Source: Fair Use

Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film Megalopolis, a screenplay he’d been noodling with since the 1980s?

Before answering that question, though, let’s set the stage.

Italian-Americans had been riding high in popular culture in the 1950s, with Frank Sinatra as the dominant singer of the age. But then came the back-to-nature hippie 1960s, which left urban Italians weirded out. Finally, in the 1970s, Italian filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, and Michael Cimino kicked off a legendary decade in movies.

Coppola had the best 1970s of them all, winning an Oscar for cowriting Patton, then making three perfect movies in a row: The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II, and concluding his decas mirabilis with the imperfect but staggering Apocalypse Now.

Since then…well, the late, lamented 2Blowhards blog observed in 2008:

As far as the world is concerned, Francis Coppola is someone who occasionally—all-too-rarely, in fact—delivers rounded, worldly, stately narratives that feature a moving amount of warmth, mass, and dignity. He’s a grown-up entertainer/artist—William Wyler with some additional splashes of blood and tomato sauce. But as far as Coppola himself is concerned, Francis Coppola is an enthusiastic, inventive kid, amusing himself with dolls and toys—a born innovator bounding between surrealism and the early New Wave, playing mischievously and irrepressibly with ideas and styles.

So, his many films since Apocalypse Now hadn’t made much of a mark, although the biggest problem with Godfather III was probably out of Coppola’s control: As Michael Corleone, Al Pacino’s preferred acting style had evolved from ominously taciturn to shouty.

Impressively, however, Coppola rebuilt the fortune he blew on his ill-fated Zoetrope Studios with his successful Coppola Winery, with its brands such as Virginia Dare, Lost Colony, and Roanoke. Lately, it seems to have gotten easier for celebrities to strike it rich off of food and drink branding, such as George Clooney’s ridiculously lucrative tequila start-up. But before Coppola, only Paul Newman succeeded in grocery stores on a similar scale.

And the Coppola dynasty succeeded in Hollywood on a scale rivaled only by the Hustons, with three generations winning Academy Awards. Francis turned his conductor father into an Oscar-winning composer; his daughter Sofia Coppola won the Original Screenplay prize for Lost in Translation; and his nephew Nicolas Cage won Best Actor for Leaving Las Vegas. And that’s not to mention Francis’ sister Talia Shire (who played Adrian to Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky), his son Roman Coppola, nephew Jason Schwartzman, and more distant relations like ex-son-in-law Spike Jonze, an Oscar winner for Her.

Although Coppola is often compared to Scorsese, their class backgrounds are quite different. Scorsese comes from humble stock, while Coppola is from Italy’s maestro caste. His maternal grandfather, for instance, was tenor Enrico Caruso’s pianist. The Coppolas have a seemingly in-born tendency toward monumental megalomania.

Consider the musical score to the artistically superb 1979 children’s movie The Black Stallion, directed by one of Francis’ non-relative protégés, Carroll Ballard. It features a scene in which the castaway little boy and the majestic beast make friends on the beach. The boy rides the horse to what I initially assumed was a lesser-known Beethoven symphony I’d never heard before, perhaps the Fourth. After all, what serious composer would dare write in the exact style of Beethoven?

Rewatching the film decades later, I realized the score is not by Beethoven, but by a modern imitation. Yet, who’d have the ego to compose in the manner of Beethoven for the first time in 150 years? As it turned out: Carmine Coppola, of course.

Similarly, there’s my favorite scene in Hearts of Darkness, F.F. Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now in the jungle. While all the actors are being eaten alive by bugs, Francis is living like a viceroy in a huge bungalow. If I recall correctly, he ecstatically takes delivery of a crate of the finest Cuban cigars and lovingly opens it, explaining to the camera like a modern Lorenzo de’ Medici: “All I want is for every moment of my life to be…magnificent!”

