Vintage Sand Episode 55: Megalopolis and Necropolis

Vintage Sand

Vintage Sand listeners this month will get something of a twofer, a BOGO episode. Since we really have not had the chance to do a full necrology since July, Michael takes the time to relate the accomplishments of some very bright lights in the film business that have gone out over the past four months. These include artists who leave behind a great legacy and holes that can never really be filled, including people like Dame Maggie Smith, James Earl Jones and Alain Delon. Before we get to that point, though, we begin with a very different kind of eulogy: our reflections on Francis Ford Coppola’s summa, the egregious "Megalopolis". We felt, as we did for Scorsese in our episodes on both "The Irishman" and "Killers of the Flower Moon", that a sprawling work by one of our greatest filmmakers, in this case a film that had a gestation period of nearly fifty years, deserved to be examined both in its own right as a work of art and in context as part of its creator’s career. In hindsight, it’s risible to think that at the end of the 70’s, film fans were heatedly debating who among the heroes of the American New Wave would end up with the greater career: Scorsese or Coppola? (Let’s not even talk about some of the others around the periphery of that conversation at the time, like De Palma, Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Rafelson, Cimino, Lucas and yes, perhaps even Spielberg—although, surprisingly, Paul Schrader has been coming up with a few late-period masterpieces). Megalopolis ends that debate, and stands, as I referred to "Eyes Wide Shut" relative to Kubrick’s career in our episode devoted to that film, as a cardboard tombstone to the career of a gifted filmmaker. While the members of Team Vintage Sand, whose bottomless intrepidity was confirmed by each of us successfully wading through (a la Andy Dufresne) the 2 ½ hours of dreck that is "Megalopolis", did find the occasional positive to light on, for the most part it was an example of a work of incredible consistency, in that just about every choice Coppola makes as writer and director was the wrong one. Perhaps the comparison with Scorsese is unfair, and certainly nothing could ever erase the impact of Coppola’s four films of the 1970’s, or even the smaller delights of his later work (Mike’s a fan of "The Cotton Club", and I’ve always thought that "Tucker" was a much better film than its reputation dictates). But for us, the truth is that between the gratuitous literary and high culture references, the sophomoric philosophizing that would make any actual 10th grader cringe, the derivative film tributes sprinkled throughout (including, unbelievably, a moment where the film appears to physically burn up in the projector—a brilliant idea had Bergman not done it 60 years ago in "Persona"), and a script that even good actors like Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito can’t save, "Megalopolis" was, quite unintentionally, the funniest film of the year—and given how much we love and admire its creator, the most painful. Once can only hope that this is not Coppola’s final statement, and that in future efforts he will trust his audience, not try so hard to impress us with his erudition, and remember what made him so great in the first place