Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola's final magnum opus would fill me with rage if there were enough of a film here to get emotional about. While Megalopolis recalls recent infuriatingly awful movies like Babylon and Jupiter Ascending, it is far too insignificant a picture to be placed in such disreputable company. Coppola's collage of various forms of artificiality, historical Cliffnotes, and stale philosophy is as pure a work of auteurist cinema as his buddy George's The Phantom Menace. The "story" centers on a genius artist who wants to singlehandedly perfect something that can only be created by a massive collective of individuals and elements, often working at cross-purposes but ultimately uniting in a common magnificent endeavor. Unfortunately, neither the protagonist of Megalopolis, futuristic architect Cesar Catilina, nor its visionary writer, producer, and director seem to understand that a single dude with flashy new technology can not will into being something as large, complex, and magnificent as a city or an epic film through the shear force of their own will and artistic brilliance. It always ends up an unwieldy mess.

What happened to Coppola over his storied career—a career truly unlike any other filmmaker? Did he just peak too early? Was he simply the biggest victim of the auteurist hubris that infected his generation of movie directors? Between 1971 and 1974 alone, he helmed two Best Picture winners, won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Patton and the Best Director Oscar for The Godfather Part II (and this was during an era when those awards actually went to the best pictures), as well as producing George Lucas's smash hit American Graffiti, and writing and directing arguably his own best picture The Conversation. So yeah, maybe he just got bored with a form in which he obviously excelled to such an unprecedented degree. Still, why not continue to make great movies the way he had been? Why this need to reinvent the form, become his own studio, and indulge in endless experimentation in a quixotic attempt to find "a better way" to do something he already did brilliantly?

Coppola believed that in order to make a film about a guy who travels to the jungle and goes insane, he needed to travel to the jungle and go insane himself. He came back from making Apocalypse Now with the idea that he should have hands-on jurisdiction over every single aspect of film production. Rejecting the idea of studio control over everything, he decided he had to become a studio so he could control everything. But he didn't just set up a small alternative operation outside Hollywood; he tried to internalize Hollywood and become both an artist and an old-school studio mogul—buying up huge soundstages and vast stashes of equipment, signing actors to multi-year contracts, and hiring former studio legends to act as in-house consultants. Then he gets the crazy idea that the best way to make films is as if they were live television, with the ultimate goal being movies that are performed in real-time in front of multiple cameras, where all the actors and technical crew are rehearsed to the point where every frame of the picture could be shot in a single day.

When these insane ideas bankrupted him after the spectacular commercial failure of his one-of-a-kind musical One From The Heart, he had to start doing a movie a year to keep his creditors at bay. But instead of focusing on making exceptional little pictures like his heroes from the post-WWII European new waves, he decided that videotape was the next cool thing, and he used many of his '80s productions to experiment with the smaller scale but still exciting new toys of video cameras, chroma-keying, and analog tape editing. He directed several projects of this era, like The Outsiders, from his tricked-out Airstream RV, "The Silverfish," as if he were directing an awards show instead of an intimate film about the fragile emotions of teenagers.

Coppola and producer/casting director Fred Roos would spend endless months on auditions and then have his casts spend hours together improvising, playing theater games and team sports, and listening to period music so they'd feel like a real company. He'd pre-shoot and edit almost an entire film on video in front of green screens as a dry run and then go out of his way to shoot the real film in chronological order. All this was supposed to help achieve a kind of authenticity and lived history among the carefully selected cast. But then, he'd piss that all away with truncated post-production periods. He cut nearly all of the carefully worked-out relationships he spent so much time developing in The Outsiders when test audiences told him his movie played too long and too gay. Then, he shredded his complex ensemble musical period epic The Cotten Club down to a contrived short story when the distributors wanted a film with a more traditional structure. All hale the great auteur!

