Freed from the shackles of sense or expectation
Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis
Corey Atad returns today to write about Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read the whole piece.
Previously Atad wrote for Hell World on The Bear and The Zone of Interest.
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
This piece was sent out as part of today's full Hell World newsletter which you can read here:
Luke O’Neil
Freed from the shackles of sense or expectation
by Corey Atad
There are facts about Megalopolis that precede it. That it has been on Francis Ford Coppola’s mind for four decades. That he almost got it off the ground in the early 2000s, but then 9/11 happened. That he self-financed it to the tune of $120 million, with money from the sale of his winery. At last Megalopolis arrives in theaters this weekend as Coppola’s late-period opus, his great achievement and perhaps great folly. “Worst movie I’ve seen in my fucking life!” a man shouted as he stormed off near the end when I saw it the other day at a quarter-full IMAX screen in Toronto. Jon Voight in a Robin Hood outfit talking about his boner before shooting some characters with a small bow and arrow was apparently a bridge too far for that moviegoer. That’s Coppola’s latest working its magic.
Megalopolis is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, not by a long shot. I don’t know that it’s good, but I also don’t know that “good” or “bad” have much meaning when discussing a work so radically uninterested in normal barometers of quality or even taste. It’s a gaudy film, simultaneously grand and cheap looking, written and performed like a misguided modern take on Roman theater, with so much pompousness and low comedy. Its story, about a future New York City dubbed New Rome, decadent and on the verge of collapse, is timely and timeless. But what it has to say about a collapsing society is banal at best. Reading about earlier iterations of Megalopolis, it’s clear that the project once resembled something more like a normal movie, but over time Coppola chased his muse through the winding paths of his own synapses, producing the kind of fever dream possible only when a great artist becomes his own patron.