My World Of Flops: Megalopolis

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

Orson Welles was nearly as famous for the movies he never finished as the masterpieces he made. For decades, no unfinished Welles project loomed larger than The Other Side Of The Wind. It was an ambitious, semi-autobiographical drama about an Orson Welles-like auteur (John Huston) staring down mortality and the end of his life and career at a raucous, boozy birthday party attended by a colorful assortment of movie-world players all jockeying for position. It sure seemed like The Other Side Of The Wind was doomed to join Jerry Lewis’ notorious The Day The Clown Cried as the most famous unreleased movie in film history. 

Then something wonderful happened: the famously unfinished film was finished and released on Netflix. The result was as great as fans had hoped. The grand old man of American film made a young, sexy, and electric provocation that engaged with the cinematic revolution of New Hollywood in fascinating and unexpected ways and gave Huston one of his best roles. 

Similarly, Megalopolis is a passion project Francis Ford Coppola had spent decades working on but could not get financed, possibly due to its unspeakably awful screenplay. Megalopolis would be Coppola’s The Other Side Of The Wind, an old man’s passionate attempt to connect with generations that came after him with a purposefully young movie overflowing with sensuality and sex. It sure seemed like Coppola would never get a chance to make his muddled magnum opus, that it was doomed to live and die as a tantalizing, never realized possibility, not a finished film. 

Then something terrible happened: Coppola made Megalopolis. Even more disastrously, it was released. Achieving his longtime dream was one of the worst things that could have happened for him, his reputation, and for me as a moviegoer and film critic. 

Coppola embodies the popular film archetype of the crazed maverick willing to risk it all on an impossible dream. In narrative films, these inspirational figures triumph. In the real world, Francis Ford Coppola took $120M of the money he’d made selling sparkling wine to Karens and set it ablaze in a creative inferno so vast it could be seen from outer space. 

Megalopolis bombed so badly that mere weeks after its disastrous debut, it was only playing on one screen in one theater 20 miles away from where I live. I live in Atlanta, which is not exactly a podunk small town. The last time this happened was in September 2012, when I wrote about The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure for this column. 

That’s right: a dream project from one of our greatest filmmakers—a man with five Oscars and an Irving G. Thalberg lifetime award—did as poorly as The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure. I can’t even say that Coppola’s epic folly is a better film than The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure. It’s certainly more ambitious. I did not enjoy The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure, but it did not make me suffer like Megalopolis did. 

I prefer to write about movies for My World Of Flops once they’re available for streaming so that I can stop the action and take detailed notes. I like to be able to quote dialogue accurately and break films down on a granular, almost scene-by-scene basis. 

As we have established, Megalopolis is not available on home video. If I were the great Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the world-saving hero of Megalopolis, this would not pose a problem. In addition to being the wealthiest, most impressive man in the world, Cesar can stop time. He’s the best humanity has to offer, but he also possesses God-like powers. If I were Cesar, I could stop time whenever I’d like and diligently transcribe the film’s staggeringly idiotic, impressively inane dialogue.

I am not Cesar Catilina, thankfully. He may be an outsized figure of Francis Ford Coppola-level genius, but he’s arguably the worst character in film history. I’m not being hyperbolic. We are supposed to revere, respect, and emulate Cesar to derive inspiration from his heroic existence. Instead, I wanted to murder him with my bare hands so that he’d shut the fuck up. 

I had to rely on a clip I found on YouTube that contains Megalopolis’ most memorable moment and encapsulates, in 75 cringe-inducing seconds, what makes this a uniquely embarrassing boondoggle of historic proportions. This scene is a microcosm of the whole gaudy gestalt. 

This iconically awful scene finds Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the beautiful daughter of Cesar’s archnemesis–-the craven, cowardly collectivist mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito)—asking for an opportunity to sit reverently at the great man’s feet and soak up his wisdom. 

The headstrong beauty has crossed into enemy territory to ask for a chance to learn from a man her father despises. Being the world’s biggest asshole, as well as its greatest man and most incredible intellect, Cesar does not make it easy for her. 

His response to her offer is an inexplicably insulted, “YOU want to help me?”

This serious white man, with his serious white man ideas and serious white man brain, cannot believe that a silly young girl who isn’t even white or male and thinks of nothing but designer handbags and shoe-shopping might be able to “help” him in any way. The besotted young woman earnestly responds that she wants to learn from him. This sincere, vulnerable plea for Cesar to take pity on her and allow her to soak up his Einstein-like genius inspires even more verbose jackassery from Cesar. 

In words seared indelibly into my mind and the minds of all 12 people who’ve seen Megalopolis, Cesar sneers, “And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?”

Amazingly, this is not the embarrassing part. Obviously, a towering doofus discussing the riches of his Emersonian mind is incredibly embarrassing, but it’s somehow followed by something even more humiliating. Julia is indignant, but only temporarily. When Cesar repeatedly confirms his outrage that she somehow feels “entitled” to sample the riches of his Emersonian mind, she spits out, “You have no idea about me. You think I’m nothing, just a socialite?” 

With a wildly misplaced sense of self-righteousness, Cesar seethes, “No, not nothing, but I reserve my time for people who can think, about science, and literature, and architecture, and art. You find me cruel, selfish, and unfeeling. I am. I work without caring about what happens to either of us. So go back to da club, bare it all, and stalk the kind of people that you enjoy.”

