Megalopolis (15, 138 mins)
Verdict: Thumbs down
Rating:
When I saw Megalopolis at this year's Cannes Film Festival, I anointed it with just one star. Looking back, that was harsh. It is not devoid of virtues, so it probably deserves two.
But it is a crashing disappointment all the same, a desperately bloated and self-indulgent exercise on the part of 85-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola. And I write as one of his biggest fans. The Godfather is my favourite film of all time. His 1970s output alone, which also included The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, elevates him to the very top tier of filmmakers. He stands with the greatest of the greats.
But with that mighty talent comes a mighty ego, and a clear expectation that Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: A Fable, to give it its complete and vainglorious screen title, will make us marvel anew at his genius. Let us weep at his hubris instead.
Megalopolis is a passion project which has been decades in the planning, and which Coppola financed himself partly by auctioning off a chunk of his successful wine-making business. And yet, to use a wine analogy, the movie (a futuristic story about a dysfunctional city run by venal politicians), is corked.
Still, it's not that there isn't a powerful springboard for his notion that America in the near future, and New York City in particular, might be comparable with ancient Rome as decline and decay set in. He calls his metropolis New Rome, a place undermined by greed, and men intent only on enriching themselves.
Megalopolis is a passion project which has been decades in the planning, and which Coppola financed himself. (Film still of Megalopolis)
The plot is not so much confusing as labyrinthine, but Coppola ploughs on, using imagery that can't mean anything to anyone but him
There are a few flashes of cinematic brilliance, to be sure, and the premise is interesting. (Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine in Megalopolis)
Adam Driver plays architect Cesar Catilina, the city's principal mover and shaker, the nephew of mega-wealthy banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Cesar is also a Nobel Prize winner — and a rumoured wife-killer. When we first meet Cesar he is standing outside his office at the top of the magnificent Chrysler Building, seemingly about to take his own life. But he holds the mystical ability to make time stand still, and this enables him to step back to safety.
This sorcery is wrapped up with a magical golden building material he has invented called 'Megalon', with which he intends to erect a gleaming new utopia. But he has an influential foe in Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who affects to care about those whose neighbourhoods will be levelled to make way for Cesar's Megalopolis.
If all this sounds confusing, that's because it is. Yet Coppola has barely got going, hammering the ancient Rome analogy for all he's worth — which will likely be a lot less than it once was if this film gets a metaphorical thumbs-down from the cinema-going public.
Cesar's wild popularity takes a dive when a tape emerges of him having sex with a Vestal Virgin, which is a proper no-no in New Rome, but his lover Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is the daughter of Mayor Cicero, stands by him. Meanwhile his ex-lover (Aubrey Plaza), a television presenter who glories in the peculiar name Wow Platinum, has gone and married Cesar's rich banker uncle and is busily scheming with the old man's amoral grandson Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) to steal his fortune.
By now the plot is not so much confusing as labyrinthine, but Coppola ploughs on, using imagery that can't mean anything to anyone but him, and reminding us of his gigantic self-regard (or perhaps, to be more generous, his brazen wit) by having Julia and Cesar discuss names for their unborn child: Sunny Hope for a girl… Francis for a boy.
If only there was more wit elsewhere in the film. There are a few flashes of cinematic brilliance, to be sure, and the premise is interesting, not that New York hasn't been represented a thousand times before as a moral cesspit full of chancers and maniacs; after all, that's how Gotham City sprang into being.
All things considered, this film seems sure to be a megaflopolis, in which case Coppola might look to the heavens and cite a much more enjoyable cinematic depiction of Roman excess, the incomparable Carry On Cleo (1964), wailing: 'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!'
The Outrun (15, 118 mins)
Verdict: Lacerating and brilliant
Rating:
The Outrun is an unflinching adaptation of a memoir by Amy Liptrot, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Nora Fingscheidt. (Still from outrun)
The classiest film of the week is one which has a fraction of the Megalopolis budget.
It's a riveting study of addiction with an extraordinary central performance from Saoirse Ronan, as good as anything you will see all year.
The Outrun is an unflinching adaptation of a memoir by Amy Liptrot, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Nora Fingscheidt. It skips about in time as we follow 29-year-old Rona (Ronan) back and forth between her messy life in London and her childhood home on the Orkney Islands, where her alcoholism is a source of quiet despair for her devout, kindly mother (Saskia Reeves).
Rona is much closer to her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane).
It's lacerating stuff, but the healing power of nature offers glimmers of hope in a story that I found mesmerising from start to finish.
Wolfs (15, 107 mins)
Verdict: Clooney and Pitt fail to spark in a strained one-joke comedy
Rating:
Wolfs, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, strained comedy depends on a single joke
Wolfs is a feeble and derivative comedy-thriller, which relies heavily on the assumption that George Clooney and Brad Pitt have a kind of magical rapport.
Alas, at least from where I was sitting, they don’t. They play shadowy fixers who grudgingly team up to help a district attorney (Amy Ryan) get rid of a male escort (Austin Abrams), who seems to have died.
The film’s terribly strained comedy depends on a single joke: that these two men, having long supposed they did discreet clean-up work that nobody else could, are both furious to find someone else doing it.
Writer-director Jon Watts tries gamely but not very successfully to give the plot more heft by involving a heroin shipment and a posse of trigger-happy Albanian gangsters, every one of them a screeching caricature, while a jazzy score screams ‘caper movie’ at us. But Wolfs ululates in vain.
My Old Ass (15, 98 mins)
Rating:
Pictured: Maisy Stella as Elliott and Kerrice Brooks as Ro in an undated film still from My Old Ass
My Old Ass is much better, a hugely engaging coming-of-age story from writer-director Megan Park in which 18-year-old Elliott (a really impressive feature-film debut by singer Maisy Stella) is guided through an eventful Canadian summer by her 39-year-old future self (Aubrey Plaza). It’s original, poignant and funny.
- I also liked Will & Harper (15, 114 mins, three stars), a touching road-trip documentary following Will Ferrell across America with his old comedy-writer friend, formerly Andrew Steele, now a trans woman, Harper.
Wolfs is on Apple TV+ now, My Old Ass is in cinemas, and Will & Harper is on Netflix now.
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