Has there ever been an artist with worse judgment about his own talents and abilities than Francis Ford Coppola? Ever? The greatest realist in the history of cinema has spent his creative life consumed, for some reason, with making pictures that explore the depths and corners of cinematic artifice.
The 85-year-old Coppola has capped his six-decade career as a director (he began by helming a soft-core porn flick in 1962) with an absolutely calamitous work of bizarre amateurism called Megalopolis that would barely get a passing grade from a 10th grade film teacher at some artsy school. It’s a fanciful work of alternate history set in a make-believe version of New York, and it is so insanely bad, in fact, that it possesses a bizarre charm—like when a child is making up a cock-and-bull story to explain why he’s two hours late for dinner and his tale just spins totally out of control and you have to wait until the end to shake your head indulgently and serve him up whatever leftovers you have.
At a very early point in his career, Coppola had wanted to make a movie about the Catiline conspiracy, a key moment in the decline and fall of the Roman republic he had read about as a child suffering at home with polio. And it also seems clear that he must have fallen in love (as many of his age did) with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Instead of discarding these two youthful passions, he apparently remained gripped by both and decided to merge them into a single demented epic about a city called New Rome. Coppola acknowledges that he suffers from bipolar disorder. This movie is a clinical artistic demonstration of that fact, as well as what can happen when a person with bipolar disorder has access to $120 million of his own money. He spent it on Megalopolis. The good thing is that no one has been harmed except his children’s inheritances.
The architect from The Fountainhead, here called Cesar Catilina, is at odds with the mayor, Frank Cicero. New Rome is awash in decadence. Catilina wants to build a new city in its place using a new material he invented called Megalon, for which he has won the Nobel Prize. Cicero doesn’t want him to build a new city. A whole bunch of other people are also against Catilina, who has the power to stop time but doesn’t seem to use it very often or to any purpose.
There’s a chariot race in Madison Square Garden (because New Rome is actually New York, kind of). Dustin Hoffman is a gangster, and Jon Voight is a banker, though why they’re in the movie is anybody’s guess, though they do match up a bit with characters in the Roman conspiracy. A slinky siren named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) tries to hypnotize men with a diamond bracelet. A virginal teen chanteuse named Vesta is seen having sex with Catilina, which is evidently bad. Eventually everything works out and the new city is built—it looks like the chocolate room in Willy Wonka—and the movie ends with an onscreen version of the Pledge of Allegiance, which Coppola rewrites as a pledge of allegiance not to the flag but to all humanity.
As I said, the movie cost $120 million, and I feel like Coppola was somehow had by the people who helped him set up the budget and spend the money, because it looks absolutely terrible. Not to bring up Ayn Rand again, but the movie it most resembles is the execrable three-part version of Atlas Shrugged released a decade ago. The color scheme is the same, as is the horrible rear-projection work, and the entire cost for those six hours was around $20 million. Every dollar isn’t on the screen, is what I am saying, and that’s putting it mildly.
But if Coppola is a sucker, he’s also the con man who suckered himself. After he nearly killed himself making Apocalypse Now in the late 1970s only to see it triumph at the box office, the projects that have stirred his deepest passions have largely been technical experiments—efforts to play with cinematic toys and storytelling forms rather than efforts to portray life and love and tragedy and triumph in all their complexity.
The turn in the tide of his reputation, and the decline of his reputation, began with the dead, drear, awful movie that brought his triumphant 10-year run that began with winning an Oscar for the screenplay to Patton in 1970 and proceeded through the two Godfathers, the brilliant thriller The Conversation, and the highly flawed but utterly magnificent Apocalypse Now to a screeching halt. That picture was called One from the Heart, and it was written as a small-scale study of a failing marriage in Las Vegas over the course of a single night. Coppola had ideas about how to make it experimentally—some very inventive ideas but ones that were decades ahead of their times in terms of practicality.
As a result, the project blew it up into an unwatchable epic that ended up costing more than $100 million in today’s dollars and destroyed the movie studio he had built for himself. He followed it with two other bloated versions of small-scale stories by the teen writer S.E. Hinton—The Outsiders and Rumble Fish—with extraordinary casts and utterly ludicrous overrich, overripe, overeverything dialogue and visuals.
The thing is, as an experimental artist, he stinks and has always stunk. He splits images in five ways and spins cameras around and does a scene in black and white and another scene with a person whose head is floating in the sky and turns Gary Oldman into a German Expressionist caricature as Dracula—and the results are almost always catastrophic. They provoke giggles rather than wonder.
But as a real-world storyteller, he is literally—and I mean literally—without peer in his medium. Fifty years years ago, in quick succession, he cowrote and directed The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II—rigorously realistic, unsentimental, emotionally capacious, and entirely grounded epic portraits of greed, violence, love, loyalty, family, community, hubris, and the terrible consequences of surrendering to the temptation to do evil. Unlike almost all other films ever produced, the two Godfathers are works of art that justify comparison to the most enduring works of literature because they achieve a depth, scope, and moral complexity that transcend the limitations of the cinematic form.
Coppola has lived a dozen lives, dodging disaster after disaster and living to fight another day. He saved himself financially by developing a hugely successful winery and a tourist business in Belize, but before that happened in the 1990s, he did have to hire himself out to the studios to keep himself afloat. And it is instructive to note that in making those relatively straightforward movies he made for the money—so-called paycheck projects—he was still able to tap into an earnest understanding of human nature and the ability to unfurl a story in a completely convincing way that utterly deserted him when he was playing the avant-garde artist.
I’m thinking of movies you probably haven’t even seen, like Peggy Sue Got Married, The Rainmaker, and Gardens of Stone—the latter in particular an all-but-unseen masterpiece about military families in Vietnam-era Washington sadly best known for the tragic incident when, during filming, his own son Gio was killed in a boating accident in Annapolis. If these were the only pictures on his résumé, Coppola might be remembered as a minor but talented director of unusual delicacy, skill, and heart. As it is, he will always be remembered for the two greatest films ever made. Either he understood he would never be able to do anything remotely as good again and so determined to test himself for the rest of his life in areas in which he had no real gift, or he is a person with no understanding of himself whatsoever. Or he went off his meds.