The Brooklyn Rail

When people started asking me if Megalopolis (2024) was “bad,” for a moment, I was genuinely surprised. For those of us stuck in the cinephile bubble (particularly that dark corner dedicated to cult, genre, and other disreputable “bad” films), Megalopolis has been something of a white whale since the announcement that Francis Ford Coppola’s embattled, late-career disasterpiece—an epic, heady, steampunk take on America, envisioned as the decaying Roman Empire of the future being remolded by a man who can control time—was finally ready to see the light of day. Adam Driver, the film’s Great-Man star, has called Megalopolis “undefinable,” and this sense of the film as a fully sui generis work of auteurist mania is at the heart of movie buffs’ rabid eagerness. Its reputation has preceded it over more than forty years of development, leaving tantalizing bread crumbs along the way: its production process cost the director much of his personal wealth; its revolving door of stars didn’t have contracts, merely hanging out until Coppola allowed them to leave; an usher is supposed to shout a single line of dialogue at the screen; even after it was completed in 2023, no studio wanted to release it.

When a director makes multiple outright masterpieces as a young man—and especially when one of those masterpieces is the infamously risky, massively over-budget Apocalypse Now (1979), whose production literally almost killed him before earning him the Palme D’Or—every swing for the fences thereafter is bound to make a lot of us hold our breath. As could only be expected, and as has become typical of Coppola’s swings (see the reception of 1981’s One from the Heart), reviews for Megalopolis have been wildly mixed over the question of whether it’s “good.” For a film whose primary goal, per the director as well as his protagonist, is to start “a great debate about the future” and encourage intellectual and artistic “freedom” for “the human family,” the critical wall of verbiage alone could rightly categorize Megalopolis as a smashing success. So rather than ask whether Megalopolis is “bad” or “good,” let’s turn instead to the question, is Megalopolis truly “undefinable”? In an era whose slavish devotion to the Netflix algorithm and the Tomatometer has fundamentally rewired our understanding of film culture as metadata, how do we begin to really unpack this question?

In 2021, J. Hoberman wrote a piece in Sight and Sound whose central ideas can help us frame Megalopolis’s reception. Focusing on Richard Kelly’s singular Freedom Fries-era bomb, Southland Tales (2006), Hoberman explores “film maudit,” a concept dating back to 1949 which he defines as “a ‘damned’, ‘unlucky’, or ‘ill-favoured’ movie … cursed with an unhappy destiny… a fiasco.” A cousin to the badly-used category, the “cult film,” a label so thoroughly commoditized as a “genre” that it’s all but lost its original meaning, the film maudit is perhaps best embodied by Werner Herzog and his Fitzcarraldo (1982) protagonist, pushing a massive ship up a mountain together to achieve the impossible dream of a perfect opera house in the jungle (“CARUUUUUSOOO!”). Its criteria can be perfectly applied to Coppola’s latest: per Hoberman, the film maudit is a product of an especially torturous production history like Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) (check), it’s wildly expensive (check), and “megalomaniacal persistence helps” (check). It’s movies like Otto Preminger’s Skidoo or Elaine May’s Ishtar. Still, at the end of his essay, Hoberman argues that our modern media landscape is no longer hospitable to (inhospitable enough for?) the creation of the true film maudit:

In 2021, the film maudit seems a historical concept … As the mass audience eroded, social media has rendered film maudit superfluous. In simultaneously undermining a critical establishment to react against and elevating the opinions of unaffiliated cinephiles, the net has fostered a cinematic counterculture capable of embracing, defending and blessing nearly anything.

Thus the death of the cult film label: our film market may be defined in large part by mild-mannered, shallow-focused, streaming-optimized IP and “second screen content” on the one hand, but at the same time even “weirdness” has been turned into its own brand to be sold to a niche market and labeled as a “microgenre” on Letterboxd Pro.

In some sense, Megalopolis’s reception seems to have confirmed Hoberman’s argument. Where Kelly’s Southland Tales earned boos and walkouts at Cannes, Megalopolis received a seven minute standing ovation—and earned a jaw-droppingly paltry 4 million dollars on its 120 million dollar budget over its opening weekend. In a seemingly active attempt to pre-fabricate a film maudit, Lionsgate, which finally picked it up (provided Coppola footed the promotional bill), has used the language of the “cult film” to preemptively market Megalopolis as a strange but misunderstood masterpiece, using (fake) quotes from critics like Pauline Kael saying other Coppola classics like The Godfather (1972) were bad. The film currently holds a cleanly tepid 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, dooming it to the doldrums between the “bad movie” championed by a small band of True Believers, and the “good movie” that an average viewer would choose to watch on a streamer or pay to see in theaters. People have heard that “it’s bad,” and a mass audience will certainly be confused by the film’s bizarre tone, what Screen Slate called its “direct-to-Tubi aesthetic,” and its grandly felt but largely inchoate politics.

