Francis Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS

 

(Coppola comes in like Bane to all the guys in the audience) "You think you've thought about the Roman empire often enough? I was born in the Rome... molded by it...."

Fearless, reckless, delirious, comical, pretentious, unwieldy, (disturbingly) sexy, visionary, dumb, magnificent, quizzical, romantic (yes, really), breathtaking, crude, laughable, extraordinary... all that and a bag of Platinum Wow chips (I mean give Aubrey Plaza the Oscar and the Razzie, right?) But the word I'd come back to most is Adventurous. This is the headless intellectual-emotional sense of what cinema can be in a mile wide nutshell.

Put aside the moment you may have heard about - which I was lucky to see and sadly a lot of you in general release or video won't get - where Adam Driver talks to an actual human being in the movie theater (thank you, heroic random employee at the AMC in Paramus by the way, who got some much deserved applause); there's four or five minutes where Coppola just decides it's finally time to unleash the Abel Gance Napoleon Kracken and has three-screen split widescreen for a delirious montage of power being taken and corrupted with Plaza's Wow pulling her strings all over (her one big scene with LaBeouf... perfection)

You're seeing filmmaking at times here that feels like you are getting immersed in a Dream Smoothie of a filmmaker who's had a lot on his mind not just with this project, but over so many of his delirious experiments and more Classical/formal exercises. In other words, for those who know, it is not on the level of mastery of the more controlled Tetro, but certainly superior to Twixt or Youth Without Youth (the latter I have a soft spot for anyway).

And.... What is this star rating? As Moby once said, we are all made of stars, right? This is merely to reflect that, when all is said and done, I had a great time, usually, in this bat-guano piece of uncompromising art, and that is what it is... when I was not occasionally wincing and unsure, and not all the performances are at an even keel (Driver is wonderful, Talia Shire is a Hoot and gets what her brother needs, Esposito is corageous in underplaying, Jon Voight and Shia LaBeof almost make you forget for some time that they're colossal turds in real life, and Nathalie Emmanuel is... okay, eventually she's a little better, kind of the weak link).

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note leaving Megalopolis is that it is not hard to follow or so confusing you need a glossary or some such crap. It's a straight-forward tale (relatively for me, but then have you seen my letterboxd) of competing figures of power all vying for different things, whether it be control of a mob or money or, hell, time itself. It is the story at heart of, and this is just me interpretation, Francis Ford Coppola split in two ways: the "Reckless Dreamer" in Cesar and the more competent but burdened leader and family man in Cicero.... and the execution of the story is where it becomes a Mind-fuck that mostly (if not totally) lives up to its Once in a Decade sort of hype.

There's a lot of gloriously trippy, heady filmmaking here and even headier and heavier ideas about the roles of power, the chances (string theory is mentioned not mistakenly) humanity has to change its course, and how the monied can work to create and destroy in society... and there's times Coppola didn't see how his large budget was put on the main actor's and not populating a few of his sets with enough extras. It's a major, gigantic, overpowering work by a filmmaker who has nothing to lose but still wants us to see what he can show us if we give him the two hours and several more minutes.

Frankly, I just love the sincerity more than anything else here, that's my overall first impression. This is not made by some cynical douchebag or a hack (or, come off it now some you be serious, this isn't Neil Breen.... though for a moment or two, on paper, I almost get what you mean until it passes and the professional actors and director who knows how to line up a shot come thru), but it's also not as I feared which is Southland Talesm.

This is like, shit... what is this, uh (snaps fingers obnoxiously).... Terrence Malick's Dick Tracy meets Fall of the Fritz Lang Roman Imperial Spectacle? That's the thing I thought the most was the 90s Dick Tracy - this is BIG AND BROAD AND HEEEYYY... which is why when it goes get quieter occasionally it comes as almost a shock. It's a movie not only not afraid to go for it, it's telling means to challenge the form of how it is. One couple I overheard leaving the theater behind me were in some gleeful exasperation and said: "I've never seen anything like it before." How that works for you.... we shall see.

So... it's everything. And so very weird. So many of you are going to hate it. Maybe I've had too many surrealist cinematic vaccinations, but... it's a mad ride I felt glad to take!

(PS..... for those who went to the special early IMAX showing that was broadcast across the country, what in the wide world of Joe Biden elder abuse was that intro q&a? Why even do that to the man? If you're going to talk to Coppola, just have either Spike Lee *or* De Niro *or* Dennis Lim to ask a few quick questions. This is a fucking weekday night, some of us - Uncle Francis most of all - need to get to bed. It just went on and on and then got into the election and of course De Niro did his Trump rant and for maybe the only time ever I wish he didn't. That itself is probably a weirder movie by itself than Megalopolis even is, and... let that sink in. Anyway, thank God they didn't play trailers at the least).