Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making science fiction fable “Megalopolis” was entirely financed by selling off part of his vineyards, and has the hallmarks of a labor of love in which nobody could say no to him about any aspect, even budget or running time. Which is not to say that it’s indulgent in context of recent cinema history: it runs 2 hours, 18 minutes, reasonable for an epic, and at $120 million, it’s not that pricey by the standards of studio franchise entries (the final “Avengers” movie cost $356 million, and the second “Avatar” cost almost $100 million more than that).
No, it only seems ‘indulgent’ by the impoverished standards of American popular cinema, which has been so degraded by anti-intellectualism by this point that even films by directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson are mocked as pretentious, arty or just plain weird by mainstream viewers (in comparison to Marvel, anyway). It alternates grandiose rhetoric about government and the modern city with borderline screwball comedy, quotes Marcus Aurelius and other ancient thinkers, papers over story gaps with sonorous narration by cast member Laurence Fishburne, and fills the screen with superimpositions, split-screen mosaics, and images that aren’t meant be taken literally (like a statue of Lady Justice collapsing on a street, seemingly from despair over the gap between the haves and have-nots). It’s a film out of its time, more in the spirit of a silent movie like “Metropolis” (one of many key visual influences) and Abel Gance’s three-screen historical epic “Napoleon” (which Coppola helped restore and premiere in the 1980s, and which he acknowledges by splitting his own screen into three vertical rectangles showing different information and sometimes uniting in one wide image).
The thing is, though, movies like “Megalopolis” used to be released fairly regularly, by major studios, which are increasingly not in the movie business, but the IP regurgitation business. Movies were always a popular art form, but it used to be understood that sometimes you’d deliberately seek out something different, challenging, and perhaps obscure or ‘arty’ just to have a reaction to it and be able to discuss it with others. Movies like this only seem “indulgent” because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it, or else it’s considered a waste of time—or worse, a form of acting-out by some bratty person who thinks they’re an artist rather than what they presumably are, an employee of whomever bought a ticket.
Plus, there’s a long tradition of this kind of film, and while it would be inaccurate to say it’s not a crapshoot in terms of accessibility or even quality, it’s not as if it never works out in the audience’s favor. There’s a scale of excellence for dream projects where the auteur had final cut, just like there is for the kinds of films where the studio has control, with “1” being, perhaps, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” or “Caligula” or the 2016 “Ben Hur”, and “10” being, oh, let’s say “All That Jazz.” But of course your mileage may vary; the first three movies all have their defenders, and it was perhaps a little surprising, to this viewer anyway, how quickly the consensus started to turn around on “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar” (the first reclamation pieces started appearing in the aughts, I think) or the Wachowskis’ “Speed Racer” and “Cloud Atlas” (ten years from release, tops) or “Babylon” (the aircraft carrier started turning around within a few months of its first appearance).
It remains to be seen how the verdict on the second “Joker,” also criticized for being up its own bum, will shake out. I didn’t like it, mainly because it seemed inert, didn’t do anywhere near as much with its fever-dream musical mandate as it could have, and spent too much screen time rehashing and literally litigating the first one. Still, I have a certain sneaky and probably misguided admiration for Todd Phillips taking the unlimited blank check he had after making a $1 billion, Oscar-winning hit, and spending it on something so mystifyingly opaque and, seemingly, anti-audience. How many times in a filmmaker’s life do they get the chance to do something that makes no sense to anyone but them?
That ornery singularity—along with a very crude conceptual connection to Coppola’s hyper-artificial 1983 bomb musical “One from the Heart,” with a leading man who couldn’t sing very well, and shot entirely on sets even when scenes were set on the Las Vegas strip— is probably the only thing Phillips’ latest has in common with “Megalopolis,” although Coppola himself recently praised the connection.
Coppola has lived long enough and enjoyed enough to success to have made a lot of films that didn’t really make marketplace sense, and that left people confused as to what itch he was hoping to scratch by making them. “Apocalypse Now” is the most famous; we tend to forget all the late-’70s coverage of how it was out of control and a likely bomb because it ended up being a financial and critical success. But there was also “The Cotton Club,” “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” all of which failed to break through in any sense but have grown in esteem over time.
Every big director has one or more of those, if they survive in the industry long enough, whether it’s Spielberg’s “1941” or “Hook” (both partly reclaimed by critics, though audiences embraced the second one) or Barry Levinson’s “Toys” (nobody’s ridden to the rescue on that one yet, as far as I know). As for Kevin Costner’s “Horizon,” who can say? The second chapter isn’t out yet, and he won’t get to make the two more he’s dreamed about unless he catches a few major breaks.
I recently asked Gus van Sant, who spent the creative and marketplace capital he’d accumulated as a result of directing “Good Will Hunting”—which made $225 million at the box office and was nominated for nine Oscars and won two—on a color remake if “Psycho” that wasn’t shot for shot but was pretty close. It bombed at the box office and was considered bizarre and pointless by a lot of critics, even ones who rather enjoyed it. I recently got the chance to ask Van Sant why, of all the things he could’ve made next, he chose that. He called his “Psycho” “a cinematic experiment.” I asked him what the point of it was, and he said, “to see what would happen.”
More directors should be allowed to think that way. Sometimes dream projects result in films that prove to be enormously valuable over the long haul, culturally as well as financially, like maybe half of the Coen Brothers’ output. And once in a while, they hit paydirt immediately, as was the case with the original “Star Wars” and “The Matrix,” which felt so new that a lot of people watching them the first time felt as if they’d been dropped into a country where they didn’t speak the language.
If “Megalopolis” were distilled, comic-book style, to a symbol, it could be represented a stylized pile of burning money. That’s a plus, as far as I’m concerned. If you’re going to blow a massive sum on one huge thing, why not a thing that people who don’t know you personally can experience and evaluate and maybe even enjoy? Better “Megalopolis” than a yacht, or a Vermeer locked away in a New York townhouse.
And in the end, what’s the point of measuring huge, even unwieldy works of popular art against some imagined yardstick of financial advisability, as if they were housing developments or amusement parks? There is no point. That’s not what cinema ever was, despite the pressures placed on it by corporate executives and sometimes by studio bosses who, for all their greed and nastiness, truly did love movies. When my friend Alan Sepinwall interviewed “The Sopranos” creator David Chase a few years ago, Chase mocked this obsession with everything needing to be profitable and please everyone. “It’s unfortunate for Hollywood and for major studios that their business happens to contain an art form,” he said. “I have no sympathy, and if they wanted that not to be the case, they should’ve gone into the shoe business.”
The problem, though, is that most of the current leadership of entertainment conglomerates—which might or might not encompass a movie studio, along with everything else they own—has no love of movies, or television, or music, or any other art form, apart from their function on a balance sheet, and are so bad at actually making things, as opposed to extracting value from things, that they’d never make it in the shoe business.