In another sense, though, Megalopolis has revitalized the film maudit precisely with its “undefinability”—it resists the dictum of neat definition that characterizes internet era criticism with its 50 percent rating and its New York Times Critic’s Pick and its identity as a film people have heard was “bad” and movie buffs argue about.

To me, Megalopolis was more familiar than strange. It’s defined by the same mind-boggling, earth-shaking earnestness that drives the works of Antonioni, the films of Neil Breen, and every film maudit worth its ulcer-inducing budget alike. It shares the same peculiarly vague kind of societal narrative that so often drives children’s films (staples from my childhood like Antz (1998) and Robots (2005) jumped unbidden to my mind) or the works of more recognizable oddballs like George Miller or Robert Zemeckis. It’s American Beauty told like Repo! The Genetic Opera.

When Coppola came out to introduce my 6:30pm screening at the AMC Lincoln Square 13, he was dwarfed by the massive IMAX screen. He thanked his audience (hailed as “cousins” in the “human family”) with his “whole heart” and encouraged us to ask ourselves, “Who are human beings, really? What is cinema, really? and what are our problems, really?” before his old school Great-Man movie began. In that moment, I couldn’t help but think about (sorry) Infinite Jest, and David Foster Wallace’s riff on what he calls “that queerly persistent US myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive”:

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human … [which] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic … in some basic interior way forever infantile.

That’s what makes Coppola’s latest a film maudit at heart. Untangling the utterly bananas politics of Megalopolis (as many have) is a worthy project and admittedly very tempting (the lightly autocratic undertones of Cesar’s Philosopher-King schtick are particularly beguiling). But, under the faux-topicality of a script he’s been gestating since just after the Vietnam War and the (broadly facile) references to Marcus Aurelius or Plato, what captured my imagination is the same sense of winning allegorical looseness, of dreamy play with form, that makes, say, One from the Heart or Rumble Fish (1983) so captivating to watch. This isn’t to let the man who made The Conversation (1974) off the hook for pseudointellectual hokum, but for every wooden line, cherry-picked bit of history, or wildly egotistical flourish, there was the moment of genuine, befuddled glee that genre cinephiles cherish (“Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress,” “One, two, three, yippee-yee,” “Go back to the cluuuuuuub”); and for every shot that could have been pulled from the original Tron (1982), there was a moment of cinematic pathos that evokes the best of Coppola’s silent-film-inflected stylings (cowering shadows playing across towering buildings as a satellite falls, clowns and aerialists flitting through the MSG Colosseum at night). Under all of it, there’s an irresistibly childlike hopefulness about our future and the next generation that makes the sweep of the narrative feel, in a funny sort of way, moving.

In every sense, Megalopolis is a tale about time. Well, maybe it’s a tale as old as time. Or, perhaps a tale out of time. It’s a Great-Man movie directed by a Great-Man director in an era for which that sort of massive cinematic monolith feels deeply unfamiliar. It’s gargantuan in scope and ambition, but it also boils down to one man’s maniacal eagerness to share his feelings, his desire to create something new out of all the old things around us, to ask, with a completely straight face, “Is this society, is this way we’re living, the only one that’s available to us?” and to answer “When we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” For some, the closing title card of Megalopolis may read a lot like the one that ends Y.K. Kim’s goofy eighties ninja detective cult classic Miami Connection: “Only through the elimination of violence can we achieve world peace.”

As Megalopolis’s reception shows, the film maudit is a fragile thing, here made possible only by Coppola’s gargantuan reputation and vast wealth. While distributors, critics, and audiences have all scrambled to define his project in categorical terms we can understand—“good,” “bad,” something else entirely—Coppola’s staunch commitment to his vision is unwavering. For the director of a true film maudit, the ultimate goal isn’t the reception of their work at all. Regardless of their wildly different scopes, both Francis Ford Coppola and Y.K. Kim are encouraging us, with their hearts on their sleeves and their cash reserves burning in a giant pile behind them on the front lawn, to look past our fear of failure and see that “there’s so much to accomplish.” The only question is, “is there time?”