So I bit the bullet, summoned up my courage (no Dutch courage was involved, alas) and saw "Megalopolis" yesterday afternoon. (My wife and I were the only people seated in a surprisingly large theater in the suburbs of Fort Worth that was otherwise empty.) My first impressions: It’s bad, but in a bonkers, utterly pretentious sort of way, and in that sense, if you’re at all curious, go see it on the big screen – it probably won’t be there for much longer.
In what could well be his last film, Francis Ford Coppola, 85, boldly goes where Star Trek has gone before, but with $120 million more to spend on his cast and visuals than the 1966-era Trek could afford, envisioning present day America (specifically New York City in Coppola’s case) as a 20-minutes into the future version of Imperial Rome.
It's also a 21st-century retelling of Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead," as John Podhoretz notes at the Washington Free Beacon, asking “How can a great artist make something this bad?”
The architect from The Fountainhead, here called Cesar Catilina [Adam Driver], is at odds with the mayor, Frank Cicero [Giancarlo Esposito]. New Rome is awash in decadence. Catilina wants to build a new city in its place using a new material he invented called Megalon, for which he has won the Nobel Prize. Cicero doesn’t want him to build a new city. A whole bunch of other people are also against Catilina, who has the power to stop time but doesn’t seem to use it very often or to any purpose.
There’s a chariot race in Madison Square Garden (because New Rome is actually New York, kind of). Dustin Hoffman is a gangster, and Jon Voight is a banker, though why they’re in the movie is anybody’s guess, though they do match up a bit with characters in the Roman conspiracy. A slinky siren named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) tries to hypnotize men with a diamond bracelet. A virginal teen chanteuse named Vesta is seen having sex with Catilina, which is evidently bad. Eventually everything works out and the new city is built—it looks like the chocolate room in Willy Wonka—and the movie ends with an onscreen version of the Pledge of Allegiance, which Coppola rewrites as a pledge of allegiance not to the flag but to all humanity.
As I said, the movie cost $120 million, and I feel like Coppola was somehow had by the people who helped him set up the budget and spend the money, because it looks absolutely terrible. Not to bring up Ayn Rand again, but the movie it most resembles is the execrable three-part version of Atlas Shrugged released a decade ago. The color scheme is the same, as is the horrible rear-projection work, and the entire cost for those six hours was around $20 million. Every dollar isn’t on the screen, is what I am saying, and that’s putting it mildly.
Get Woke, Go...
In his post titled “Megaflopolis,” Ace of Spades quotes from a reader who wonders if Coppola thought that maybe making a 21st-century remake of an Ayn Rand novel may not play very well to the woke audiences and critics he wanted to please but perhaps only after numerous scenes had already been filmed:
It's a very well-shot, occasionally nicely directed complete failure where everyone's, and I mean everyone's dialog sounds like Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz dialogue from "Apocalypse Now". ie. full of little snippets of poetry or plays to sound all 'intellectual" and all the way a mid-wit thinks geniuses speak.
Though a few individual scenes might work, it's just a big mess.
The funniest thing is that the protagonist is more or less a funhouse version of Trump/Elon Musk and the antagonists funhouse versions of Democrat politicians and antifa/blm. Only Coppola to his horror does not realize this until the movie is about to end.
So he loads up faux-antifa with "Make New Rome Great Again" signs, and gives his Democrat standing some "Trump-speak" in the last few minutes but the cherry on the top is-
A New Globalist/Greentard Pledge of Allegiance to the Planet delivered by a children's chorus and printed IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS on the screen.
*chef's kiss*
it really is the perfect end.
Hilariously sad. Wait till it streams for "free" to see.
A similar situation occurred recently to another octogenarian superstar director. In a January edition of the GloP podcast at Ricochet, John Podhoretz discussed how Leonardo DiCaprio wound up being very badly miscast in Martin Scorsese’s then-recent "The Killers of the Flower Moon" for contemporary PC-reasons:
DiCaprio is literally 25 years too old for his part. He is playing a returning World War One veteran, and he is 48 years old!
