Jon Voight

Megalopolis

03/10/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Francis Ford Coppola’s long-nurtured passion project, Megalopolis, arrives garlanded with the kind of vitriolic advance reviews that instantly sank its chances of making any money at the box office. But why all the furore? What has the man done that’s so unspeakable? You’d think he’d murdered somebody. Instead, at the age of eighty-six, he’s made a vanity project, self-financing the hundred million dollar film by selling one of his vineyards. (We’ve all been there.) He hasn’t bankrupted a movie studio, which makes a refreshing change.

Lest we forget, Coppola has made some underwhelming films before. Yes, he gave us The Conversation, The Godfathers (One and Two) and of course, Apocalypse Now, but there was also One From the Heart and er… Jack, both of which were less than perfect.

It’s important to note that right from the opening credits, Megalopolis is described as ‘A Fable,’ so those who describe it as ‘unrealistic’ may be missing the point.

Somewhere in an imagined future, New York has become New Rome, and those that run the city have taken on the aspects of senators and emperors, strutting around in toga-like garments and looking very pleased with themselves. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is a sort of genius / town-planner, who has discovered a mysterious and indestructible building substance called Megalon. He has also found a way to stop time by clicking his fingers (as you do) and has a penchant for lapsing into Shakespeare soliloquies for no apparent reason.

Cesar is currently intent on building the titular inner city area, which he believes will be the first step in creating a bright new future, but his main adversary in this project is Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who seems to be opposed to any kind of progress. Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), on the other hand, finds herself increasingly drawn to Catalina and it’s not long before sparks begin to fly between them. It’s clearly going to cause trouble.

There are other powers at work in the city. TV presenter, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), is suffering from failing audience figures and is keen to take a step up in the world by marrying Cesar’s rich uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). She uses her nephew, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), to help her to get there, by any foul means he can devise. (The odious Clodio is clearly inspired by Donald Trump, right down to the bloody insurrection he foments and is perhaps the one place in the ‘fable’ that does relate to real life.)

Overall, Megalopolis doesn’t work and it’s not that it’s short of ideas. On the contrary, it is virtually struggling to contain them all and it doesn’t help that there are too many big names in cameo roles here, most of them improvising their lines. The likes of Dustin Hoffman and Talia Shire flit briefly across the screen and it feels as though Coppola, having secured their services, is unsure of exactly what to do with them. Sometimes, when you work too hard on a project, you stop seeing it objectively.

On the plus side, the film looks magnificent in IMAX, a succulent, shimmering wonder to behold (Coppola did his own cinematography) and, in the film’s latter stages, there are sequences that might best be described as psychedelic, the massive screen appearing to erupt at regular intervals in a blaze of light and colour. If you’re going to see this, do try to catch it in the cinema, because its going to lose all of its majesty on streaming. The running time of two hours and eighteen minutes soon elapses and, after everything that Coppola has given us over the years, surely it’s not too much to ask that movie buffs make the effort to actually go out to see it.

3 stars

Philip Caveney

Midnight Cowboy

 

25/06/17

Following hard on the heels of The Graduate, comes this beauty, shown as part of the Cameo Cinema’s Dustin Hoffman season. Released in the UK the year after Mike Nichols’s Oscar winner, this searing evocation of the grimy underbelly of life on the streets of New York was another of the late 60s film that fuelled my early interest in cinema. I first saw it forty-eight years ago and over the intervening period, it has lost none of its considerable powers.

Joe Buck (Jon Voight, eerily displaying the distinctive facial characteristics that his daughter, Angelina Jolie would make famous years later) is a troubled young dishwasher from the ass-end of Texas, who decides to reinvent himself as a cowboy-styled stud and travels to New York city with the intention of earning a living by seducing rich young women for money. Of course, the reality of the situation is quite different from his expectations. After what looks like an initial success, Joe ends up paying the first woman he ‘seduces;’ and things don’t improve when he meets ‘Ratso’ Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), an impoverished huckster who volunteers his services as Joe’s ‘manager.’ Ratso cons money out of Joe on their first meeting, but when they meet up again, the two men move into a filthy derelict building where an uneasy alliance begins to develop.

As with The Graduate, what strikes me here is how edgy and uncompromising this film is and yet it was a huge mainstream hit, back in the day, winning three Oscars and receiving countless nominations for the performances of Voight and Hoffman. It steps fearlessly into territory that hadn’t really been seen in the cinema before, so much so that Nichols famously advised Hoffman not to take the role of Ratso, believing that it would kill his career. The evocations of Poverty Row New York are brilliantly rendered and there’s also an extended sequence set in an Andy Warhol free party that vividly depicts the burgeoning anti-establishment movement of the period. Filmed with an impartial eye by English director John Schlesinger, it expertly nails the shallow, consumer-obsessed tawdriness of America in ways that few native-born directors could hope to achieve.

Fears that the film would be exploitative are largely unfounded. The dominant theme here is the deepening relationship between the two male protagonists and how in the midst of grinding poverty, both of them are fuelled by impossible dreams. This is a triumphant film, from its hard-hitting opening to its poignant conclusion. If you get the chance to see this on the big screen, don’t let it pass you by.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney