All of this came to mind as I found myself the only occupant of a large theater at the 2:40 showing in Plainville CT. (I was also reminded of how one of Larry Fishburne’s earliest film appearances was in 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” as “Clean. Mr. Clean … from some South Bronx shithole. I think the light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head,” in Martin Sheen’s memorable voiceover, written by Michael Herr). Here, Fishburne is in full Morpheus mode – his deeply supple baritone supplying needless narration in solemn, oracular tones. Yawn.
I wish I could report that this wildly ambitious film had any redeeming qualities or that I saw in it even a glimmer of what my friends and colleagues have reported. For me, “Megalopolis” is not only pretentious, but stilted – marred by a straining for effect, torpid pacing, and flat line readings. There’s not a bit of genuine emotional life in any of it. It’s an empty exercise in self-indulgent abstraction.
One scene in particular stands out in this respect. It’s symptomatic of the whole miscarried film. Adam Driver (Cesar Catalina) and Nathalie Emmanuel (Julia Cicero) are standing on a rooftop with a distinctive coign of vantage, surveying Cesar’s vision/empire to be. She asks him about his plan for this cityscape. A stadium, he replies, roofed with a delicate gold fiber. As visions go, not exactly inspiring. The platform they are on is a giant mechanical clock, under glass, whose hands move ever so majestically (Cesar, we are given to understand, without explanation, has the power to stop time -- another lame metaphor for the power of art – and of film in particular. There are several freeze frames etc.). Julia replies by reciting the first lines of Sappho’s famous Anacotria poem, no. 16, which runs as follows:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
ever you love best
What’s wrong with this scene? Plenty. Her delivery is hopelessly dull and drab, completely without passion or inflection. She might as well be reading a grocery list. But it’s the decisions that the director made in shooting it that dulls its impact. He shoots the whole thing at an impersonal middle distance. When Emmanuel recites Sappho the shot is over Driver’s shoulder -- that way both faces are in the frame, a classic device. What’s called for to intensify the moment is a cut-in to her face – a close up. Then back to Driver, maybe spinning around to really see her for the first time. A connection is made. Otherwise those lines are wasted. They're arbitrary; they mean nothing. It’s hard to account for Coppola’s bad shot and editing choices here.
The plot is saddled with numerous contrived turns involving betrayals and murder, Roman style, with Cesar's cousin, Clodio, framing Cesar in a bogus sex scandal. Clodio is played by Shia LaBeouf, an actor who for unfathomable reasons, still has a career with major directors despite his over the top, hyperventilating performances. Though I suppose this is precisely what Coppola wanted from him. LeBeouf plays a gender-fluid character, an angle that crudely plays off old Hollywood tropes about villains who are sexually ambiguous. It's shameful.
What about the rest of the cast? Driver is not an actor I’ve ever warmed to. And he seems miscast here. His huge, crooked slab of a hangdog face invites some kind of admiration, as does his drawling delivery; it’s certainly arresting. Either that or he’s watched too many Gary Cooper films. But at times he doesn’t seem quite in control of it. Under Coppola’s direction he looks like he’s trying too hard. It is not a relaxed or lived in performance. It’s hammy and stagey. You can see the wheels spinning. Emmanuel, only known to me from her capable ensemble work in the “Fast and Furious” movies, is a luminous presence whose luster is hard to dim. And yet, she looks lost for much of the film. Her reaction shots are all off. Her timing is just bad. She looks like she’s thinking about her lines instead of, you know, acting them. Dustin Hoffman puts in an oddly likeable cameo, gargling his lines like a tipsy mafioso gargoyle. Giancarlo Esposito is an intensely watchable actor, but he’s largely wasted here.
Jon Voight looks like he’s on life support. Why is he even in this film? He brings nothing of urgency to it. The irrepressibly energetic and wonderfully subtle Aubrey Plaza is ill-used here. Her face can register micro-emotions with startling rapidity – the true sign of a great film actor. But alas her line readings – she’s stuck with maybe the worst in the film – are hopelessly dull and lifeless. I guess this is what comes of a director intent on making his actors into mouthpieces for his Big Obvious Theme. The whole cast is reduced to allegorical stand-ins, so Coppola can drive home his fatuous points about the decay of empire and the painfully thin conceit of America as a latter-day Rome. At one point Cesar's car, driven by Fishburne, slowly glides through a bad part of town where we see giant statues representing Justice and other allegorical figures briefly come to life only to fall and crumble. It’s meant to be dreamlike – but it comes across as painfully awkward and obvious.
Some critics have cited Ayn Rand’s megalo-architect Howard Roark from “The Fountainhead” as an inspiration for Driver’s character. That’s surely in play. But he seems closer to the real-life Roark, Robert Moses, who ruled New York’s Parks and Recreation’s Dept for decades. (This is actually one of Driver’s job descriptions we learn early on).
