Withering critical appraisals and piddly box office receipts be damned. The cinematic event of the year was the arrival of Francis Ford Coppola’s eternally gestating passion project Megalopolis. Produced with some $120 million of the filmmaker’s own money, it is a movie Coppola had been writing, producing, tinkering with, or otherwise dreaming about for some four decades. Everyone from Paul Newman to James Gandolfini and Jon Hamm had, at one point or another, been attached. It grew to be more of a legend than actual production: a grand movie-in-theory, forever frustrated in its attempted realization. Its actual release was, for many cinephiles who followed its anguished production, like some lost continent being dredged from the fathomless creative depths of the great vanguard of the New Hollywood, who gave us The Godfather pictures, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and, sure, the movie where Robin Williams plays a ten-year-old kid super-aged into the body of a forty-year-old Robin Williams.
So, whatever ones makes of it, the very fact of Megalopolis—with a star-speckled cast of motley talents including Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Balthazar Getty (Remember him? From Lost Highway?), and members of Coppola’s famiglia like sister Talia Shire, nephew Jason Schwartzman, and granddaughter Romy Mars—lighting up screens across the continent, was the reason for the season. By most reckonings (including my own), Megalopolis is not very good. Set late in the “third millennium” in the futuristic city of New Rome (New York City, basically), Driver stars as genius “Emersonian” architect and engineer Cesar Catilina, who dreams of hewing some newfangled city of the future from an ultramodern construction material called “Megalon,” the discovery of which netted him a Nobel. His ambitions are checked by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a corrupt, vaguely Adams-esque sort, who would rather revitalize the city with that classic bread-and-circus civic planning non-solution: a casino. Also in the mix are Catilina’s ultra-rich banking magnate uncle (Voight), his faux-revolutionary fuckboy cousin (Shia LaBeouf), and a wily and sexy business reporter named Wow Platinum (Plaza), plowing her way through all three men to consolidate her own influence. There is a musical number involving a magically multiplying virgin; a sex scene in which Plaza’s character plots a hostile takeover while her adopted son goes down on her; and a genuinely puzzling interlude where a live actor steps in front of the physical theatre screen and poses a question to the great Caesar Catilina.
This precis risks making Coppola’s movie sound more interesting than it is. Same goes for many of the film’s more savage takedowns. The problem is not that Megalopolis is “messy” or “incoherent.” The problem is that, for all its pretensions of experimental grandeur, the film is almost laughably straight: a story of a Great Man waging war against ordinariness, cast in Randian terms, from Catilina’s Howard Roark heroics down to the art deco set dec. A film that desperately begs us to imagine the future is totally backward-looking. Characters and plots are lifted from history books, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw. A pop star in a transparent dress evokes the dancing doll sequence of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann (a bit Coppola had already paid a debt to, in the little-seen 2009 drama Tetro). The excessive deployment of CGI and green screen technology make it as unpleasant to behold as many of the big studio blockbusters. The spattering of absurd humor—including a wonderful scene in which Voight, dressed as Robin Hood, sneakily stages as assassination with a prop crossbow protruding from his tenting trousers—are too scant. More than a monument to its maker’s unruly ambition, Megalopolis is a testament to Orson Welles’s maxim that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
For all the film’s talk of imagining some brave new world, Megalopolis can offer no convincing image of what that world might look, or feel, like. The best we get are snippets of the city itself: Jetsonian apartments on stalks, moving walkways, and skyscrapers of flourishing gold leaf that resemble the Gold Saucer amusement park from Final Fantasy VII. Catilina’s utopian politics are likewise never clearly articulated. It’s as if his Megalopolis, like Coppola’s, is trapped on the tip of his tongue. The film is not a failure because it is some wild-eyed failure or a tragic case of artistic reach exceeding grasp. It is a failure because it is a tedious slog. And, for whatever it might be worth, a total box office dud.
A great many aging, interesting filmmakers have returned with reflective, elegiac, and at times still restlessly inventive movies.
Coppola is no stranger to the floperoo economy. His 1982 musical One From the Heart netted peanuts against its $26 million budget, bleeding Coppola’s various production companies and souring his reputation. In 1988, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a comic biopic of embattled American automative entrepreneur Preston Tucker, suffered a similar fate. But in the character of Tucker—whose dream of a futuristic family sedan faced fierce opposition from the Big Three auto manufacturers—Coppola found a charismatic artist-technician who wars against the mediocrities for the sake of a product that is more-or-less like any other in its category. For better and worse, Megalopolis is Coppola’s “Tucker Torpedo.” And while basically uninteresting on its own terms, Coppola’s magnum opus is nonetheless generative, inviting a reflection on late style in one of American cinema’s undisputed masters—and of the medium itself, which can seem, despite the riches afforded various weisenheimer super-humans and yellow animated mischief-globs that grace the modern silver screen, to be struggling through its own long autumn.