* * * * * * * *
You know It's like, are you kidding me? And he wasn't supposed to play that part. That's the great story of the movie! They were gonna make the movie as David Grann’s book is written, which is about one of founding events of the FBI. [Which] was an investigation into this death spree in Osage County in Oklahoma that an agent named [Thomas Bruce] White was sent out to Oklahoma to investigate, and figured out that this family mafia was marrying and killing off women who had rights to land where oil was located, and they were they were seizing them essentially through marriage and then killing off the women. And this was such an amazing feat of investigative brilliance that it help make the FBI.
And that's the part that DiCaprio was supposed to play. And then literally Black Lives Matter happens, and he and Scorsese look at each other and they're like, we're telling the wrong story! We're telling a white savior story!
We can't tell that. We have to tell a story about the viciousness and monstrous behavior toward the Native Americans. And therefore, we have to turn this around, and not introduce the FBI until like two and a half hours into the movie. And then Leo, you're still lead because you're the reason we can sell the movie to Apple for $200 million.
You have to play the villain, who's an idiot, unattractive character and uninteresting. And he's like, okay! And the movie is then rewritten into this story about a moron and his vicious uncle, doing terrible things to these Osage women that they also supposed are supposed to like, for three and a half hours. Yeah, it's a disgrace.
The Horror. The Horror: "Megalopolis" Now
So did Coppola realize too late into shooting "Megalopolis" that he was making a “Great Man” movie about an Elon Musk and Trump-ish character in an era where leftists hate with a passion the notion of Great Men? (And Musk and Trump in particular, needless to say.) If you’ve ever seen "Hearts of Darkness," George Hickenlooper’s brilliant documentary about Coppola shooting "Apocalypse Now" in the Philippines, rewriting John Milius’ script each day and improving the ending with Marlon Brando, you know what a tortured production Coppola put his crew and actors through. Yet miraculously, in spite of it all, Coppola emerged with one of the greatest war films ever made.
History does not repeat here; "Megalopolis," with its great cast, fails the Gene Siskel test of a good movie very badly. Siskel famously wrote, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” I’d much rather watch a documentary of this cast hanging out with Coppola.
And speaking of documentaries, I’d love to see a version of Hearts of Darkness, or read a making of Megalopolis book that’s as meaty as Julie Salamon’s "The Devil’s Candy", (which focused on Brian De Palma's 1990 gargantuan flop PC-addled big screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities") to learn how much Coppola was improvising and rewriting, and making things up on the fly to shape his new movie. For its first three quarters, Jon Voight’s character seems like an obvious stand-in for Donald Trump. Voight, who is one of the few open Trump supporters in Hollywood, plays the richest man in New Rome, wearing a blonde wig that appears very Trump-like. Yet three quarters of the way into the film, a populist uprising takes place led by Shia LaBeouf, with Confederate and (gasp!) Betsy Ross flags prominently on display. (Maybe some of the rioters are Philadelphia 76ers fans who took NJ Transit into the city.)
Regarding the movie, left-leaning architectural critic Josh Stephens described “The Brilliant, Unhinged Spectacle of Megalopolis:”
Ayn Rand’s well-known screeds, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, contribute heartily to Catilina’s flimsy character: the brilliant, insufferable architect and the supergenius who invents a wonder material that can be used to heal bullet wounds, build skyscrapers, and power luminescent moving walkways. (On that count, Catilina seems to have made a few trips to Wakanda.) The difference between Howard Roak, John Galt, and Catilina is that Catilina is genuinely benevolent: he wants his designs and materials to uplift the masses. In other words, he’s delusional.
Coppola pays homage to fellow octogenarian Robert Caro. Catilina is presented as an alternative-reality version of Robert Moses: an inexplicably powerful, but unelected, city official. He has the look of Frank Lloyd Wright, waving his cape as he strides purposefully into the future. (More accurately, Catilina isn’t so much an architect as he is a planner, materials scientist, and huge bore.) He’s also awkward and dorky, disingenuously suave, and a fan of recreational drugs, and he wears every shade of black imaginable. Not unlike a certain petulant industrialist we all know.
Essentially, Catilina proposes for New Rome an updated version of mid-20th century urban renewal—although it’s not clear whether Coppola actually supports slum clearance or is simply daydreaming. Not coincidentally, he would have lived through the era of the great bulldozings and surely remembers it well. At best, Catilina’s plan is a metaphor for human creativity and unattainable benevolence. His other quirk is that he can stop time, which is a metaphor for the fact that humans cannot, in fact, stop time.
In his review of the “Incoherently idealistic” "Megalopolis" at the Bulwark, Sonny Bunch wrote:
Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily make the case that it’s a fairly straightforwardly fascist tale about the needs of a brilliant leader to guide the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck in which they wallow and into a brighter future, democracy be damned.
The Original "Perfect School-City"
It really is. Beyond his mystical and largely unexplained “Megalon” MacGuffin, Catilina is basically a futuristic version of Le Corbusier, who in the 1920s proposed leveling Paris to create his own version of what Catilina describes in "Megalopolis" as his “perfect school-city:”
Charles-Edouard Jeannet, better known as Le Corbusier, was one of the 20th century’s more formidable architects. The Villa Savoye, High Court of Chandigarh, Unité d’Habitation, Notre Dame du Haut, and others still remain iconic. But his greatest (in terms of influence, be it good or bad) legacy lies in urban planning, in both public housing and imagining a car-filled city.
His urban planning ideas were to quite simply, as William JR Curtis notes in Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, “save the industrial city from disaster.”
And what did this savior have in mind for Paris in the early 1920s? Total destruction of several square miles on the Right Bank including one of Paris’s most popular neighborhoods—the Marais. And in its place, 18 glass towers.
The then-disease-plagued Marais (which was also historically its Jewish quarter) would be replaced by a gridded phalanx of 18 cruciform office towers over several square miles. The towers would sit in a multi-tiered park. One level was an immense amount of green space. Another level was for transportation. An airport was even included in the designs. Low-rise residential and government buildings appear in the northern corners and along the river.
Utopian thinking was intertwined with architecture. Architect Le Corbusier tried to demolish swathes of Paris to build uniform, concrete monoliths:
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) June 18, 2024
"We must create a mass-production state of mind… a state of mind for living in mass-production housing." pic.twitter.com/0j5dbEQjOM
Corbu wanted to flatten Paris’ Jewish quarter? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the “Progressive” modern architect was described in 2015 as an “outright fascist” by Xavier de Jarcy and Francois Chaslin, his French biographers:
Mr Jarcy said that in “Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in “Prelude” co-wrote “hateful editorials”.
In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”
Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.
The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.
Corbusier only saw two buildings bearing his imprimatur completed in the U.S. He was part of the architectural committee who designed the UN building in New York in 1948, and he designed the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts building at Yale in 1962. However, Corbusier’s urban planning concepts were enormously influential on American urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, with invariably disastrous results. Jane Jacobs’ influential book 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is essentially a real-world rebuttal to his architectural and urban planning fantasies.
Apologies for the architectural tangent. Getting back to filmmaking, in the 1970s, Coppola had one of the most brilliant and sustained runs of any major director, winning the Oscar for co-writing "Patton," and then directing "The Conversation," "Apocalypse Now," and of course, the first two "Godfather" movies. Regarding those last two films, Podhoretz writes:
As it is, he will always be remembered for the two greatest films ever made. Either he understood he would never be able to do anything remotely as good again and so determined to test himself for the rest of his life in areas in which he had no real gift, or he is a person with no understanding of himself whatsoever. Or he went off his meds.
The insanity that is "Megalopolis," despite being one from the heart (in more ways than one), leans strongly towards that conclusion. Still though, in an era of largely interchangeable spaceship and superhero sequels, as Sonny Bunch writes:
Megalopolis isn’t a good movie, precisely—I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels as both standard storytelling and airy metaphor—but I’m glad it exists and happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve consumed over the years helped in some small way to will this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.
You may want to pour yourself a couple of large glasses of Coppola’s wine as well – one to celebrate that one of the 1970s’ greatest directors is still making movies, the other just to get through seeing what he has wrought without Mario Puzo or John Milius pitching in first at the typewriter.
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