Friday, October 4, 2024

La cité obscure


MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE

2024
Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Spoilers: moderate


Inside of the movie, Megalopolis (rather, Megalopolis: A Fable) is about pursuing a great dream to its glorious conclusion.  Outside of the movie, it's more about holding onto a dream too damned long, and I have every right to suspect that, having spent some four and a half decades cooking in Francis Ford Coppola's head from its earliest conception to its completion this year, the film would have been betterat a minimum clearer, cleanerhad it been made at any point earlier in that continuum.  It really feels like what happens when you get so close to a long-cherished projectand have removed yourself, by virtue of self-funding and a still-imposing reputation, from any meaningful oversight (or even just, like, meaningful constructive criticism)that much about it that stirs your soul and, to you, makes perfect narrative and emotional sense, now only comes out smudgy and pointless to anybody else.  This is surely not the only contradiction of Megalopolis: it's a movie about a Great Man building an enduring institution that he intends to command for society's benefit, that will lose pretty much every penny of its production budget (as, indeed, no reasonable forecaster would have otherwise predicted), and which Coppola sold off a large portion of his ownership stake in his wonderful winery to pay for.  (There's an argument, only a slightly facetious one, that the best thing Coppola ever made wasn't Apocalypse Now, but his claret.)  I can keep going: it's a movie whose most salient pop cultural legacy is probably going to be that it's the one where the weird old guy cheerfully, and perhaps willfully oblivious to any of the currents of history in the last twenty or even forty years (it is also a film about time), sexually harassed a bunch of extras on the set of a movie that he has, also, dedicated to his recently-dead wife.

I did, in fact, go in with the most upbeat attitude I think it's possible to have with a director who has arguably not done justice to his talent in thirty years; it is, anyway, the first time in some time that Coppola has actually worked with a large budget (if not world-beatingly large, but $120 millionagain, of his own cash), and I had every hope that the combination of evident confidence, complete independence, and genuine resources would be translated into an insane spectacle of ideas and images if not, as was somewhat apparent as soon as it screened at Cannes, a proper story.  There's enough of the former, happily, that I would not quite describe Megalopolis as a waste of anybody's time, and by God, it's not boring, pounding away through its 138 minutesthough the manner in which it does this is really just a manifestation of its dysfunction.

It has the decency, sort of, to get through its absolute worst, sloggiest part in the first twenty of those minutes; this movie, which is close enough to "good" to count, begins just abysmally badly.  It sort of starts off like a right-wing YouTube video (also, to a discomfiting degree, formally), regarding Rome and decadence, and with Laurence Fishburne pretentiously narrating in ways that somewhat recall a character from the Matrix trilogy, but not necessarily his.  That's not really either of the bad parts.  The first bad part is that the first twenty minutes of Megalopolis looks like fucking shit: it's a movie I'm not sure ever "looks good" as far as Mihai Malaimare Jr.'s cinematography goes, going extremely overboard on what my digestion of a few Coppola B-sides over the past few weeks has reminded me has always been one of his predelictions on projects both big and small, an extreme gold tint to the color, and early on it has the pissy complexion of one of his smaller, uglier digital projects before hitting some kind of acceptable medium that is still very dubiously "okay" (and it's more a personal demon of mine, but I absolutely abhor it when digital sensors and/or framerate interacts with flashbulbs in a way that "clips" the white flash; I don't know how this works, but I'm sure you've seen it on cheap TV shows, and now you see it in a major theatrical motion picture several dozen times during a big scene).  It mainly looks like shit, in a frightening way, however, because the opening twenty minutes features a lot of Manhattan financial district location footage taken, it turns out, decades ago during one of the abortive forays towards making this movie (this may be the reason its color correction winds up with "pissy").  It's not all bad stuff, but it intercuts this predominantly with footage of some of the worst-dressed sets actually made for this iteration of the movie, and virtually undressed street scenes, and your heart may drop into your stomach at the prospect of spending the next ~110 minutes wondering how an apparently astute businessman could mismanage a self-financed film this badly, and where any of that $120 million went, because so far, this movie, which is dedicated to a full-on fantasia of New York City (one of the reasons it didn't get made years ago was 9/11), looks like Tim Burton made Batman as a guerilla film, and had given up on the concept of "production design" in favor of just making assertions in dialogue that this is Gotham City over and over.  (But I exempt, entirely, costume designer Milena Canonero, whose fashions are not only the most consistently excellent things in the movie, they're the only thing that never loses focus on a futurized Rome.  It's not just the women's head coverings, either, I adore that black cloak that lets Driver stomp around like The Colossus of New York.)