If Megalopolis becomes a Mommie Dearest-level camp phenomenon, then Driver’s pronunciation of “da club” will be its answer to “No more wire hangers!” 

Driver manages to be simultaneously racist, sexist, condescending, and ageist in his delivery of “da club.” 

Coppola never seems older, whiter, less hip, or less current than when he’s trying and failing to seem young, urban, hip, and contemporary. The way the scene is written, acted, and directed suggests that the last time Coppola went to “da club,” it was with Liza Minnelli and a four-year-old Drew Barrymore at Studio 54 sometime in the late 1970s. 

Driver’s insufferable egotist swivels his head back and forth and pronounces “da club” in an insultingly broad caricature of Black speech. He sounds more like a character from a 1990s UPN sitcom like Homeboys In Outer Space or Shasta McNasty than the protagonist of a Francis Ford Coppola movie. Our God-like hero is implicitly calling the future mother of his messiah-child a silly hoodrat who belongs in a club, zonked out of her mind on MDMA, making out with hot girls and popping champagne, not wasting the time and energy of a great man.

Consciously or otherwise, Cesar is negging his soon-to-be soulmate. Megalopolis establishes that, as the most impressive man in human history, Cesar does not need to neg anyone. Yet he nevertheless tells a woman he finds desirable that she is a superficial floozy unworthy of plowing through the riches of his Emersonian mind and clueless when it comes to essential matters, like loftily pontificating on science, literature, architecture, and art.

Instead of responding that the words flying out of Cesar’s mouth constitute the most pretentious or ridiculous thing anyone has ever said, Julia becomes aroused.

Coppola is negging moviegoers. He’s insulting them with a lurid, bizarrely immature provocation full of laughable dialogue that would embarrass Ayn Rand. The veteran filmmaker dares audiences to hate every surreally self-indulgent moment. Yet the octogenarian vulgarian expects to hold onto the audience’s love all the same. 

The insufferable protagonist, who angrily demands to be seen as a surrogate for the writer-director-financier, shoos the silly girl away by admonishing her to “come back when you have more time.” 

Time is central to Megalopolis within the context of the film and on a metatextual level. Megalopolis represents the poignant tragicomedy of an old man trying to cheat age, death, and mortality by creating a young movie with a juvenile sensibility for audiences young enough to be his great, great, great, great, great-grandchildren. Coppola wanted to be reborn as someone young, new, and contemporary, to the point that when Cesar and Julia have a child they vow to call it “Francis” if it’s a boy.

Coppola wanted to shed his wrinkled skin and aged body and achieve creative immortality with one final manic manifesto, one last chance to make a movie that matters before he heads to the big studio lot/vineyard in the sky. So the winemaker made a sprawling epic that takes place in New Rome, a futuristic metropolis torn between the warring factions of Cesar, the scion of a powerful and flamboyant family that includes a cousin played by Shia LaBeouf (who alternately rocks a mullet and ponytail, the two least flattering male hairstyles), a Donald Trump-like Jon Voight, and Esposito’s Cicero, a cowardly conservative scared of the future and the utopian change that Cesar represents. 

Coppola says he cast the canceled LaBeouf and Voight so the film wouldn’t be “deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers.” It’s more likely that Coppola despises Voight and LaBeouf for very understandable reasons and wanted to punish them with uniquely awful roles in a singularly misguided motion picture. 

Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza channels both Anna Nicole Smith and Maria Bartiromo as Wow Platinum. Plaza’s scheming sexpot is sleeping with pretty much every member of the New Roman power family. Plaza throws herself into what is less a role than a horny grandpa’s sexual fantasy. 

Nobody emerges from Megalopolis unscathed. Nobody. 

About an hour into my second viewing of Megalopolis I experienced a full-on professional/existential crisis. I was overcome with an intense desire to leave not only the theater but film criticism as a whole. In that awful moment, two paths stretched out before me. In one, I could suffer through an hour and a half I knew damn well would be not just bad but unwatchable and continue my career as a film writer by finishing this important motion picture and then writing about it. The other, more immediately appealing path involved deciding, right then and there, to retire as a film writer and leave behind arts criticism entirely. The wonderful upside to choosing this road is that I could storm happily out of the movie theater and never look back. 

In this Sliding Doors scenario, I would never need to see another movie like Megalopolis again. I could begin a new, blissfully Megalopolis-free existence, possibly in another country. Unfortunately I have no skills other than writing. It’s not like I have a law degree or an MBA to fall back on. All I can do is write. So I chose to keep being a writer even though it entailed suffering through every last minute of Coppola’s elephantine monstrosity, this incoherent ode to self. 

Between my two viewings of Megalopolis, I have spent nearly five hours plowing through the riches of Coppola’s Emersonian mind. I barely survived with my soul and sanity intact. 

This monster must be stopped before he commits more crimes against cinema. Coppola has earned a lifetime pass for The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. Megalopolis makes a disconcertingly strong argument that his lifetime pass should be angrily revoked, along with his Irving G. Thalberg. When they gave him that lifetime award 13 years ago, they could never have imagined what an unfortunate turn that lifetime would take. 

When Megalopolis finally ended, seemingly days, if not months, after it began, a dedication to Eleanor Coppola, the writer-director’s wife of 61 years and the woman who shot the behind-the-scenes footage for the essential 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, popped up. 

That’s a horrible thing to do to someone you love.

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Fiasco