Francis Ford Coppola’s legacy is built on his long-ago big swing, massively lavish epics. But how has an extended hiatus positioned the sometime visionary master director to deliver what seems to be his swansong Megalopolis?
Bear in mind that the auteur has hedged all his bets on what sounded like pie in the sky ideas throughout his career. And he’s pulled off moon landings before. There are The Godfather films (even if you insist on only counting the first two), and Apocalypse Now, and there’s a case for saying that Bram Stoker’s Dracula should be reappraised as some kind of masterpiece, whatever its flaws. And yes, between these achievements, it’s easy to forget his explosive car crashes like One from the Heart (1982) which effectively derailed Coppola’s career and the finances that would enable it for many years though he still worked consistently throughout the 90s. His golden era is classic and untouchable, but One from the Heart and his subsequent failures have scarred his credibility after this period with the asterisk of the has-been master who has ceased to deliver or have any reliability. Since The Rainmaker in 1997, Coppola has released only three films, none of which garnered critical praise or created any public fanfare.
So it was in the midst of his slew of 80s commercial flops and the critical bewilderment about how he could have lost it that Coppola first conceived Megalopolis, and he’s been trying to get it made ever since. It was shopped around but not a single studio was interested. Alas, it has been completely self-financed and was, in fact, funded by Coppola organizing a winery merger (of all things).
How could it be that no studio would back a spectacle with this degree of originality from one of the greatest living filmmakers? It’s hard to believe in a world where his eminent contemporary Martin Scorcese secured $200 million from Apple for Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and Netflix paid anywhere between one hundred and forty and two hundred million for The Irishman (2019). It didn’t seem to matter that neither film scooped up any major awards or made a profit. So these crime sagas are expensive beyond belief but Hollywood must feel they remain a safer bet than the extraordinarily lofty and eccentric Megalopolis.
Then again, Kevin Costner – the multi-talented director of Dances with Wolves (1990) and star of The Untouchables (1987) – secured financing from Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema, alongside the $38 million he chipped in of his own after selling one of his properties, to make his own elected passion project, Horizon: An American Saga.
But here again we have a story of personal ambition veering downhill very quickly. Chapter 1 was dead on arrival at the cinemas and now Costner is left without a theatrical release for Chapter 2 and has halted production on Chapter 3. It looks like a monumental blunder all round. Still, Costner sounded resilient to reporters at the Venice Film Festival when he said, ‘I don't know how I’m gonna make [Chapter 3] right now, but I'm gonna make it.’ That’s all very nice and hopeful but his ambitious Western told in four parts might not tally with today’s very different film landscape that puts as much of a premium on digital and streaming as it does on theatrical distribution. At this point, the only back up emblem for Costner’s American Saga is a very imposing question mark.
Maybe it’s for the best that Coppola funded Megalopolis himself. Considering the way his film budgets have a habit of ballooning and the stories of improvisation and weed smoking emanating from the set, he could have ended up financially stranded by studios as Costner has been with Horizon.
'If it’s grandiose and over-the-top and captures the terminal phase of great empire and an imperilled republic, maybe that makes Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis just the kind of dramatic half-mad concoction we need for our awful and interesting times.'
You’d think all this uncertainty about Megalopolis would have Coppola beside himself, but in this final stage of his career he seems uninterested in profit. Besides, nobody wanted to make Apocalypse Now in the late 70s and now, because of this, he has the great advantage of owning it. In a recent interview with Karl Quinn of Nine, the genius of The Godfather likened himself today to the Coppola of old, the master of the golden period and he also described himself as following in the footsteps of the great comic genius Jacques Tati who bankrupted himself and lived in poverty after funding his final film Playtime (1967). It was only reappraised as the masterpiece it was after his death. Out of the gate, critics seem pretty iffy on Megalopolis but who can speak of what shift in status the future may hold. At least Coppola insists his family fortune has not been ruined.
At long last Megalopolis arrives and it is certainly a visual spectacle like no other. Cesar (Adam Driver) has invented Megalon, a substance capable of turning New Rome into a utopia far removed from the dystopian state the falling empire is in. What unfolds involves a clash of ideals between the citizens and the elite, power grabs in an influential banking family, and a corrupt Mayor of New Rome trying to forbid his daughter's romance with Cesar. You’ve seen it all before but not quite like this. A reporter turned socialite played by Aubrey Plaza and one of the rich kids (Shia LeBeouf) have designs on the family fortune. Rising above all the greed and inhumanity is Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia. Cesar is troubled when Julia comes to understand what he’s capable of. Their romance looks like a bad idea in a world devoid of hope. On top of all this we get Cesar performing the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, allusions to Roman history, critiques of celebrity, and the egocentricity of genius.
The bravado and uniqueness of Megalopolis threw me in the deep end so that the archetypes came across as surprising rather than played out. An unconfined, epical film on the level of Mankiewicz’s film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony) or Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra with Taylor and Burton is refreshing and provocative. That’s not to deny that it may not find a place with the contemporary public: audiences will be the judges of that. It’s true that some of the members at the session I saw laughed, so Hollywood might have been wise to reject this colossus. Whatever happens, I’m in Coppola’s camp. Why not purchase some kind of American dream for yourself?
And if it’s grandiose and over-the-top and captures the terminal phase of great empire and an imperilled republic, maybe that makes Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis just the kind of dramatic half-mad concoction we need for our awful and interesting times.
Eddie Hampson is a literary and film critic.