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.