A great many aging, interesting filmmakers have returned with reflective, elegiac, and at times still restlessly inventive movies. The fall movie slate, as scheduled both theatrically and at festivals, conspicuously abounds with new works from old masters which apprehend (in different ways, and with different degrees of success) Edward Said’s notion of late style as those works that “stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.”
Perplexity and unsettlement reign in Hard Truths, the twenty-something-ish feature from the eighty-one-year-old British director Mike Leigh. Leigh is master of the comedy-hyphen-drama form, mining humor and pathos at various edges of society. His filmography spotlights striving motorcycle couriers (High Hopes), embittered intellectual maniacs (Naked), emotionally repressed driving instructors (Happy-Go-Lucky), and back-alley abortionists (Vera Drake), along with statelier biopics of the Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner and Victorian librettist/composer duo Gilbert and Sullivan.
Leigh’s tragicomedy reunites him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of his Palme d’Or-winning 1996 feature Secrets & Lies. She plays Pansy, a tightly wound housewife with a forked tongue. Her barbs are, initially, hilarious, inviting riotous laughter from audiences. (“What’s a dog need a jacket for?” She barks. “It’s got fur!”) Before long, however, her irritability reveals deeper wounds: personal, familial, and, especially, racial (Pansy and her family are Afro-Caribbean). A scene in which Pansy asks to see the manager of a furniture showroom, then sheepishly retreats to her car to stare into space offers a profoundly sad reflection on the type of person whose exacting demands of everyday life betray a basic powerlessness. Even by Leigh’s standards, Hard Truths can feel punishing, verging on cruel. It’s as if Leigh is chastising viewers for mistaking his characters, ground down by the conditions of modern life, for figures of fun.
Oh, Canada stages a similar reunion between director and subject. In 1980, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo made a star of Richard Gere, who peacocked as an upmarket male escort afflicted by marrow-level malaise. It’s a troubled male archetype that abounds across Schrader’s filmography, from Taxi Driver (which he scripted) to Light Sleeper, and a recent trio of features: First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener. If “late style” expresses feelings of intransigence and disharmony, Schrader’s “man-in-a-room” trilogy felt, by the end, a little too settled into their stylistic and thematic box. On paper, Oh, Canada is of classically Schraderian stock: at the end of his life, a draft-dodging documentarian Leonard Fife (Gere) is visited by former students to give an on-camera account of his life. Originally a wannabe novelist, Leonard made a name for himself in Canada making impassioned social documentaries about Catholic Church abuse, environmental poisoning, and the Residential School system. In his personal life, Leonard is pompous and a bit of a cad. He bails on his wife and child, scams a late-night hand job from his buddy’s wife, drinks, smokes, and carries on.
What distinguishes the film from Schrader’s more recent pictures is its style. The film is built in flashbacks (in which Gere’s character is alternatively played by Jacob Elordi, and by a younger-looking Richard Gere) and cutaways. The wonky structure is meant to reflect the Leonard’s mental state: stories trail off, characters (and actors) mesh together, memories seem totally misplaced. It’s an attempt to express cognitive decline, but we’re left with no sense of Leonard’s motivations, beyond him just being a bit of a bastard. Even his climactic march across the U.S.-Canada border is undercut by an earlier scene in which he ducks service by pretending, quite campily, to be gay. And perhaps that’s the point: he’s not a “draft refugee” at all; just a guy ducking out of an increasingly restricting life. The confessional is the core mechanic of Schrader’s cinema—and his anguished, lapsed Calvinist psyche—and Leonard’s promises to be a doozy: a life of artistic passion covering for a more basic cowardice. Of course, the real confessor is Schrader himself. Oh, Canada plays like the director’s own cry for forgiveness. Perhaps Schrader, too, once cheated on a spouse, or stole a pair of winter boots.
More persuasive is the film’s depiction of aging and its ravages. Gere, the 1980s super-stud, is dressed down in death-mask makeup and fitted with brimming drainage bag. When he’s not lost in his mind-maze, he coughs phlegmatically and ruminates on the smell of dried shit. Edward Said explicitly associated “late style” with “the decay of the body, the onset of ill health.” The film’s most interesting feature is the way figures Gere, still a white-haired Hollywood hunk, as a gurgling gargoyle. It’s something that Schrader, who never seems too old to get his films and funded and distributed, believed would gin up buzz, telling an audience at the New York Film Festival that people would pay to see his “dying, desiccated gigolo.”
These more abject, material horrors are foregrounded in The Shrouds, the latest from the eighty-one-year-old David Cronenberg. Vincent Cassel stars as Karsh, a wealthy Toronto technologist—and, with his slicked-back silver mane and black-on-black wardrobe, obvious Cronenberg stand-in—who develops a technology for monitoring the deterioration of his late wife (Diane Kruger), as she festers in her grave. More than just some macabre, voyeuristic conceit (though it is that), the technology permits the bereaved a new form of intimacy with their deceased loved ones. (Cronenberg himself lost his wife of forty-three years in 2017.) When he’s not drooling over his dead wife’s bones, Karsh is plagued by nightmares of her physical deterioration, carrying on an affair with her dead ringer twin sister (also Kruger), and fending off the advances of an overly flirty AI avatar named “Hunny” (Kruger again).
