Francis Ford Coppola didn’t have the career he wanted. As a young man, he saw himself as a personal filmmaker in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, someone who’s make many small films with the same group of people, an ever-expanding family of actors, technicians, and craftsmen. The Godfather was an assignment, and by all accounts a miraculous accident; it’s hardly ever mentioned that he won an Oscar for writing the Screenplay for Patton before all this happened, and have you seen You’re a Big Boy Now? What about The Rain People, or on the other end, Tetro? Twixt? Did you know Coppola directed Robin Williams in Jack? That was 1996, still “paying off [his] debt obligations.” After directing The Rainmaker in 1997 (featuring Teresa Wright’s last performance), Coppola stopped working in Hollywood and, then in his mid-50s, finally started in on his original goal of making small, personal films with friends and family.
He made three: Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt.
That was 2007-2011, a quick exercise to prepare and relax for the production of… Megalopolis. If only Coppola could’ve followed up One from the Heart with Megalopolis—then, it might be the masterpiece that the 2024 film only suggests. I saw Megalopolis two days in a row, mesmerized by its complete disregard for conventional film grammar and acting technique; it’s not a wreck like The Room, and while it does encourage audience participation at one point, it’s not going to be a joke in 20 years. “MegaFLOPolis” will never catch on like Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar did as bywords for wild indulgence and catastrophic failure. But that was the 1980s, when audiences were encouraged to care about box office grosses and star salaries, all acting shareholders in line at the movies.
The difference is that no one expected Megalopolis to make money. Coppola self-financed it and had a difficult time finding distribution after Hollywood and Cannes screenings; Lionsgate only agreed to put it in 2000 theaters because Coppola’s paying for marketing. But now that the film’s an inevitable box office failure, Coppola’s revealed he has some kind of tax-write down, and besides, he’s 85 and the rest of his family is doing very well. Why hate the man? The ability to do what Coppola did is very rare, and if people are particularly angry about his spending $136 million dollars of his own money on this, it’s because they’re jealous they can’t go out nearly as far out on a limb as he has, and they never will. Maybe Megalopolis feels like a slap in the face, sour drool from an old man droning on and on (anecdotally, far more men have responded to the movie than women).
I saw it on Saturday afternoon and couldn’t remember anything specific by Saturday night. I described the movie’s dramatic structure as a straight line, one that made time whiz by mostly because it was so different than any other contemporary American film. Coppola has made the first real American “art house” film in many years, bringing back, however briefly, a cinema more challenging than Barbie dolls and myths from the mid-century. Whether it’s Oppenheimer or Fly Me to the Moon, that era is a dead end for the art form, and people are sick of it. Coppola has spent nearly 30 years “trying to find his voice,” and more than 40 trying to get Megalopolis made—if only he had made more of those “exercise” films! His 21st-century work never received wide distribution, so most people are seeing his janky digital sensibilities for the first time this week.
Megalopolis isn’t the movie it could’ve been in 1983, but it’s got a better cast than One from the Heart, a technical marvel but killed dead fish Frederic Forrest in the lead; unfortunately, everything else in the movie consistently underwhelms. Sure, you “get into its rhythms” pretty quickly, but there’s no denying or defending its cheap, cheesiness. Just look at the poster. At the same time, it’s made with more abandon than any other $100+ million movie I’ve seen in years, maybe ever, and that’s what keeps Megalopolis exciting and consistently interesting, if not great or even good.
“When we jump into the unknown, only then will we know that we are free.” Paraphrasing a few tweets I saw over the weekend, Megalopolis may be lacking in many respects, but at no point in its 138 minutes was I a) bored, or b) knew what was going to happen next. The New York Times joined Variety in roasting Coppola’s box office failure with a completely unnecessary story on Sunday about the film playing to empty houses. Well, $4 million in one weekend is pretty good for an art movie, just not one in 2000 theaters; still, Megalopolis would’ve never garnered the attention, negative or otherwise, unless it received this wide release, because everyone knows that a theatrical release makes a movie exist. Coppola insisted on a wide release and an aggressive advertising campaign, and while he won’t make his money back, his movie will be remembered, because right now, still, people are talking about it.
It doesn’t matter if those people are like my mom, who said she’d seen better student films at UC Santa Cruz; it also doesn’t matter that I saw it twice, two days in a row, and will likely write about the movie again if I’m able to see it next week (although I suspect it’ll be yanked by then). Was Coppola punished for firing his original art department, a Marvel-associated unit? Probably. If anyone is pissed off at him for making something so expensive, so personal, and so obscure, if it’s not jealousy, it’s just the reflexes of an increasingly lobotomized audience who may say they want “films like they used to make” but really just want to be reassured and entertained in a familiar way. That’s nothing new; Coppola knew how dumb audiences had gotten before he made Megalopolis. So what? When he dies, as he said at Cannes, he’ll have no regrets. That’s why people are so mad at him.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith