Decline and Folly
‘Megalopolis’ and the rise and fall of Francis Ford Coppola.
In an otherwise rather monotonous year for cinema, the hype surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s labour-of-love Megalopolis made the film something of a cultural event. Eight of the ten highest grossing films of 2024 have been franchise sequels, and gloomy articles about declining attendance have continued to appear in the press. So, would an eagerly awaited passion project from one of America’s great artists revive auteur cinema? It would not. Megalopolis is a mortifying disaster.
A sober review of Coppola’s career suggests that the expectations his new film was asked to support were overwrought. His career crested early, after all, with a remarkable run of four consecutive classics in just seven years—The Godfather (1972), The Conversation and The Godfather Part II (both 1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). That was always going to be a hard act to follow, but nothing Coppola has made since has even approached the brilliance of his work during that short period. During the 1980s and ’90s, he lurched uncertainly between genres without ever finding suitable material or producing a really memorable or satisfying film.
After he directed the moderately successful John Grisham potboiler The Rainmaker in 1997, Coppola retreated from studio work to concentrate on more personal filmmaking again. The three films he directed before Megalopolis—Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011)—drew respectable reviews and small cult followings, but they passed most audiences by unnoticed. And as Coppola has since acknowledged, these minor works were really just practice runs for Megalopolis, the picture he had wanted to make since the end of the 1970s.
The idea for an epic science-fiction story on the scale of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis dates back to 1977, when Coppola began shooting Apocalypse Now. Pre-production is said to have begun in 1983 with hundreds of pages of script notes, and over its long and tortuous gestation period, the central idea remained unchanged—a futuristic political allegory that compared the fall of the Roman Empire to the decline of the United States. American collapse might have seemed a plausible prospect at the end of the 1970s, a decade fraught with the upheavals of Vietnam, Watergate, oil crises, and domestic social fragmentation. Declinism fell out of fashion during the Reaganite ’80s, especially after the end of the Cold War left the United States as the world’s only remaining superpower. But so long did Megalopolis spend in development hell that by the time it finally made it to the screen, its central concern was relevant once again.
Production was delayed several times and even derailed by world events—the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 threw a wrench into plans for location scouting in New York, and then the COVID pandemic delayed the start of principal photography just as the film was about to go into production in 2020. Over time, dozens of stars were attached to the project, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but Coppola’s inability to secure funding or finalise a shooting schedule meant that all these names moved on to make other projects and aged out of the roles in which they were cast.
If the final product is any indication, Coppola never did manage to pull all his ideas into a comprehensible script—the project seems to have been a collection of every fragmented notion that has passed through his head over the last 40 years. And the scale of the thing kept getting impossibly bigger. After the nightmare of shooting Apocalypse Now—an ordeal recorded in the riveting 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness—it’s hardly surprising that the major Hollywood studios were wary of writing Coppola a blank cheque. So he ended up financing the film himself.
It took Coppola four decades to get Megalopolis made, and the final budget was estimated to be somewhere between US$120m and US$136m. He drew on the earnings of his lifestyle brand Francis Ford Coppola Presents, which is associated with resorts, restaurants, cafes, pasta sauces, and literary publications. And when that money ran out, he borrowed over US$100m against his family winery before selling part of the business in 2021 to raise the money he needed to complete the picture. Coppola’s decision to largely film in Fayetteville, Georgia initially brought down costs due to tax breaks, and he spent over US$4m to buy a Days Inn motel to house the crew and his family. (After production was over, the complex was converted into the All-Movie Hotel, which provides accommodation and resources to make other films.)
On paper, this all sounds like the romantic story of an ambitious director determined to create one last masterpiece in the face of studio indifference. Unfortunately, a more prosaic and dismaying reality greeted bemused critics and audience members at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Megalopolis on 16 May 2024. In a scathing review for the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw summed up the overwhelming critical consensus:
For me, this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence.
In the New York Times, Kyle Buchanan noted that Coppola had done little to improve upon the lacklustre work he has produced in recent decades:
“Megalopolis” finds Coppola in the same experimental-filmmaker mode he employed for his two most recent movies, the indies “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011). Few scenes are shot or edited in a conventional manner: Coppola employs split screen, projection techniques and artsy montage at will, and the pacing of any given sequence can change on a whim.
Coppola did receive some support on social media, although many of these people had not yet seen the film they were defending. They preferred to believe that the director was an embattled artist faced with philistine critics of the kind who had misunderstood Apocalypse Now when it was first released. Even sympathetic critics who had seen the film struggled to praise it without a great deal of qualification. David Ehrlich of IndieWire contended that Megalopolis is a timely and important film fit for the current era, but added:
Coppola might lack the imagination required to invent the new cinema that his new movie so desperately wishes it could will into being (he’s not even De Palma in that respect, let alone Godard), but he’s always seen the need for it better and more urgently than any of his contemporaries.
Some viewers may have the patience to sort the good ideas from the surrounding muddle of Megalopolis and offer a charitable account of what its director was trying to say or accomplish. But most, I suspect, will simply be baffled that 40 years of effort produced a film of such staggering ineptitude. How did the director of The Godfather end up here?
II.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on 7 April 1939, Coppola was raised in a family with a strong connection to the arts. His father Carmine played the flute for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and became an accomplished composer who would later score many of his son’s films. His older brother August became a film executive, while his younger sister Talia Shire became an Oscar-nominated actress. His daughter Sofia became a director and his nephew is actor Nicolas Cage.
In some ways, Coppola’s path was not dissimilar to that of fellow New Hollywood contemporary Martin Scorsese. Both men are Italian Americans whose heritage and early years influenced their respective gangster pictures. Both suffered from health issues growing up and used the dramatic arts as an escape—as a child with asthma, Scorsese immersed himself in movies instead of playing sports, while Coppola developed an interest in theatre while he was convalescing with polio. Coppola’s early interest in the stage informed his approach to performance and storytelling, which was more classical than Scorsese’s stylish virtuosity.
Both men also got their starts under the guidance of the late b-movie producer and director Roger Corman, who supported their work when others had little confidence in them. Coppola’s first feature was the low-budget horror film Dementia 13, released in 1963. It wasn’t the most auspicious debut, and the result owed more to Corman than Coppola, but it was the break the 24-year-old director needed. His next film, a comedy titled You’re a Big Boy, appeared three years later and it was an improvement, but it was the 1968 Fred Astaire-led adaptation of the stage musical fantasia Finian’s Rainbow that began to turn industry heads. The film was a lavish blend of Coppola’s passions for theatre and for cinematic storytelling and it became a box office hit. The following year, The Rain People demonstrated that he was capable of producing smaller pictures on lower budgets carried by the performances of their casts.
The 1970s brought the inarguable peak of Francis Ford Coppola’s career. The Godfather films transformed a pulp novel into a magisterial family saga, and Coppola displayed a keen eye for acting talent, fighting for Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone over the objections of the studio executives at Paramount Pictures, who wanted an established star in the role. Apocalypse Now won the Palme D’Or at Cannes despite its infamously troubled shoot and widespread critical scepticism. That production nearly killed its star and drove its director to the brink of insanity, but it remains one of the strangest and most vivid films ever made about the madness of America’s military involvement in Vietnam.
Graham Daseler
The Conversation is less celebrated, but like The Rain People, it proved that Coppola could work effectively when left to his own devices within reasonable limits. Made quickly between the two Godfather pictures, it is a taut, unpretentious chamber piece about surveillance and paranoia that offers a window into the anxieties of the Watergate era and boasts one of Gene Hackman’s best performances. Coppola directed, wrote, and produced the film himself—he wouldn’t write another original screenplay on his own until Twixt in 2011—and it shows what he could do when everything was under control. But after the chaos of Apocalypse Now five years later, he already seemed to be burning out.
Coppola kicked off the 1980s with a romantic musical titled One From the Heart (1981) starring Frederick Forrest, Terri Garr, and Nastassja Kinski. This was supposed to be a modest picture financed and distributed by MGM, but after Coppola’s independent Zoetrope studio assumed control of the production, it ran over-budget and was finally released to critical hostility and popular apathy (although the score by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle did receive an Oscar nomination). He followed this with the brat-pack ensemble piece The Outsiders (an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel scored by the director’s father) and Rumble Fish (a more self-consciously arty effort starring Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke). Both films have since attracted cult followings, but the general public was largely unreceptive to them both when they were first released in 1983, which did little to help their director’s commercial viability.
From there, Coppola jumped restlessly from project to project and from genre to genre in search of his elusive muse. The Cotton Club (1984) was a genre-bending mixture of musical and gangster film starring Richard Gere and Gregory Hines; Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) was a romantic time-travel comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage; Gardens of Stone (1987) was a character drama about a Vietnam War vet played by James Caan; and Tucker, the Man and His Dream (1988) was a biopic of American inventor Preston Tucker starring Jeff Bridges. What united these disparate pictures was anyone’s guess, and any one of these films (with the possible exception of Rumble Fish) could have been made by any number of journeyman directors. Coppola was still working constantly, but his career already seemed to have lost its sense of direction and definition.
That may be why, at the turn of the decade, Coppola reluctantly agreed to revisit the Godfather saga and direct a third instalment that nobody asked for or wanted. Unfortunately, the film suffered from a convoluted plot, the absence of Robert Duvall (who objected to the salary he was offered), and a wretched performance from Coppola’s daughter Sofia as Mary Corleone. It added nothing to the Godfather story, which had already arrived at its natural conclusion in Part II, but Coppola did eventually manage to salvage some of its reputation when it was re-edited as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone in 2020.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula followed in 1992, and it was probably the last picture Coppola made before Megalopolis to merit the description “eagerly awaited.” Announced as an attempt to faithfully re-adapt Stoker’s novel for the screen, the upshot was a studio-bound misfire in which the director focused his attention on the film’s lavish design and baroque romanticism to the detriment of the performances of his cast. Keanu Reeves was subject to particular mockery for his performance as Jonathan Harker, but the final fault lay with the director. Dracula was intended to reintroduce Coppola to audiences as a serious auteur but instead it acquired the dubious reputation of a camp classic.
Coppola limped out of the 1990s with the startlingly stupid Robin Williams vehicle Jack (1996) followed by his Grisham adaptation in 1997, which seemed to be a final bid for commercial success. Having tried a bit of everything for twenty years, he decided he’d had enough and didn’t make another film for ten years. He returned to low-budget independent film-making in 2007 with Youth Without Youth, followed by Tetro and Twixt before taking another hiatus that lasted until he announced that he would finally make Megalopolis. And this time, everything would be done his way.
III.
Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis takes place in New Rome, a counterfactual version of New York City, where corrupt and remote political elites live in opulent comfort while the rest of the city’s populace languishes in poverty. The events dramatised in Coppola’s film are inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy in ancient Rome of 63 BC, and lest the parallel escape us, he has named his rival protagonists Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).
Catilina is a brilliant architect with the personality, vision, and ambition of an Ayn Rand hero, who wants to rebuild and regenerate New Rome using a mysterious material called Megalon. The principal obstacle to this utopian plan is Cicero, the city’s corrupt mayor, a situation complicated by Catilina’s involvement with Cicero’s daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel). As the plot unwinds, Coppola draws upon a plethora of historical, literary, theatrical, and cinematic references that range from the familiar to the obscure, but the intriguing parts of Megalopolis never cohere into an intelligible whole.
The film’s problems are partly conceptual. If audiences are expected to immerse themselves in an alternate reality, that reality has to be aesthetically convincing—costumes, hair and make-up, art direction, set and lighting design should all combine to create a world built by people with identifiable tastes and proclivities. But Coppola and his art department never seem to have settled upon a unifying vision of what this future looks like. Almost every set is over-designed and over-dressed, and the iconography of ancient Rome keeps colliding with Coppola’s desire to create something that looks and feels arbitrarily futuristic. The result is a cluttered mishmash of busy incongruity.