But why not acquiesce to the prevailing winds of the time? After all, a couple of decades later, he could go back and recut his movies with the type of care and intentionality he neglected to give them when it counted. He eventually did this with both The Outsiders and The Cotton Club, and even the film many consider his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. I have never believed it reflects well on a self-proclaimed auteur/artist when they ask an audience to embrace their "do-over" version of a picture, especially when they were their own studio and had final cut in the first place, as was the case with most of the films Coppola has gone back and tweaked in the past couple of decades—Apocalypse Now, One From the Heart, The Outsiders, The Godfather Part III, and even his most recent little fantasy horror film Twixt. That 2011 movie was largely funded with his own money and made independently using prosumer video tools so he would not have to compromise his vision. But he was clearly stung when it received boos and jeers at a Comic Con screening. Why should someone who considers themselves a cinematic artist give a shit what a bunch of nerds dressed up as superheroes think of his work?

Revisionary director's cuts are the maddening legacy of so many of the great filmmakers of Coppola's generation. He and George Lucas embody the two roads this type of arrogant grandiosity almost inevitably leads down. Lucas succeeded in turning himself into the type of corporation he was fighting against but never went on to direct any of the personal experimental movies he always claimed he wanted to make (only returning to actual filmmaking twenty years after he'd done his best work and then devoting most of his time to endlessly tinkering with those earlier achievements). Coppola could not fully transcend the type of corporation he was fighting against and opted to make many small to medium-sized films, sometimes as a director for hire but more often as his own producer and sometimes as a screenwriter to pay his debts. Many of these movies—Peggy Sue Got Married, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Rainmaker—are pretty terrific pictures. Unlike Lucas, he did later turn to making the type of small personal films that reflected his own passions and proclivities—Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt/B'Twixt Now and Sunrise—but he also devoted much of his later day filmmaking time to tinkering with his past achievements.

Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I'll never understand the hubris or even the desire to bend an art form to fit the standards and aesthetics of an individual rather than for an individual to surrender their aesthetics to their chosen art form (and the business of that art form). But Francis Coppola has done both and is still doing both! One has to admire the singularity and eccentricity of his career. I also hold him in high regard for the way he used his clout and power in Hollywood to champion other filmmakers, serving as producer for many of his friends, like Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader, Caleb Deschanel, Carroll Ballard, Walter Murch, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro; younger directors like Victor Salva, Jeremy Leven, Gregory Nava, Agnieszka Holland, Hal Heartly, and Bill Condon; his kids, Sofia and Roman, and even one of his idols, Akira Kurosawa when the Japanese legend couldn't secure funding to make one of his dream projects.

Similarly, I tip my hat to Megalopolis star Adam Driver, whose artistry, star power, and distinctly uncomplicated, unmethod approach to acting has enabled so many legendary older filmmakers to realize their long-gestating, difficult-to-finance dream projects—Martin Scorsese's Silence, Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Michael Mann's Ferrari, and now Megalopolis. Regardless of what I think about these movies, they were worthwhile uses of Driver's time and considerable talent. Still, not only can I not applaud Coppola's go-for-broke gamble on himself; it kind of breaks my heart to see the great filmmaker apply the same DIY approach he took with his recent batch of small personal movies to his half-century-long-dreamed-of epic. When spending $120 million, mostly from the money he made in the wine business, maybe bring on a solid collaborator or two. While making his latest, probably final, project, he was clearly surrounded by enablers who never questioned or pushed back on any of his ideas or whims. No great picture has ever been made this way; quite the opposite.

Many in the film and fan community will rally around Megalopolis as if it is our duty to support the mad genius who risked his fortune and legacy on such a personal vision. But, come on. Why should this type of incompetent excess be celebrated or even excused? One thing I've always admired about Coppola's younger contemporary, Steven Spielberg, is that he's never placed himself above his chosen medium, nor has he expected an audience to. Since Spielberg is such a successful, populist filmmaker, no one thinks twice about pointing out when he makes a terrible picture—and the guy has certainly been responsible for some real stinkers in his day, as have all prolific filmmakers. Why treat Coppola, the elder statesman of the original film-school school generation of movie brats, any differently? In my view, a film should always judged first and foremost by what we see on-screen; the intention or process behind it should never be our first, second, or even third thought. If it is, that's the dead giveaway that the picture failed to stand on its own.