The second bad part is that Megalopolis might be a slightly long movie, but it wants to be a very long movie, and credit (I guess) where it's due, it would almost undoubtedly be better if it were.  A lot of these first twenty minutes (and this may last another twenty, honestly) is just shoveling in the characters and backstory and concepts of "New Rome" and what feels like an entirely separate Megalopolis prequel.  Besides New Rome itself, the first concept, fully inexplicable, is both the biggest and most important and the littlest and most to the side of anything else, but it does come packaged with our protagonist, master builder Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver): Cesar can stop time.  This is not a plot-related concept, except to the extent that Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), is somehow immune to this power and has discovered he has it.  Cesar's made an enemy of Cicero by heading the Design Authority of New Rome, and in Cesar's tireless efforts to create an urban paradise with architecture, he's often run up against the entrenched interests of the New Roman elite.  Of course, he's still one of them, the nephew of wealthy banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voigt), and cousin to Crassus's grandson, the whimsical yet ambitious Clodio (Shia LeBeouf), and he even keeps as his mistress the ambitious yet vengeful television news personality, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), though at some point she would've graduated to "girlfriend," given that Cesar was widowed some years before.  This event was the fracture point between he and Cicero, for as the latter was then district attorney, he already sought to destroy his incipient rival by framing that death as a murder.  Cesar passed through his persecution, and in the meantime developed mighty "megalon," a miracle building material that may be his wife's soul, and with it he now has the meanshe needs but the opportunityto make a reality of the futurist eutopian vision that has obsessed him lo these years: Megalopolis.

It is at this point that the movie even startsI mean this literally, not figurativelyand I refuse to march through the extravagantly lumpy plot except to say that it is, by a sort of default and very inorganically, a romance between Julia and our architect, so together they strive against his rivals to build Megalopolis as her father, and Clodio, and Wow all attempt to tear him down.

Now, some of this is just, "it's an art film, basically, and it's doing crazy, non-narrative shit," especially the time stopping conceit, which is purely thematic, albeit very awkwardly introduced and positioned, so that it seems like an actual superpower.  It is, instead, probably the principal (by no means only) method by which Coppola gets at the core idea of Megalopolis, concerning art itselfwhich is, as the film explains, "frozen time"and not just art, but the entire obligation of any civilization to bequeath a better, more beautiful world to the next generation.  Time-stoppage is therefore the single most important thing in a movie whose plot keeps it so uncarefully unseparated from everything else, because the final shot of the movie invokes its power and, just in time for the credits to roll, Megalopolis completely "clicked" for me in a way it hadn't for the entire previous two hours and change, meaning that this clumsy conceit made the difference between me walking out with mostly bad feelings about the movie and walking out with strained but positive ones.

As for all of the rest of it, in the aggregate, it is one of the most obtuse things you ever saw.  We could point again to New Rome, which gets better but is at all times this direly incomplete exercise innot world-building, exactly, because that's not Megalopolis's goal (ironic, ain't it?), but evoking the idea of a world.  I called it a "fantasia" earlier, which gets at it, so that it's a little like, for instance, Blade Runner, only moreso and less so simultaneously: it is also very concerned, morbidly concerned, with the notion of a civilization in terminal decline, and it wants to paint a world that, more as a matter of impressionism than hard speculative fiction, instills that feeling into you, and on this count, above all others, Megalopolis is kind of a miserable failure.  Coppola's fantasia has nothing like that vibe, or that visual panache, or that willingness to explore the decay he keeps saying threatens the whole edifice.


And it could probably have used more hard speculative fiction anyhow: it's so intentional about making New Rome just New York with pseudo-Roman set-dressingand a lot of it we get comes down to neoclassical architecture anyway, i.e. American architecturethat it's rare that it achieves "looking into a mirror, cracked" rather than a mere uncanniness and, indeed, cheapness.  The most it ever feels like tripping into an interesting alternate history is during a long, even successful sequence at, explicitly, Madison Square Garden, providing the panem et circenses on behalf of an elite wedding that involves chariot races but also performances more like American pro wrestling and Cirque du Soleil, which unfortunately also involve the worst digital compositing in a very badly-composited film.  To some extent your literalist brain might interpret this New Rome, contrary to Coppola's intentions, as a visit to a society that's already attempted and failed to make the eutopia.  It's just New York, after all, but some yahoos took it over and started calling it Rome, and adopted these Roman names that are shockingly indifferent to their own significance, considering that this is a movie that's puking allegory all over every frame, eating the puke, and regurgitating it again, to the point of badly confusing anybody who recognizes them.  There are a lot of "Julias," I'm sure, but the famous one was Augustus's own daughter, whom he exiled for sexual indecency, which is where this Julia starts but not remotely where she is by the half-hour mark, and other than Crassus (who's at least rich and ineffectual), that's the closest the movie gets to any kind of obvious connection.  "Cesar Catalina" is like the opposite of his namesakes.  (Of course, the closer you inspect the social context in which these historical figures acted, the more it prompts the question, which might be Megalopolis's highest intellectual value, "isn't America = Rome kind of a really terrible analogy?")