The shots of New Rome’s skyline, meanwhile, shine with glass-and-steel skyscrapers, but the reliance on computer-generated backdrops instead of miniature models and imposing sets robs Coppola’s city of the tangible character that made, say, Fritz Lang’s industrial Metropolis or Tim Burton’s decaying Gotham such convincing creations. The decision to saturate almost every scene with an oppressive golden hue only serves to further flatten the film into dull uniformity. Coppola fired his visual effects team in December 2022, a month into the shoot, and his production designer and art department quit the following January.
Perhaps most perplexing of all, the film’s supernatural elements are never properly explained or explored. In the first three Star Wars films, George Lucas was careful to establish the parameters of “the Force” and its importance to the plot early on. In the opening scene of Megalopolis, we learn that Catilina can stop time, but neither the provenance nor the implications of this remarkable ability are elaborated and its influence on the development of the plot turns out to be negligible. We are later told that Catilina won a Nobel Prize for inventing Megalon and that this revolutionary material holds the key to his visionary plan to rehabilitate the city, but its extraordinary properties and significance remain vague. One of Catilina’s Megalon innovations is simply an airport travelator (an idea illustrative of the more general failure of imagination on display).
Coppola managed to assemble a cast of highly capable actors, but their talents are wasted on material that lacks either character complexity or an ear for how people actually speak to one another. Coppola seems to have been aware of these shortcomings and he encouraged his cast to devise their own characters and improvise their own dialogue as they rehearsed. According to leaked reports, he seemed to be unsure about what he wanted to achieve or how he wanted to achieve it.
Some directors thrive on chaos, and having confounded the doubters with Apocalypse Now all those years ago, Coppola plainly believes he is one of them. More often, a threadbare script and chaotic production will result in a disorganised film, and in this case, the results are predictably unsatisfactory. The poorly conceived characters have no discernible interior life, the dialogue is frequently stilted and inert, the plot stumbles from one contrivance to the next, the pacing is often listless with structureless scenes either sunk in exposition or floating by without dramatic purpose, and the central love story is devoid of chemistry.
With all that time and money at his disposal, Coppola has produced one of American cinema’s greatest and most profligate follies. It may be that Coppola’s dazzling streak in the 1970s exhausted his talents and drained him of every good idea he had. That’s not meant as faint praise—many film-makers work their whole lives without creating anything a fraction as good as The Conversation. But creativity is rarely an infinite resource. Even an artist as preternaturally gifted as Bob Dylan has confessed that he is no longer capable of writing the songs he seemed to be able to produce on a whim during the mid- to late-1960s.
It may also be that Coppola’s 1970s work was like lightning in a bottle—the result of a happy confluence of material, collaborators, and creativity that he has never managed to recapture or reproduce since. But the era of New Hollywood—that brief heady period between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980—is long gone. The movie industry has changed to meet evolving technology and the consumption habits of audiences. William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Alan J. Pakula, Michael Cimino, and Peter Bogdanovich are all dead. George Lucas has retired and sold his most successful property to Disney. Brian De Palma has been reduced to directing straight-to-streaming junk that almost nobody watches. Paul Schrader and Roman Polanski occasionally produce interesting work but their best years are behind them. Only Steven Spielberg is still reliably finding a wide audience and only Scorsese is still making creatively vibrant cinema.
While his days of making films like Megalopolis are now surely over, Coppola seems to have no intention of stopping. He is already preparing a number of smaller projects. If his track record is any indication, these are more likely to be misses than hits, but he evidently no longer cares what anyone else thinks. With Megalopolis now out of his system, he most likely considers himself an emancipated creator free of a burden that dogged him for half his life. Megalopolis is his last big statement to the world and himself, reception be damned. As Colonel Kurtz asks his assassin Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, “Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?” The disappointing results of this philosophy speak for themselves—a US$120m monument to artistic hubris from an artist who has not made a truly remarkable picture in 45 years.
