Megadoc (Mike Figgis, 2025)

 

About halfway through his record of the making of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, Mike Figgis comments that the best such documentaries all record disasters, and that as such there’s part of him that celebrates when something goes wrong on Coppola’s project. It’s a sign though of Figgis’s ultimate reticence, if not of his outright passivity, that one wouldn’t know from his own film that Megalopolis was indeed a failure by most measures, losing at least $75 million of Coppola’s own money, the critical response at best mixed: Megadoc leaps from the end of shooting to the Cannes premiere with the obligatory standing ovation and then abruptly ends without further comment. Among other omissions, it also gives little sense of what Megalopolis is actually about (albeit that even many of those who worked on the film seem unsure on that score), and due to varying cooperation from the actors, gives a rather skewed impression of the experience of watching the film (one might think it’s mainly a chamber drama starring Shia LaBoeuf and Jon Voight, with Adam Driver hovering on the sidelines). But for all of that, Figgis’s film barely has a dull moment, fascinating in the portrayal of the immaculately turned-out Coppola (a different suit and tie ensemble every day) often at odds with the monster he’s unleashed, mystified that everything involves so many people and takes so long, as if he were a mere hired hand himself; budgetary numbers occasionally flash up on the screen, all of them staggering. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the most charming passages is an improvised conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza as they arm-wrestle, Hoffman doing his (edge-of-creepy) best to push things in a flirtatious direction; it’s a moment that shows up the paucity of such spontaneous engagement amid so much care and diligence, even if it relates to nothing in the finished movie.