A person could lose their mind in Megalopolis. It sure seems like Francis Ford Coppola did, though ‘lose’ is maybe the wrong word, implying inadvertent mental misplacement. Actually his gargantuan, grotesque, wonderful folly of a movie is a long-gestating project to which Coppola has deliberately donated his mind (along with $120m of his vineyard money), emptying it out like a carpetbag containing the detritus of over four decades of larger-than-life life. Amid that pile there are more than a few dead moths and lint-fuzzed biscuit crumbs. But there are gleaming gold coins and skeins of silken thought too, alongside weighty tomes of Roman history and Shakespearean tragedy and some bootleg DVDs of boondoggles like Southland Tales (2006) and Cloud Atlas (2012) and the filmmaker’s own Youth Without Youth (2007). It’s all up there, and Coppola’s apparent inability to tell the treasure from the trash is one of the film’s frustrating, oddly poignant charms…
Thank you for reading this post.