Its highest intellectual value certainly isn't in Cesar's... ideology is already too strong a word.  I've seen the movie described as "Randian" sometimes, and it would, bizarrely, benefit from being more.  Coppola made that movie ages ago, in 1988's Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and it's a perfectly nice story about good capitalism vs. bad capitalism (it's also a bitchy allegory about the commercial failure of Coppola's One From the Heart, but frankly, it's a much better candidate for the appellation "fable," in that it has an easy-to-grasp moral and better-positions the true story of a failed car manufacturer as a larger-than-life exemplar of the best of American culture).  Well, Megalopolis would benefit from being more of anything cognizable, anyway.  But as long as we're discussing Coppolas that this remakes, it's as much like Youth Without Youth, also about a guy pursuing a wild dream (a linguist in the search for the proto-human language) and also about forty or fifty other stray notions (Nazis, love, the boundaries of a human lifetime), and was in fact made as a sort of stopgap "small" Megalopolis (Micropolis?) that pursued ideas the same way, haphazardly and opaquely.  The good news is that Megalopolis does not have the congealed spirit of Youth Without Youth, and while both feel like "old man" movies in their way, this one at least has the energy of dementia rather than just being slow and creaky, though I tease Coppola, it probably is as much of a matter of Megalopolis having a budget 120 times larger and getting pursued as a passion rather than a thing-to-do.  (Though there's a credit that suggests Coppola fils, Roman, might've taken on a significant burden on this one.)

Anyway, I was speaking of ideology, and Coppola alone knows what Megalopolis's is, which is good (because I'm not sure I want to hear it) and bad (because the purpose of this story, such as it is, is entirely ideological, and it's incoherent without it), and it somehow winds up as didactic as a propaganda movie despite possessing no particular platform, though Driver and Esposito sure get some dialogues about the nature of man (it's the great debate: threat or menace?).  Not for nothing does its best performances come from LeBeouf and Plaza, who are just sloppy melodrammer villains (though, in fairness, LeBeouf is pretty unmistakably Trump, albeit a Trump whose neatest scene involves an extensive stint in female drag).  There is never a good sense of what Megalopolis, itself, does, which is undoubtedly intentional but also sort of a bummer, and it kind of means all of our villains and especially Cicero are right, purely by default, because our hero wants to spend untold sums of money on magic.  As far as I can tell, it's just the most godawful ugliest architectureCesar's vision of the future is an alien floral arrangement that looks completely nonfunctional and inefficient (he mentions at one point that everyone in America's largest city will have room for a garden and I surmise Coppola doesn't even understand the concept of "a city")but, it has a glowing people mover.

It does still have a plot, a lot of it, which is just jammed together in the most uncomfortable ways a plot could be, even once we've left the insane amount of exposition we need (and we didn't even get all we needed!), with a number of events having virtually no impact (a characteristic plot point is the libelous deepfake sex scandal with a minor that befalls Ceasar, which does... nothing, but I think Coppola wanted to do something with pop stars and virgin fetishism and perhaps wanted to say the word "Vestal" without any apparent comprehension of the Vestal order's peculiarities).  But, and now for the more enthusiastic part, it is a line upon which to hang a lot of style.  Not the every-last-scene style of a Dracula or a One From the Heart (or their extraordinary and more varied cinematographic treatments) but those are probably the closest touchstones*, with Coppola's interest in 1920s and 1930s stylistics leaping out all over the place, with numerous psychedelic montages and non-diegetic iconographic shots and symbolic superimpositions and (naturally) images inspired by but, remarkably, not directly lifted from Metropolis, such as Driver and Emmanuel having a conversation atop a giant horizontally-oriented clockface.  (One of Coppola's avowed influences is Menzies and Wells's counter-MetropolisThings To Come, which is 100% better at being questionably-moral futurist propaganda.)  It's not 20s or 30s-inspired, but I at least find it gratifying that it also has a surfeit of splitscreen collage.

