OCCULT AUTEUR AGONISTES: Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ & 'Cotton Club'
The Horror. The Horror.
“Aww, what's the difference, 100 or 100 million? It's the idea that counts. The dream.” — Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man & His Dream
“Don’t let the now destroy the forever.” — Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis
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I wanted to like it. I wanted to like it so much. But.
Francis Ford Coppola’s white elephant and turkey at the same time Megalopolis is such a frustrating major motion picture. It aims so high, shooting for time-transcending movie magic, a cineaste’s dream on the screen, but whiffs harder than a lineup of Caseys. It’s hugely ambitious and has its heart in the right place, but the 85-year old Occult Auteur brain responsible for it is scattered and abstruse.
Creatively, it’s not an utter and complete failure, which is one key frustration about it. There are mesmerizing scenes with dreamily stunning visuals (I saw it in IMAX, and would assert that is the only way to do it; this movie needs all the help it can get). The film introduces intriguing societal, artistic and humanist themes via intellectually provocative monologues and philosophical verbal exchanges. The half-real/half-futuristic urban setting is cool.
But Megalopolis is also messily plotted and bombastic as hell, while sporadically and then often dramatically inert and a bore. It’s overlong and overloaded with subplots and sudden twists that either go nowhere or crash into a wall and stop. It contains painfully bad dialog that clanks hard. Perhaps most fatal of all, a mishmash of miscast thespians and awkwardly clashing performances make losing yourself in the story impossible.
After an intriguing first act that does a decent job of world-building the fantasy elements, Coppola’s self-financed independent film goes off the rails, and not gradually. Megalopolis is subtitled “A Fable,” and I at first successfully tried to roll with the surreality of the fairy tale-ish story and its mix of players set in “New Rome” (for all intents and purposes ersatz New York City). New Rome is home to the story’s two lead (and competing) characters: a genius Artist and architect named Cesar Catilina and the power-hungry Mayor Frank Cicero, played by Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito respectively. Caught between them is the mayor’s beautiful daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who lives a shallow nightclub lifestyle but longs for more.
The fable/fantasy part of the story is that Driver’s artist architect can stop Time, like all true Artists, the film implies. No one knows Cesar’s occult secret…until the mayor’s daughter discovers she is the only one alive who remains unaffected when the clock stops, and can witness it. Fascinated now by the architect, yet hesitant to betray her father, the mayor’s daughter reaches out to the iconoclastic man-out-of-time, perhaps as his modern Muse…
If the love story worked, the movie might work even with all its other flaws, but it doesn’t so it doesn’t. Adam Driver is not a romantic leading man, sorry, he’s a character actor, and sparks no chemistry with the superbly gorgeous Nathalie Emmanuel (who I always thought the most beautiful woman on Game of Thrones, a show packed with beautiful women). I’ve been rooting for her, and wish she gave a breakout performance in this movie, something stronger than serviceable, which is what we get. I’m not sure it’s Ms. Emmanuel’s fault; she’s not a bad actress, emits empathy effectively, and the camera loves her flawless face because how could you not. Yet all her key scenes with the badly miscast Driver — like the Big Reveal when he discovers that she knows he can stop Time — should crackle with electric epiphany, but go meh instead.
Because of the lack of chemistry among the key cast, scenes of payoff and satisfaction just sort of happen, and they keep “just happening,” yawn. The romantic leads’ first big kiss should be a magical movie moment, and if there was any chemistry between them, I think it would have been. Coppola frames the shot so well, larger than life, metal beams aloft, cityscape below, music soaring…but this pair is just a total love match dud, so whatever.
Another of my fave Cult actresses who has suddenly become ubiquitous Aubrey Plaza is not put to good use here, either, trying real hard, too hard, as a cut-throat TV talking head named Wow Platinum, “The Money Bunny.” It’s an over-the top performance that doesn’t really gel with the rest of the cast, and kind of an embarrassment of a role. Though nothing compared to the humiliation ritual Shia LeBoeuf gets put through as the spoiled degenerate cross-dressing nephew of an elderly finance and banking billionaire (played by Jon Voight, looking a lot older than he did as a Russian spy in Reagan), who foolishly marries the money, power and status-seeking Wow Platinum.
