Something Old, Something New: Megalopolis | The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Francis Ford Coppola's fabled fable is a crushing disappointment.
In the end, the documentary that will inevitably be produced about MEGALOPOLIS’ journey to the big screen will probably be far more interesting to watch than the film itself. Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million passion project, self-financed and more than 40 years in the making, has emerged from its long gestation as the most disappointing thing it could have been: dull. There are striking visuals and some flashes of wit on display here, but they provide little consolation when the film is so utterly stultifying for most of its 138 minutes.
Coppola is interested in paralleling the ailing condition of modern America — and of contemporary cinema — with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and to this end, he lays his scene in the imagined city of New Rome, sometime in the 21st century. This is essentially a neo-Roman version of present-day New York, so the Chrysler Building features prominently and Fred Again plays in the club, but there are togas aplenty and not a mobile phone in sight.
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina (well, really he plays Francis Ford Coppola – but we’ll get to that), a visionary architect who has won the Nobel Prize for inventing a substance named Megalon (exact properties and powers unclear, but plentiful and miraculous). With this revolutionary material, Catilina plans to turn New Rome into a futuristic utopia, ‘Megalopolis’, and he has been granted permission by the federal government to demolish whole blocks of the city to do so. But Catilina’s grand ambitions bring him into conflict with New Rome’s reactionary mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who publicly asserts the need for immediate solutions to New Rome’s poverty problem, and privately cares only about preserving his own power. Meanwhile, Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) becomes enamoured with Catilina. She is the only person immune to his ability to stop time — a power he uses to absolutely no meaningful end in the film, because it’s a metaphor (though I’d be lying if I told you I knew what for, beyond a generalised notion of artistic brilliance). Supporting cast members include Jon Voight as banker Hamilton Crassus III, Shia LaBeouf as Catilina’s scheming cousin Clodio, and Aubrey Plaza as WOW PLATINUM (all-caps optional): news anchor, embittered ex-lover of Catilina, and source of some delightfully hammy moments that are among the only successful parts of the film.
I’d love to be able to tell you to ignore the generally poor reception Megalopolis has received elsewhere. I’d love to be able to stridently defend the film as a vital, brilliant statement from one of cinema’s great masters, or, failing that, as a flawed but fascinating curio. Unfortunately, the film is neither thought-provoking nor entertaining enough to be either of these things. It is a wildly frustrating, bafflingly boring cinema experience. I went in with high hopes and an open mind, and left with a bit of a headache.
The film does start strongly. Catilina teeters perilously on the roof of the Chrysler Building, tipping forwards and just preventing his fall to certain death by stopping time (not entirely sure how this works; again, it’s a metaphor). But while the film opens with a rapid descent being halted, Megalopolis is mostly downhill from there. The narrative never builds any kind of flow or momentum. Major incidents are introduced and almost instantly resolved or forgotten about. Scenes either end abruptly or overstay their welcome; a grand colosseum set-piece, intercut with a drug-fuelled fantasy sequence where Catilina spirals out of control, is impressively staged but a real snooze. And the performances — with a couple of exceptions, most notably Aubrey Plaza as WOW PLATINUM — are poor, though in fairness, it’s difficult to tell how much this is down to the material the actors are working with. The dialogue is leaden, chock-full of solemn sententiae. Sometimes, these are of Coppola’s own invention, but often, he seems reluctant to express an idea in his own words when he could just quote Aurelius or Plutarch on the subject. While some of the aphorisms Coppola has written are pretty neat (‘Don’t let the now destroy the forever’, ‘When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free’), the overall effect is of characters all walking around with their commonplace books open. That this is later challenged by Julia with (ironically) a quotation from Epictetus (‘don’t say your philosophy, embody it’) doesn’t change the fact that so much of the film is characters vaguely spouting aphorisms. The overall impression is that Megalopolis is more interested in encouraging us to notice all of the big ideas it’s including than it is in actually exploring those ideas.
When it isn’t in motivational-speech mode, the dialogue slips into a second register which includes such gems as WOW PLATINUM saying, as she kneels in front of Catilina, ‘You're anal as hell, Cesar. I, on the other hand, am oral as hell’. Somehow, even that line doesn’t land, but moments like it — essentially, everything that WOW PLATINUM says and does — are at least evidence that Megalopolis is knowingly silly, its goofiness for the most part a feature, not a bug. How could it be otherwise, when a pivotal scene has Jon Voight uttering the immortal words, ‘What do you think of this boner I’ve got?’ From these descriptions, it might sound like the film, despite failing to engage intellectually, could at least be a source of goofy fun. Not so, unfortunately. I don’t think this has the potential to become a so-bad-it’s-good cult classic like The Room — it’s not consistently camp or kitsch enough (read: WOW PLATINUM isn’t in it enough) for that. The film simply fails to entertain. There were maybe four moments that stood out to me because they were in some way shocking, unsettling, or just plain bonkers; other than that, it’s unbelievably dull.
Coppola and cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. have crafted some undoubtedly powerful images that will stick with me. Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel balance precariously on girders high above a sepia skyline. A hand reaches through silvery clouds and grasps the moon. And, in a couple of dizzying sequences intended to make the most of the height of an IMAX screen, and which will no doubt look spectacular on there, the screen splits into three vertical panels.