I could go on but why beat a dead horse? The whole thing made me want to re-watch “Tucker,” which I recall rather liking. Coppola has never been a filmmaker of ideas like, say, Godard. Films anyway aren’t about ideas, but images, emotions, and relationships. (Which is why Godard, despite his early elan, has always left me a bid cold). Coppola’s great theme has always been family, one form or other; the maddening, bloody, and tender dynamics of it, and here he stages that in a ruthlessly naked key right out of Suetonius. There is a grandly staged political marriage between Plaza's scheming Wow Platinum and Voight's decrepit tycoon, done up in an overdone, baroquely lacquered style. But it's stiff, lifeless, even as lurid spectacle. It made me long for the gaudy excesses of Fellini's "Satryicon."
As an overdetermined allegory about art, about the autonomy of the artist in a crass mercantile world set against the death of an empire, about moviemaking itself, “Megalopolis” is a crude, sophomoric essay. White elephant art, as Manny Faber put it. One can applaud the risk, the imaginative stakes, the film aims for. But to see it fall so far short is dismaying. Some critics have praised Coppola for swinging for the fences in the spirit of unfettered invention and that is indeed laudable in a time when most films have nothing at stake. But the film is also quite regressive.
“Megalopolis” is not so much a futurist film as a throwback, one that invokes the popularity in 1950s and 60s Hollywood for sword snd sandal epics: Anthony Mann’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” William Wyler’s “Ben Hur,” Jospeh Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” to name the most prominent. These films, made in the decade or so after the war, offered mostly triumphalist allegories about the fate of America as it moved into its imperialist phase. They were a mixed bag to be sure: Mann’s film made a stark warning about hubris, while Wyler served up a sentimental ode to Christian piety. Mank’s movie – much maligned like Coppola’s for its cost and extravagance – remains a remarkable achievement in retrospect. Kubrick, working with the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, delivered a sharp-edge liberal critique of empire and an ardent defense of the individual.
Coppola never manages to achieve such a sharp focus. He’s all over the place, really. Is it a film about the endangered fate of art in the modern age? Or a film about the wages of ego and power? The two strands never quite converge. The emotional lines between characters are badly skewed; they feel like sketches for relationships and thus never draw us, never invite us to identify with the hero or anyone else.
Coppola’s daring vision fails to catch fire. It’s less an appeal to what cinema can achieve than a complaint about the many abuses he’s personally suffered during his time as a filmmaker fighting an uphill battle against intractable studio bosses and dull bean counting functionaries. The result is a film that should have reached for the intensity of a tragedy, through the eventual death of its hero, whose self-awareness arrives too late. Instead, it’s a flagrantly self-justifying film in which tragedy is elided by an absurd sleight of hand as it abruptly, preposterously, and unconvincingly pivots to a happy ending. It’s just embarrassing.
It's unfair, I suppose, to hold the film to some rigid standard of naturalism when it so clearly is operating in the grandiose register of opera. Yet the operatic here comes across as merely cartoonish. Oddly enough, it's not grandiose enough. "Dracula" unfolded like a fever dream -- a rapturous, incantatory phantasmagoria; a ravishing Liebestraum. None of that energy is present in "Megalopolis."
And yet: maybe this film is supposed to be a more Brechtian/Noh drama than naturalistic? The actors are archetypes, portraying ritualistic, formulaic archetypal states of being, etc. Conflict is depicted at an elemental, rather than naturalistic, level. The aggressively foregrounded artifice is meant to shock the audience into an awareness of our civilization’s fragile predicament. I can entertain that notion for as long as it takes me to dismiss it.
Coppola, for his all larger-than-life ambitions, has always worked them out in the framework of naturalistic human behavior. “Peggy Sue Got Married” is a good example. It’s a lighthearted fantasy, expertly crafted, with a whimsical supernatural angle, lightly laid on, as in a Hollywood classic. But that film is light on its feet. It never takes itself that seriously even though the emotional stakes are high. In “Megalopolis” it does not work. It’s merely leaden; ponderous and inert.
The vision of the polis reborn, the ideal city, where art guides the citizens to some lofty utopian form of living, is swallowed up by the "mega" and its hubristic ambitions: unfortunately the damning fate of so many artworks – Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” comes to mind – conceived on a colossal scale and bent on delivering utopia.
But utopia is not a large scale, Robert Moses-style urban redevelopment plan. It’s a series of micro transactions, founded on hope, purely and always anticipatory, intimate gestures made toward a still emerging future. Much has been made of the books Coppola read preparing for this film. One wishes he’d come across Ernst Bloch’s 1918 “The Spirit of Utopia.”
Because Utopia is not and can never be fixed, as Cesar naively dreams. It’s not an achievement; it’s a process.
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