Cronenberg has never been shy about projecting his own neurosis and bad feelings on screen. 1981’s Scanners, about a cadre of telepathic assassins, features a tortured sculptor who produces twisted, Bacon-esque works in order to still the voices in his head. “My art,” he mutters, “keeps me sane.” Cronenberg’s filmography plays like a goopier version of Freud’s notebooks. The Shrouds’ exploration of his own grief is particularly frank. It’s like he took the necrophilic subtext of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and made a whole film out of it. Yet it is so particular its maker’s consciousness—and broken heart—that it is hard not be moved by The Shrouds, despite some of its sillier plot turns, or shot-for-Canadian-TV visual textures.
As with his last picture, 2022’s Crimes of the Future (a masterpiece), Cronenberg exhibits a more sympathetic, and even romantic, preoccupation with bodies in distress. For all his films’ fascination with mutation and the “new flesh,” Cronenberg has always seemed a bit skeptical, even revolted, by such bodies. His work is synonymous, after all, with the genre of “body horror.” Now it’s as if, confronting his own deterioration, Cronenberg finds new delight, possibility, and beauty in the body, in all its malformations, and even in the routine process of putrefaction.
The body at its end is on full, moving display in Scénarios, a new (and perhaps final) film from Jean-Luc Godard, who died in 2022. A short collage, typical of Godard’s late-late period films (namely 2018’s The Image Book, the last feature released before his death), Godard juxtaposes stills from old movies with images drawn from the history of warfare, underscored by disjointed music cues and his own narrated disquisitions, drawn from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. There, at the very end of the seventeen-minute film, is Godard himself, hunched over the edge of a bed, his distended gut hanging out over his belt line. The scene was shot the day before the director died, in his home, by legally assisted suicide.
These films are not terminal, funerary statements—or the death rattle of the medium itself. They are new movies.
Suffice to say I found the image extremely moving. I never quite know what to make of Godard, whose later films seemed increasingly like exercises in willful aesthetic obstinacy. At the same time, I appreciated that stubbornness and desire to radicalize the form to the very end—and, as Scénarios shows, even beyond—as consummations of the whole concept of lateness. Godard always zigged where the film industry (and its popular form) zagged. His belief in the power of the moving image bordered on a kind of political fanaticism. Godard’s late life collaborator Fabrice Aragno introduced the film at a midafternoon, half-attended screening. He vented about people referring to Godard’s posthumous features as “the last Godard film.” This was, he insisted, “the new Godard film.” It’s a refreshing way to think about the old masters, and about cinema itself.
These films are not terminal, funerary statements—or the death rattle of the medium itself. They are new movies. And their newness suggests that, even as a class of hyper-prolific and canon-defining artists fade into the twilight, cinema may still offer fresh possibilities. But if I’m being honest, this charming sentiment scrapes against the industrial and cultural realities. Box office receipts are not a metric of a movie’s quality, but they are a fair metric of public (dis)interest. Coppola’s auteurist passion project bombed; the latest film by David Cronenberg had trouble securing a North American distributor; ninety-four-year-old Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2 (one of the year’s best) was all-but suppressed from release in American cinemas, at the behest of Warner Bros.’s current know-nothing-in-chief, David Zaslav. Notably, of Coppola, Leigh, Schrader, Cronenberg, and Godard, it is the Americans whose late films, and the press surrounding them, seem most terminal. Their final films seem pitched as the curtain call for movies themselves. But the idea that the cinema is dying as these old (American) masters fade into the twilight feels pathological, and indicative of a great hubris. It’s a type of ladder-pulling that is a generational defect of so many boomers. Having lived through, and made, history, they’re now packing it up and taking it with them. Hearing them whine about the death of cinema is like listening to a greybeard in a Jerry Garcia-branded necktie wax nostalgic about Woodstock. It’s an offense to younger filmmakers, and moviegoers, and those who can’t afford to lose faith in the medium.
Watching the much-publicized Megalopolis live-stream premiere event, at a hollowed-out AMC multiplex in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, surrounded by other increasingly irritable cinephiles, my own appreciation of Coppola’s heroism began to wane. When I got up mid-film to use the men’s room and refill my bucket of soda pop, I noted that I was in no real hurry to get back to the theatre. As Coppola’s mangled, rather boring vision unfolded, matters of intrepidity, and late style intransigency faded. Other questions began flitting across my mind. Stuff like: Is this almost over? What’s the score of the Bill game? And, mostly, What else could playing, on this great big screen, to such a captive audience, instead?