Francis Ford Coppola is one of my all-time favorite film makers. "The Godfather", "Godfather Part II", "The Conversation", "Apocalypse Now", hell, I even loved his first mainstream film "Finian's Rainbow"!
I've really been looking forward to seeing his self-financed, $120 million fable, MEGALOPOLIS for myself. It's been adored by some and shunned by others, there seems to be little middle ground.
As for me....
I just walked out of the theater a half hour ago and I'm trying to figure out what the hell I watched.
I laughed aloud at funny dialogue, I admired some of the visuals, I damn near slept as long stretches of the non-sensical first hour bored me to death. I also cringed as some of the dialogue landed with a thud, way off the mark as drama and nowhere near a bullseye as satire.
This is a very strange film.
Strange can be good. Mysterious can be fun. Satire can be biting AND hilarious.
But what the hell is this?
I'm a big Adam Driver fan, but he seems ill-cast as Cesar Catalina, a brilliant engineer/artist, city developer who dreams big. He wants to turn the current city of New York, oops I mean "New Rome" into a Utopian civilization for all.
His biggest opponent is the Mayor, Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) whose vision is more traditionally based in power & greed.
Circling these two are a maddening and bizarre cast of characters.
Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) absolutely steals the movie from all the big name actors as Julia Cicero, daughter of the Mayor and an ever growing fan of Cesar.
Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) overacts on a massive scale as TV host Wow Platinum. I guess with a name like "Wow" she's got to swing for the fences, but Plaza is all over the place.
She's positively staid compared to Shia LaBeouf as Cesar's power hungry cousin Clodio. I feel like Coppola sat in a room with Shia, did peyote for a month, wound him up and let him go. LeBeouf is hilariously shot out of a cannon, but it wears very thin, very fast. And he's on screen for a lot of the 142 minute running time.
Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwatzman are completely wasted in glorified cameos. At least Jon Voight gets a strong final act as the President of a Bank that Clodio & Wow have their sights set on. But even his final scene has a strange, bloody comedic tone.
Laurence Fishburne stars as Fundi Romaine (more peyote please, these names are killing me) Cesar's right hand man and our narrator.
Fishburne not only narrates, he reads many of the big platitudes that Coppola places on massive stone engravings to start different sections of the film.
Let's talk about the positives.
Coppola has always been a visual genius. His special effects in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" were a revelation of shadow play, models and physical effects in the face of CGI. He masterfully uses the same playbook here, while also using CGI for some of the larger set pieces in the new city. There were moments that were brilliant.
The shadows of citizens cringing against monuments as an object falls from the sky, conjuring up the feel of a modern day Pompeii.
Huge sculptures depicting Justice move and portray emotion.
Madison Square Garden is a modern day coliseum complete with Chariot races.
Sadly, the brilliant moments are fleeting.
The Roman allegory around the decline of the US is heavy handed. I could see what Coppola was trying to say, and I appreciate it, but I never felt it.
Osvaldo Golijov's music score is part Sinbad movie, part gladiator movie and part death march.
The last hour (except for the last scene) is by far the best part of the film as the clash of power and the future of New Rome and Cesar come into focus. But every time the film threatens to pull you in, Shia LeBeouf strolls in wearing a dress or acting like Jerry Lewis and you're pulled out of the film again.
By the time LeBeouf and Plaza were engaged in a graphic sex scene that slowly morphed into a murder plot in a bathhouse, I felt a very long way from Coppola's incredible gifts as a storyteller that we've seen so many times in the past 50 years.
Coppola has always been a master at pulling the best performances out of his massive casts. This feels sloppy, unfocused, more like a first film by a freshman film student wanting to make what he thinks an "art film" than the informative fable Coppola had in mind.
His split screen work here starts off like Frankenheimer's "Grand Prix" and devolves into DePalma's "Body Double".
And the final scene in Times Square on New Year's Eve. It's the exact ending a young Coppola would have battled against studios about, refusing to close the story that way. No spoilers, so I'll say no more, but see if you agree with me.
Often when I see strange films that challenge me, I can't wait to see them again.
An hour later, I am in no hurry to experience Megalopolis again.
I'd like to say that even lesser Coppola is better than most films, but for the first time, I'm not sure that's true anymore.
This MegaMess sadly gets a C-.
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