C-Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Starring Adam Driver Review by Jon Kissel |  |
If a director makes three or four of the greatest American movies, he can do whatever he wants. For Francis Ford Coppola, that’s meant toiling in his own shadow, never coming anywhere near the quality of his several masterpieces. He’s also built a filmmaking dynasty and founded a wine empire, the latter of which enabled him to produce and direct what will likely be his final film. Megalopolis has been in the works since the 70’s, when Coppola saw the parallels between the Cataline Conspiracy of the Roman Republic and contemporary America. Though that historic incident has been reconsidered by historians in the time Megalopolis was on Coppola’s mind, his film loosely about it hasn’t undergone the same level of reexamination. The combination of Coppola’s inability to rediscover the magic of his 70’s output and the surface-level examination of both Roman history and present-day America makes Megalopolis a mess of such grandeur that it’s impossible to predict what will happen next. This nine-figure stream-of-consciousness is worth watching if only for its head-scratching quality, and the unique combination of Coppola’s soft-brained earnestness and therapized self-examination.
RSS Feed