What about the third generation of movie Coppolas? Young Nicolas Coppola changed his name to Nicolas Cage to make it harder to accuse him of being a “nepo baby.” But he can’t dodge his Coppola nature and nurture. He cashes checks from an enormous number of movies, many of them unworthy of his considerable talent, because he loves to spend money creatively, buying nine Rolls-Royces, the Shah of Iran’s Lamborghini, a private island, multiple castles, a pair of deadly albino king cobras, a Tyrannosaurus skull, and a two-headed snake.

So, it was of interest when Coppola sold much of his winery out from under his heirs to self-finance the making of a screenplay he’d been noodling with since the late 1980s: Megalopolis.

Could he possibly pull it off and make his first great movie in 45 years?

Set in New Rome (New York), the reliable Adam Driver brings his Steve McQueen-like cool to playing Coppola’s hero Cesar Catilina, the head of New Rome’s Design Authority. The architect Cesar is a cross between Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Galileo (he’s won the Nobel Prize for inventing a widget called the Megalon), Shakespeare (Cesar delivers the “To be or not be” soliloquy, in case you’d never heard it before), Einstein (he has a lot to say about time), Robert Moses (he wants to blow up old New Rome and replace it with his New, Improved New Rome), and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola. As a friend says, the auteur’s stand-in makes John Galt look like Forrest Gump for humility.

Cesar is dynamiting parts of New Rome to construct his utopia of Megalopolis (Coppola is so old he’s the last person in New York to see Robert Moses as the hero in his struggle with conservationist Jane Jacobs over whether or not to demolish Greenwich Village), much to the dismay of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).

But the mayor’s pretty daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) is falling in love with her father’s archrival, Cesar.

Conveniently, Cesar’s mistress, the elegantly named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza in a role doubtlessly intended for Madonna in 1989), leaves him to seduce and marry Cesar’s ancient uncle, the world’s richest man, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). (In case you are wondering, yes, Coppola reunites, 55 years later, the stars of Midnight Cowboy, with Dustin Hoffman playing Cicero’s consigliere Nush “The Fixer” Berman.)

Laurence Fishburne, who was 14 when he appeared in Apocalypse Now, is actually pretty good as Cesar’s chauffeur and confidant.

Shia LaBeouf plays Crassus’ Trump-like populist heir who conspires with his new Aunt Wow to get their hands on the old man’s fortune before he goes through the formality of dying. But Coppola wishes to forcefully remind his heirs that the energy of youth is no match for the cunning of age in a denouement that I must admit I totally did not see coming. If you stick it out through the first two hours of Megalopolis, hang around to see the last twenty minutes because Voight’s Vengeance is funny.

So, is Megalopolis a miraculous comeback to Coppola’s 1970s quality?

No.

Of course not.

It’s absolutely as horrible as everybody says it is.

Something that surprised me when I became a film critic in 2001 was how nonsubjective the job turned out to be. If you are a normie civilian and go see one movie per month, sure, it’s easy to see how you might think it’s all highly arguable whether (to debate among 2001 movies) The Fellowship of the Ring is better than Mulholland Drive, Black Hawk Down, Moulin Rouge, or Ocean’s Eleven.

But if you are a pro forced to see one or two movies per week, you quickly come to notice that making a good movie is hard and a large fraction of releases are simply not good.

A memorable example is that when Ridley Scott revived the sword and sandal epic with Gladiator in 2000, famous directors such as Scorsese, Mel Gibson, and Baz Luhrmann (who, by the way, probably could have done more with Coppola’s idea for Megalopolis than anybody else by gaying it up) rushed to line up an Alexander the Great project. No matter who they endorse for President, the nature of the job means that competent film directors are authoritarians who thrive on making hundreds of decisions per day. Hence, their identification with the greatest conqueror of the ancient world.

Oliver Stone won the race to finish Alexander, and the JFK director’s film was highly anticipated. Yet, within the first 90 seconds it was clear that Stone’s Alexander was the anti-JFK in cinematic quality.

Similarly, Megalopolis’ dialogue is, from its opening moments, cringeful.

Script doctors are relatively cheap. But Megalopolis seems to be a movie conceived by an octogenarian watching History Channel specials on the Roman Empire while mainlining Viagra.