Lawrence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Talia Shire, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney and other familiar Hollywood faces dot the supporting cast in roles imbued with varying degrees of societal metaphor and often clashing acting styles.
Was everyone here allowed to do their own thing? Interpret the material and role however they wanted? Or did Coppola direct them in this way? Either answer, the result is unfortunate entertainment failure.
The discordant and out-of-whack performances are a big problem for Megalopolis, and it’s one mega-reason it’s tough to care enough to follow along with the escalatingly chaotic story. Some talent plays it broadly like “The Fable” Coppola tells us this tale is, but others, like Ms. Plaza and Shia, take it over-the-top into camp. Meanwhile Driver either chooses or was told to play his protagonist like Ayn Rand wrote Shakespeare, while Esposito plays the mayor almost totally straight-ahead and safe, and probably walks away least scathed yet also least memorable. But it’s the absent chemistry between the romantic leads that’s the big emotional anchor that sinks the production like a hollow leaden heart.
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But there’s a lot more wrong that that. Crazy shit happens in this movie with almost no consequences: There’s a big long set piece with somebody being sent to jail, O no! Big Twist! But then they’re out free the next day, charges dropped. A character gets shot in the face but turns out to be juuuuust fine. Subplots and characters enter, seem important, but then vanish for long periods, or forever. The metaphors get too obvious and heavy, like the virginal pop star who wears groundbreaking transparent clothing technology that reads “You can see right through me.” Yes, yes, FFS FFC, we get it.
Megalopolis does boast a slew of arresting visual images, some of which gave me creepy predictive programming vibes. After about the third one in the first half hour, I wished I’d brought a notebook to jot down some of the subtle and not-at-all imagery. From Roman symbology to controlled demolitions to the film’s closing shot in front of what looks like the monolith from 2001 overlaid by rainbow fireworks, I repeatedly thought to myself: “What else is actually going on here?” I wonder how certain carefully orchestrated images captured in this film are going to look to people in a decade or two. If anyone remembers Megalopolis as more than an expensive and pretentious piffle, a poorly drawn asterisk at the end of an all-time great career, that is. Time will tell!
But I think it could’ve been more than an asterisk. I ackshully think Megalopolis coulda been a contenduh. It honestly might’ve worked if it was more deftly cast and that cast was better in tune with the director and the material and the storytelling tone. It desperately needed a leading man more in line with a handsome classy old Hollywood throwback type, a real Movie Star, not a character actor who’s not even as good looking as Dustin Hoffman in the 1970s.
I also wonder if there might be a good 85-90 minute scrumptious visual romantic fantasy version of Megalopolis, with tons of the subplots and digressive bullshit cut out and rejiggering the narrative chronology, ending with the big kiss, cut to fireworks display. Who knows? It’s unsalvagable now, and Driver in the lead role probably makes it forever so. Humphrey Bogart wasn’t handsome either, but Adam Driver ain’t Bogart.
Then again…who knows? Perhaps Time and Coppola will have the last laugh, and in two decades we’ll all realize we fumbled the new misunderstood Apocalypse Now. Even as the guy who normally says, “I Know Nothing!” though, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
BUT WAIT…There’s More! If you skip Megalopolis but want a nice P.S. on Francis Ford Coppola’s career, I highly recommend The Cotton Club: Encore, the 2019 revised, re-edited and restructured improvement of Coppola’s troubled (to say the least!) 1984 musical/romance/gangster flick about the titular legendary/notorious 1920s-30s jazz nightclub in Harlem, where wealthy white New Yorkers would travel uptown to be entertained by black performers.
The disastrous (and deadly!) production history of Coppola’s The Cotton Club is worth a Substack in and of itself, without even considering whether the movie is worthy-or-not entertainment. You could write a book about the crazy deadly back room fockery — in fact, a book has been written about it: Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and ‘The Cotton Club’ Murder, by Steve Wick.
Sticking strictly to the film’s artistic value, and taking all the real life gangster and criminal behaviors — from money laundering to drug dealing to murder — off the table, like a lot of Coppola’s films, The Cotton Club had serious budget overruns during production. The Oscar-winning director lost control of final cut and the studio re-jiggered roughly 25% of the film, cutting several musical sequences and changing the story’s racially balanced character focus to one where all white characters were central.
Coppola’s original vision (first scripted by The Godfather author Mario Puzo — have you read Puzo’s Fools Die? Amazing!) before the studio got their hands and scissors on it, saw a story mostly equally told among four protagonists. Two white and two black, two men and two women: A rising white trumpet player (Richard Gere) and the gangster’s moll (Diane Lane) he secretly romances; and a black tap-dancer (Gregory Hines) ardently pursuing a stunning mixed-raced singer (Lonette McKee) who passes for white and dreams of mainstream Broadway acceptance.
The Orion studio version cut out most of the backstage drama and several musical numbers, made Gregory Hines a supporting player and eliminated McKee nearly entirely. Instead, the final 1984 product was a gangster flick starring the then-red-hot Gere as an ambitious musician with not much of a moral code and in cahoots with the Mafia because it helps his career — which becomes precarious as he falls in love with the GF of real-life Jewish-American kingpin mobster Dutch Schultz.
I liked The Cotton Club in 1984, it was on my Honorable Mention list a few clicks down from the year's 10 Best. There was something exciting and transportive about it, even though I recognized the version I saw was choppy and rather shallow. What remained of the film still had snap and pop and verve, and I felt rather, uh, jazzed when it was over. Coppola, through all the clunks and clanks and not particularly interesting characters, made an electric film despite all the interference.
The Cotton Club: Encore is a definite improvement. It’s about 15 minutes longer, with 27 added minutes and 13 minutes excised from the original studio cut. There are several excellent newly added musical numbers — Ms. McKee’s a standout — and the character balance is much more in synch, while the immaculately detailed period set design, fluid direction, fast narrative pace and lush cinematography remain the film’s greatest assets.
The movie’s crammed with recognizable talent, some of them very early in their careers, some of them retro players from the period: Coppola’s nephew Nic Cage, Lawrence Fishburne, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Gwen Verdon, Fred Gwynne, Tom Waits, Jennifer Gray, on and on.
Unfortunately, despite the huge cast, nobody’s character or performance goes deep, with Gere’s the most glaring: Handsome and hunky as hell, yet he’s just not that interesting a guy. Same for the lovely Lane, whose murky motivations I never fully understood. Hines and McKee are much easier to grok: Both want to be successful and famous, he resents that she can pass for white and will thus likely outshine him. That’s a compelling romantic conflict.
Other than that, though, everybody’s got flimsy personal history and motivations, inside the larger and more intriguing narrative about all these shallow stories crashing together at a vibrant and volatile creative time in New York City’s history.
Even though The Cotton Club: Encore still isn’t a great movie, I recommend it highly. It is hugely entertaining, full of energy, obviously directed by a significant talent, and the musical sequences at the club (and one impromptu love song) are at times intoxicating. While the characters aren’t all that enthralling and Gere feels badly underwritten and mildly miscast, nobody’s a bore — the movie moves way too quickly for that — and several glow on screen like a million bucks. It’s Coppola in top-notch commercial Hollywood mode, a multiplex crowd-pleaser like The Rainmaker or Peggy Sue Got Married. It just took him 35 years to get it right. Maybe we’ll say the same about the 90-minute cut of Megalopolis in 2059?
"the superbly gorgeous Nathalie Emmanuel (who I always thought the most beautiful woman on Game of Thrones, a show packed with beautiful women"
I couldn't remember which character she was so I looked her up and.... meh. Mid at best. And like all racial mutts, there's something off about her. And sorry world, but mixed-race romances don't work on screen, despite their being forced on us everywhere we look (name one that worked). The only odd part of this one is that the guy is white and the woman latte. Usually we're forced to see the black buck with the gorgeous white girl.
Aubrey Plaza is very beautiful (way way WAY more beautiful than Emmanuel) but she's an odd ball who can only ever succeed at playing oddballs.
Anyway, what do I care, I'm never going to see this movie, but I did very much enjoy your review.