiline’s attempted overthrow; as part of this effort, Cicero condemned Catiline in a famous series of speeches (which inspired an also-famous painting). Coppola even has his Cicero-equivalent quote from these speeches, which caused my onetime schoolboy-Latin ears to perk up.
Cicero has (rightly) passed into history as a heroic figure of the late Roman republic; Catiline (also rightly), as a proto-Caesarean villain. Coppola wonders, however, whether this narrative is an instance of victor’s history. So he presents his Catiline as a genius whose vision for the city ultimately saves it from itself. It is a great-man theory of history that would place the fates of polities in the charisma and dreams of singular figures, to which the rest of us must yield. It is baffling that Coppola puts this forward as his ideal, given the film’s decidedly unsubtle condemnations of figures from the recent past such as Hitler and Mussolini. Societies do need good leaders, but it’s easy to see how relying on and deferring entirely to them might not work out. A Ciceronian preservation of self-government and republican forms is a better bet.
It’s not surprising that such an egocentric vision of leadership might appeal to a director. Imposing a vision from above while resisting contrary interference is often the job description. So it also makes sense that Megalopolis is also a movie about itself. Its central drama is Catilina’s quest to realize his dreams, against various attempts to undermine him; his ultimate success vindicates not just himself but the entire city. Coppola appears to have understood his quest to make Megalopolis similarly, imbuing it with grandiose aspirations.
But there’s a problem: Megalopolis is terrible. If part of Coppola’s message is that visionaries can save us if only we indulge their whims, then he should have made a better movie. A much more obvious takeaway from the movie we actually got is that even talented artists need to engage in some measure of self-assessment and self-criticism to produce their best work, and may even need to be told “no” every once in a while.
In 2007, while Coppola was still mulling over Megalopolis, a friend of his reported that the director was “paralyzed” by the creative freedom he had achieved at this late stage in his career. “He had no excuse this time if the film was no good,” the friend said.
Well . . .