Francis Ford Coppola (Still) Believes in Art
Plus: ‘The Naked Gun’ is still a joke a minute.
The Godfather—Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 epic that is, arguably, the greatest American film ever made—opens with a rather startling line: “I believe in America.”
It is uttered by an immigrant undertaker in search of revenge against the men who disfigured his daughter, and it is an ironic statement: The Godfather and its sequels are movies about America, of course, but a sort of caustic, critical glimpse of America, of its various hypocrisies and the incongruous nature of the immigrant experience, about the merging of crime and commercialism and corruption.
If I had to summarize Coppola’s appearance at the Texas Theatre in Dallas this week, where he was screening Megalopolis for a sold-out crowd, it might be with the following statement: “I believe in art.” But this is a noble belief, not one tinged with irony like Bonasera’s line in The Godfather. Coppola believes in art; he so believes in art that he put nine figures of his own money into the creation of Megalopolis, liquidating his beloved winery to bring his vision to the world.
I’ve attended my share of screenings at which the director or some other figure associated with the film was present (most recently when Kevin Smith came to town as part of his Dogma anniversary tour), and these things tend to go the same way: After a brief introduction the movie is shown, at which point the director comes out—sometimes with an interlocutor to guide a discussion, sometimes just taking questions from the crowd—and he answers some questions until it’s time to go.
Megalopolis was . . . not like that.
The official title of the film, which I reviewed last year, is Megalopolis: A Fable, but the subtitle could well have been “Francis Ford Coppola Has Some Things He Needs to Tell You,” what with its monologues about the need for a great debate about the future, its paean to the unstoppable force of love, and its pleas to accept the importance of art and literature and architecture.
And then we got an in-real-life version of the same thing.
As credits rolled, Coppola sat on a chair in the middle of the stage and talked. And talked. For ninety minutes. He wheeled out a whiteboard with ten words written on it, then proceeded to ignore the order of the words on the whiteboard and free associate about everything from abolishing debt to restructuring national politics to the nature of work.
Francis Ford Coppola had something he wanted to tell us, and we were going to sit there and listen to him.
It was, frankly, a little surreal, the way the movie flowed into the speech, each complementing the other.
But it was also a strikingly real, strikingly earnest event: a great artist and a true visionary who hoped to shape the world through his artistry and power of persuasion, who hoped to inspire those in the audience to do something more, something greater. I’ll be honest, I’m not persuaded that we should, say, choose nine random adults to govern Dallas every year. But hey. No bad idea in a brainstorm, amirite?
“When a Motion Picture begins the audience enters through a door. But which door?” began a letter greeting each of us at the Texas Theatre on Wednesday. “Please choose mine: I’ve always wanted to make an Ancient Roman Epic set in Modern America; the parallels are so interesting. But my door is a new way in, not yet familiar and doesn’t develop in ways you’ve been taught to expect. . . . Because when you’re willing to open and enter a new door you may well reach somewhere you’ve never been before.”
I remain unsure that Megalopolis really succeeds as a piece of filmmaking. But I remain glad it exists.
The Naked Gun review
Regardless, a Naked Gun movie is a little like porn: You’re doing it wrong if you’re watching it for the plot. We’re here for gags and goofs and riffs on tropes, like the increasingly absurd ways in which cops are handed cups of coffee or Drebin intrudes on his overwhelmed boss Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) in her home life. Schaffer deftly combines obtuse wordplay (“Take a chair.” “No thanks, I have a plenty at home.”) and absurd imagery (Neeson in a schoolgirl outfit disarming bank robbers in a riff on the opening sequence of The Dark Knight) with pure fantasy (Drebin and girlfriend Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) bringing a snowman to life for an erotic adventure in a mountain cabin). They don’t all land, but that’s the good thing about black-hole-levels of joke density: If one doesn’t work, you’ll get sucked into another in short order.
I am, honestly, curious to see how audiences react to the film’s sense of humor, which has been somewhat sidelined in recent years. The comedy is rarely referential and the references are often amusingly dated (for instance, the extended riff on the Black Eyed Peas and their hit 2003 song, “Let’s Get Retarded”). And much modern humor is driven by people being put into ridiculous situations and then yelling about how ridiculous everything is; everyone in this film plays every insane thing with a totally straight face, as if it’s totally natural for, say, detective Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) to find himself handing out free beers to kids at a UFC-style fight. There’s an accepted goofiness that has felt entirely absent from the rare big-screen comedies we still get.
Ultimately, the only thing I can really say about The Naked Gun is that I laughed a bunch and chuckled mirthfully even at the jokes that didn’t fully hit. We don’t get many theatrical comedic efforts like this one, so enjoy it while you can.
Click here to read the full review.
On the podcasts this week…
Can The Naked Gun save Hollywood comedies? On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to journalist and Substacker David Poland about the studios’ hesitance to make even modestly budgeted comedies for mainstream audiences.
The Perfectly Fine Four: On Across the Movie Aisle this week, we reviewed The Fantastic Four: First Steps and discussed if it matters that the New York Times is devaluing the traditional review.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Terrible Horror List: Look, I know the competition for “worst movie list ever” is tight, but man. The Hollywood Reporter list of the best horror movies since 2000 is rough. A lot of them aren’t even horror movies! That’s this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle.
Assigned Viewing: B’Twixt Now and Sunrise (Prime)
Since I’m alienating everyone by going on at length about a Francis Ford Coppola film that no one saw, I might as well recommend another that a similar number of people saw. B’Twixt Now and Sunrise is a 2022 re-edit of Coppola’s 2011 film Twixt. It’s an almost distressingly personal movie about an artist who has to come to grips with losing a child by drowning. (Coppola’s son, Gian-Carlo, died in a boating accident in 1986.) This movie also happens to have one of the last great performances by Val Kilmer (R.I.P.), which is another reason to check it out. But be warned: It’s very weird! Anyone who has seen this is unlikely to have been surprised by just how odd Megalopolis was.
Man, I was bummed enough that I had to miss his stop in Chicago stop but this made increased it.
There were some great moments in Megalopolis, but I felt like to succeed it would've needed to go full "Holy Motors" and stop wasting time trying to make any kind of narrative sense.