Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola, 2024. Thrilling performances that exist within their own vacuum. Pygmalion (and other classics haphazardly injected into the screenplay) as Meisner exercise. Imaginative compositions made to look sci-fi-on-the-CW-Network cheap. Stilted dialogue in service of nothing more than the sound of it being spoken.

I share these impressions stochastically and without further development to mirror the experience of viewing the latest, and likely last, film of Francis Ford Coppola.

The film’s celebrants (and there are seemingly few) want me to believe it’s like this on purpose. That everything is supposed to be sloppy, absurd, and nonsensical. That Coppola’s vision is simply too vast to be grasped in the year 2024. I certainly understand the impulse. When I left the theater, I tried desperately to find some lens of criticism that didn’t view this film as an unmitigated disaster, and the only one that worked was it being some grand statement on the futility of dying with one’s treasure; a mad genius burning all his money to launch a million seaward harpoons on the off chance of fatally striking that awful White Whale.

Coppola clearly missed but remained fortunate enough to have caught plenty of exotic, strange looking fish in the form of memorable lines spoken by his actors. These will live on in midnight showings for years to come, received by an audience who will ritualistically shout them back at the screen a la The Room and leave the theater absolutely giddy they live in a world where the director who made The Godfather also made Megalopolis: a film they will brag to whomever will believe them was one they saw opening weekend, the one and only time it was intended to be taken seriously.