This year has brought us two fascinating, if flawed, films from older male directors who have staked their large personal fortunes in order to fund these unwieldy passion projects. First there was Kevin Costner's (ongoing) throwback Western "Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1," and now it's Francis Ford Coppola's long-marinating cinematic experiment "Megalopolis," funded by $120 million from his popular wine empire. While Costner grapples with the past and Coppola the future, both films attempt to say something about the present and reveal ways in which the filmmakers are mired in old ways of thinking.
Even if "Horizon" and "Megalopolis" gesture toward sweeping, boundary-pushing ideas about storytelling, the approach to character, especially, feels old-fashioned and limited in a way that proves these auteurs haven't quite kept up with the cultural moment, insulated in their own worlds of ideas. With "Megalopolis," where to even begin? It's the story of a daring, misunderstood genius, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who seeks to create a utopia called Megalopolis with his proprietary shape-shifting matter, Megalon. Set in a New York City avatar called "New Rome" (and to employ a now-hackneyed joke structure), "Megalopolis" has everything: time travel, pop divas, otherwise unemployable actors, circus weddings, an array of Coppola family members, a weird sense you're watching a "Batman" movie, Aubrey Plaza stealing the show as a character named Wow Platinum, a mind-boggling a.
