MEGALOPOLIS

From the November 2024 Sight and Sound:

The best and worst to be said about Francis Ford Coppola is that he’s a compulsive reviser of his own self-portraits — not only when it comes to rereleasing new versions of his Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The Cotton Club, but even when it comes to his dropping and then reintroducing the ‘Ford’ in Francis Ford Coppola.

Part of what’s both fascinating and frustrating about his most ambitious and audacious film, developed over more than four decades, is the degree to which it revels in its own revisions — provocatively superimposing what looks like later drafts over earlier ones rather than using them as replacements. Far from emerging sadder but wiser, Megalopolis lands in our laps both happier and dumber for its lack of inhibitions. It becomes conventionally digestible only when it occasionally turns into an old-fashioned love story.

The conceit of imagining New York in terms of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (an attempted coup d’état to overthrow the Roman consuls with a populist revolt) entails not only a collapse of today, tomorrow, and yesterday, but alternate versions of all three, ergo a city reinvented whenever there’s a new scene to unravel. Read more