I've seen it referred to as a silent film with dialogue, and I think that's exactly right, which is in many respects an awesome thing (it looks like nothing else, except maybe other Coppola movies) and in some, not-that-minor respects annoying as hell (a lot of the dialogue and especially the narration would feel a lot less stupid and aggravating if it were intertitles instead).  There's enough that's cool and weird here to generate a real affection in me for it, even if it consistently feels like it should be even cooler and weirderif nothing else, I had anticipated a much more off-the-wall Driver performance and funnier and more bizarrely-mannered dialogue from the clip they proudly released ("I'm entitled?"/"yes"/"I'm entitled?"/"yes"/"I'm entitled?"/"yeeeees", which is unfortunately the only part with a really actively silly voice).  Likewise, it moves from thing to thing quickly enough, even if little of it is presented clearly and much of it feels like it serves no purpose, that I would, with huge caveats, recommend it.  But hey, final shots are important.

Score: 6/10

*I have, unfortunately, not seen Twixt.

5 comments:

  1. You have plenty enough on your plate already, but I was just thinking how a Kinemalogue Coppola Filmmaker's Retrospective run would be pretty cool.

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    1. I dunno, I feel a weird and undeniably misplaced pride at being the only person on Earth who's seen Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Youth Without Youth, and Megalopolis, but none of the Godfathers.

      In my ongoing wanderings through the filmography of Fred Astaire I'll eventually have to hit Finnegan's Rainbow. This is surely unsatisfying (and I'm uncertain how wary I ought to be of watching it, anyway!).

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    2. Ooh, I wouldn't want to be responsible for you breaking that streak (er, anti-streak?), that's definitely something you'd want to decide on completely on your own!

      I'm a fairly recent convert to The Godfathers myself (though I guess it's been close to 5 years now). If Godfathers are like Star Warses (and there are indeed some weird parallels), then Part I is Star Wars (1977), Part II is the entire rest of the main saga sans the sequel trilogy (well, more like it's Empire plus all the best bits of the rest sprinkled throughout), and Part III is any one of the sequel movies except Rey is played by a random teenage girl they found working in a Taco Bell drive-thru. Also in all three Sicily = Tatooine.

      Afterwards going back to read everyone's reviews of The Godfatherses I was surprised how frequent my impression was that they didn't understand the movies as well as I did apparently?

      Anyways they're all extremely long and probably not your cup of tea. The Godfather Part II is the best one and the least boring despite being the longest, but there's a part of the plot early on that's unnecessarily confusing (it's a temporary thing and not really important, but because it doesn't feel intentional I can see it being a sticking point with you - it's one of the things Ebert took issue with in his infamous three-star review).

      But for the most part if you find yourself curious whether Godfather Part I or Part II is better but still don't want to invest six hours of your life to it, just remember that Kinemalogue blog commentator "Daf" went and found out; it's The Godfather Part II. ;)

      Hey, there's always Apocalypse Now! (Stick with the short cut)

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    3. One day I really do have to see them. They're seminal. I own the damn things, and have for years. (I may also have seen Part I as, like, a preteen, but I'm not sure if I watched the whole thing and only recall finding it boring but, you know, I was ten or eleven.) But it's close to sitting down a season of prestige television, and the thought makes my bones melt inside my body. I'm also sort of inimical to "serious gangster movies about America or something," thanks Marty, albeit also not because of Goodfellas (another "have I ever actually watched that?" movie) but Casino, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

      Laughed at "random teenage girl at the Taco Bell drive-through." The reputation of Part III does precede it.

      My recollection is preferring the Redux Cut!

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    4. I lol'ed at "season of prestige television" because it reminded me how they literally DID run the movies together as a single TV miniseries before!

      If you dug the Apocalypse Redux maybe the Godfathers might be more up your alley than I thought - my own impression was that it felt exactly like I was watching "Apocalypse Now Deleted Scenes: The Movie" which was fine but unessential.

      Oh, to be more on topic: I was looking forward to Megalopolis because I somehow got it into my head that it was a version of/ homage to the old Metropolis silent film, and I carried this notion all the way up until around the time the trailer debuted and it looked like it was more akin to something like The Fountainhead or whatever, at which point my interest instantly evaporated. Maybe I'll see it sometime, but your review doesn't encourage me to hurry!

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