Some of these images are especially interesting because of the way they are rooted in, and deliberately make apparent, Coppola’s background in theatre. At one point, the shadows of cowering citizens are cast against the city’s skyscrapers, a visual which Annie Lyons points out is reminiscent of the opening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), for which Coppola used a Linnebach projector. In Megalopolis, when Driver and Emmanuel stand on the girders, set against a skyline of obvious artificiality, it’s as if they are suspended from the roof of a theatre. When we see them cavorting about in a snow globe, it could be an elaborate stage set. The theatricality of such moments is perhaps an homage to Coppola’s early conception of Megalopolis: sound designer Richard Beggs recalls that Coppola wanted it ‘screened over four nights […] in a gigantic outdoor purpose-built theatre’.
And the moments when Megalopolis evokes Coppola’s theatre background are also interesting because the film is a self-portrait. And avowedly so — I’m not even sure this counts as subtext; when Coppola released a first-look clip in May, it was accompanied by ‘a clear, concise analysis of MEGALOPOLIS’ which states that Cesar is ‘clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it’. Reading the film in this context, Megalopolis’ especially theatrical moments, its fusion of old-school film and theatre techniques and modern CGI, seem to point towards a future for cinema that mediates between these two extremes. And I think the film’s attempts to engage with cinema’s apparent decline-and-fall moment, and to tentatively point towards a positive future for the medium, are more interesting than its succession of shallow platitudes about society at large. It’s unfortunate that Coppola’s most formally audacious move, the fullest realisation of his long-held ambition to fuse cinema with the live theatre experience, won’t be replicated outside of a limited number of special screenings (there are lots of these on offer in the States, but as far as I can tell, none in the UK). In the absence of that ‘live-participation’ element, the film isn’t as bold and out-there as I was hoping.
One last note on the topic of Catilina being Coppola’s self-insert. For a supposedly forward-looking, visionary film, the depiction of women in Megalopolis is disappointingly regressive. Emmanuel and Plaza are doing the best with the material they’re given, but both of their characters are defined entirely by their infatuation with the Great Man and his genius. In spite of this — and here, again, I’m turning to that scene on the girders, which really is a beautiful moment — Coppola’s depiction of an artist whose faltering creativity is kicked back into gear by his loving partner is especially poignant in the context of the death this year of Eleanor Coppola, to whom the film is movingly dedicated.
When the runtime for Megalopolis was revealed earlier this year, I thought 138 minutes seemed a little short for a film so long-gestating and so self-consciously styled as its director’s magnum opus. I needn’t have worried; it feels twice as long. It's hard to fault the earnestness of the film’s ambitions and the sincerity of its sentiments. I’m glad that Coppola was able to make this on his own terms. It just didn’t work for me.
Something Old: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, dir. Terry Gilliam (2018)
Here’s a funny phenomenon: Adam Driver has starred in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (26 years in the making), Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote (29 years in the making), and Megalopolis (the development hell champion: 40-plus years in the making). If you want to finally complete your long-gestating passion project, cast him in it (Gilliam: ‘This film was made because of Adam Driver’).
Gilliam’s film shares much with Coppola’s, not least the notorious reputation it gained during its many years of troubled, seemingly cursed production, and while it is flawed and frustrating, it is for me the more enjoyable of these two cinematic self-portraits/Driver vehicles. Driver plays jaded director Toby Grummett, who is in rural Spain filming a commercial featuring the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and wistfully recalling the student film he made ten years earlier: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. When he bumps into the elderly man he cast in the title role, he is alarmed to find that ex-cobbler Javier Sanchez (Jonathan Pryce) has become convinced that he is the real Don Quixote — and believes Grummett to be his Sancho Panza.
The film looks great, with its sandy, golden-hued visuals and woozy, freewheeling camerawork; a credit to Gilliam and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini. The lead performances are strong. Driver is entertainingly sleazy as Grummett, while Pryce is brilliantly funny and in the end very moving as the knight-errant. Stellan Skarsgård, too, is a highlight — as Toby’s superior, The Boss, he’s just as menacing as he is in the guise of Baron Harkonnen. But the narrative moves in frustrating fits and starts, and by the time the final sting in the tail arrives, it’s unsatisfying: it feels too obvious, too clearly telegraphed, the point the film is making a little laboured. The only other film of Gilliam’s I’ve seen, 12 Monkeys (1995), has its issues (Brad Pitt’s ~~~!!!craaaaazzzzy!!!~~~ performance), but its final twist is satisfying.
The women in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are very thinly written — another unfortunate characteristic it shares with Megalopolis; that they are deliberately tropes and types of chivalric romance (the damsel in distress, the temptress) is a poor excuse — tropes can be challenged. And the film’s portrayal of Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who were forcibly converted to Christianity), though sympathetic in intention, is uncomfortable in execution.
Ultimately, the messiness of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote makes it a far more potent warning of the perils of long pursuing an artistic goal than Gilliam can have intended. But there is charm and entertainment here nonetheless.