The most honest Francis Ford Coppola has ever been on celluloid isn't present in any of his own movies. Rather, it can be found in a 1991 documentary shot by his wife, Eleanor. Hearts of Darkness, a project started by Eleanor and later finished by co-directors George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr, tells the story of Francis’s travails while making Apocalypse Now, a movie that was already considered a canonical classic of the New Hollywood era by the time the documentary was released. But at the time of filming, the infamously beleaguered production of Apocalypse Now was just another example of FFC’s limitless, egomaniacal ambition to achieve the ultimate spectacle-as-political-statement, that would speak to something profound about Vietnam, about America, about mankind.
Coppola at that point in time was one of the biggest directors in the world, coming off his two enormously successful Godfather movies and the critically beloved The Conversation. He had long planned to adapt Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, turning it into a story of the Vietnam War that journeyed into the dark night of the human soul. Eleanor’s documentary is about the dark night of Francis’s soul. At times, he is the picture of the overindulged, male auteur full of grandeur and vanity, holding court on the importance of cinema and art and ambition and himself. At other times, he is a ball of exposed nerves, full of anxiety about the difficulty of the production, about the personal wealth he has poured into the film when outside funding ran out, and, worst of all, about the prospect of failing to make a good movie. At one point, he talks about the sin of pretentiousness, about how every artist is terrified of being seen as pretentious, so much so that they pull back or play safe in detrimental ways. He tells his wife that he cannot allow himself to be afraid to be seen as pretentious, as it’s the only way to really go for it. It is a risk worth taking.
Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s latest and possibly final big swing in a career full of them, is a lot of things, some of them very good. One thing it isn’t is afraid. It is an earnest story (of sorts) about ambition and the future and a collapsing America, in which New York City is New Rome. (Another thing this movie isn't is subtle.) It’s a Shakespearean play, an homage to big, sweeping, disastrous Hollywood productions like Cleopatra, the films of Powell and Pressburger and Federico Fellini, a bad Saturday Night Live sketch, Ayn Rand fan-fiction, and a telenovela fever dream. At times I laughed with the movie; other times I laughed at it. I might have been laughing even harder thinking about Defector’s Drew Magary watching this in complete disgust. It is the most batshit thing I have seen in some time, and I am glad it exists even if I don’t know what to do with it.
A lot of words will be spilled trying to explain to you the politics of this movie and whether or not Coppola’s movie is a sophisticated artistic statement about what society needs in order to progress. But trying to glean insight or even coherence here is a fool's errand. More than anything else, the movie is simply one man wondering if man’s ambition to create a utopia is worth the headache and angst that creating anything requires. The movie is ostensibly about Cesar Catalina, an architect(?)/city designer(??) who can stop time(???), and his quest to build a city of the future to replace New Rome as it becomes obsolete. Catalina battles the mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) and members of his own family who decry him as a madman. Catalina is also a Bruce Wayne–like socialite and raconteur, since being infamous is part of his brand to make people pay attention to his grand designs for society. Catalina eventually falls for the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and through their love he and the mayor become even more strongly opposed, essentially having an existential fight between reforming the old society or building something totally new. There’s also a family succession drama involving Aubrey Plaza marrying Jon Voight for his money and Shia LaBeouf playing a Trump-like figure trying to use societal anger to his advantage.
Anything you get out of this movie won’t come from its story, or lack thereof. It’s so all over the place that I don’t think even Coppola could give you a satisfying summary of the plot. Instead, this movie is a journey into the jumbled mind of Coppola—his ambition, his egomania, his mourning (his wife Eleanor died while the movie was in post-production), his feelings about what’s happening to America, and his fears about the future. From a filmmaking standpoint, it’s mesmerizing and so maximalist in the way it plays with staging and editing, and good CGI and bad CGI. If you’ve paid any attention to Coppola’s press tours for the movie, they are similarly all over the place and full of the outlines of big ideas that never quite clarify. I can’t in good conscience tell you that Megalopolis is good or bad. I can tell you that you are going to absolutely hate every second of it or will want to see it a hundred more times. You might even feel both of those things.
Getting back to Coppola’s words about artistic pretension in Hearts of Darkness, there is no doubt that Megalopolis is incredibly, insanely pretentious. It's a director trying to make a movie that matches his own superego. But I’ll tell you: I would take a thousand more movies like this over another perfectly fine, competently made movie that aspires to nothing beyond good reviews and an Oscar nomination. The downside of this is that nothing about this film seems responsibly put together or thought out, as evidenced by Coppola's press tour and some of the grosser reports about his behavior on set. Everything good and also bad about the work itself, even down to the ugly cinematography and visual effects, bear Coppola's unique fingerprints. It's exhilarating, in the same way a car crash or a tightrope walk between skyscrapers is exhilarating.
The actors are in on the lunacy, and bring some insanity of their own to their performances and peculiar line readings. It all starts with the patron saint of weird leading-man performances, my beautiful boy Adam Driver. If you were to recount Adam Driver’s last 10 years to someone who went into a coma before Girls ended, they might think he had become the biggest actor in Hollywood, decorated with Oscars and feted as the De Niro of his generation. In reality, he is now the go-to muse for great directors' late-period misfires or controversial experiments. What makes Driver perfect in all of these roles is his deep commitment to being as big and as batty as the movies he’s in. His Megalopolis line readings are sure to become memes in the coming months, and he is the perfect avatar for Coppola’s mania and over-ambition.
And then there is “that scene,” which is a lot of fun and I think actually captures what it is Coppola wants Megalopolis to be: something akin to a museum exhibit or a live show. Something you have a personal experience with and take from it whatever you take from it—even if all you take away is that this is a piece of shit and that Coppola should be kicked out of Hollywood literally with a giant cartoon boot. That’s as valid a reaction as any other, and more importantly, it’s a visceral feeling. And not a lot of art is giving you that these days.
