The crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema has been somewhat distracted lately, what with the relentless rhythm of the academic semester, and, ya know, The End of Everything. We could not even get ourselves together to catch Francis Ford Coppola’s career capping Megalopolis in the theater.
But as we revere Coppola – one of the titans of the New Hollywood – we were eager to see the picture and happily paid more than workman’s wages to stream it in the MCC screening room immediately when it became available. I should confess I went in with certain wariness about the movie, which looked to lean epic and effects-heavy, not my sweet spots. Nevertheless, this was an absolute must-see, and I was rooting for it: a dream project, ambitious, iconoclastic, and self-financed (thus avoiding the inevitably mutilating interventions of obtuse studio suits trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of the production). And although I avoid reviews of movies I plan to see, I did look forward to pushing back against some of the strong negative buzz generated by a large segment of the critical community—many seemed to have their knives out in advance, reviewing not the film, but the filmmaker (similar to the way Woody Allen pictures are now reviewed and reassessed to reflect the critic’s attitude about the man and not the movie.)
MCC followers know that we shy away from “reviews” in favor of “engaging essays”—as our default setting is to respect the art and the artists. (The Lou Reed doctrine cannot be repeated often enough: “could you imagine working for a year” making an album and then “you get a B+ from some asshole in the Village Voice?”) In addition, who wants to spend time writing about something you don’t like? (The notorious critic John Simon seemed to relish trashing people’s work. That’s not what we’re about, man.) Unfortunately, however, as they say, “A man walks into a movie theater.” And . . .
I really, really, really did not like this movie. There was one fine scene, imbued with actual human feeling, when one character speaks of a sacrifice he is willing to make for the sake of his daughter. And Dustin Hoffman, in a cameo role, has an excellent line I plan to deploy in the future (“let’s wait it out”), and it was nice to see the long-shuttered City Hall subway station.
That’s about it. More generally, Megalopolis is a bloated, flashy, simplistic, and ultimately soulless enterprise. Worst of all, it is the antithesis of the New Hollywood—it plays like a superhero movie! Megalopolis could fit seamlessly within the Batman franchise: imagine Adam Driver as Batman and Laurence Fishburne as Alfred, supported by compromised public officials (Giancarlo Esposito) and assorted supervillains (Jon Voight). Coppola presumably started out with something to say about how contemporary America is collapsing a la ancient Rome (no argument here) – thus all the Cesar, Cicero and Crassus nonsense – although to our eyes it looks more like a Robert Moses-type story. Yet neither of these two potentially promising metaphors hold up, as this overlong film winds its way towards . . . a happy ending?? Batman (and or Cesar/Moses) wins!!
What the hell happened here? In 1962 the legendary critic Manny Farber coined the phrase “White Elephant Art” to describe movies that reflected the relentless chase of The Masterpiece. Farber took that argument much further than we would go, but his observation about white elephant films treating “every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity” rings true. In contrast, Mid Century Cinema favorite Claude Chabrol long advocated for “little themes”—insisting that a film about “a hero of the resistance” is no more profound than one about “the barmaid who gets herself pregnant.” If anything, the opposite was true, because monumental themes are weighed down by the ponderous necessity of their importance. But “the smaller the theme is, the more one can give it a big treatment . . . truth is all that matters.”
Setting out to make a Major Statement will often end in ruins. In contrast, as Martin Scorsese, another revered member of the New Hollywood pantheon once wrote, “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation . . . It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures.” That is a good critique of Megalopolis. But . . . wait a minute . . . this dissent could apply to Scorsese’s own recent films, such as The Irishman (which we appreciated) and Killers of the Flower Moon (an epic which seemed almost desperate to be Important).
The problem, I think, as often, is money. The greatest achievements of Scorsese and Coppola (among many others) have been low budget affairs. Yet the production cost of an average Hollywood movie is now (an obscene) fifty million dollars. The Irishman cost over $150 million to make, Flower Moon $200 million; Coppola put up over $100 million of his own money to make Megalopolis. As Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” Our heroes seem to be proving his point. In my recent notes on Scorsese I wrote, “I wish he would go small, like Schrader.”
Admittedly, Paul Schrader probably has to go small, given the funding opportunities available to him. Consider the results however: small scaled films like First Reformed (budget, $3.6 million) and Master Gardener ($4 million). These movies managed to have something to say, although, still steeped in the ethos of the New Hollywood, they were gracefully shot, thoughtfully acted, character driven, subtle, introspective, and complex. Which is all we really want from the movies.