This review in honor of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megapolis. Not it’s quality – I haven’t seen it – but just the sheer existence of the damn thing.

A famously mistreated and malformed major studio picture with a post-release to rival Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, 1984’s The Cotton Club was, for 35 years, a deeply circumscribed experience. Viewers would be forgiven for expecting that some of that had to do with director Francis Ford Coppola himself, whose passion projects (and even his workaday productions), are – even absent any studio interference – absolutely not sturdy objects. Coppola’s best films are visual arias invested as much, if not more, in texture and tone than in plot or logical coherence. Defiantly cinematic, Coppola’s Godfather pictures are baroque operettas looking back at the gristmill of 20^th century capitalism. His masterpiece The Conversation istheir grimier, tetchier, thoroughly shaken nervous wreck of a sibling. His Dracula isKabuki theater crossed with a travelling carnival.

And those are just the films that didn’t nearly bankrupt him or destroy his career. When 1979’s Apocalypse Now nearly lost its mind, it also contributed to losing New Hollywood its head. The kind of money and effort he was spending was, suddenly, only to be handed out for relatively streamlined, sure-fire projects. Personal projects were on austerity, gone the way of the Dodo. By the end of the 1970s, Coppola, like Robert Altman and others, seemed like unhinged mavericks absolutely lost in their own delirious cinematic fever dreams (and I mean that as a statement of affection). Apocalypse Now is, as he famously and self-aggrandizingly noted, an imperial project, an act of mutually assured destruction for the people behind and in front of the camera (which Coppola apparently, incorrectly, thought let him off the hook).

Distorted though his claims and films (and that narrative about the demise of the New Hollywood) could be, Coppola seemed unambiguously committed to not listening to anyone but himself when he outdid even his own ego with his fascinating one-from-the-heart picture One From the Heart drawing more from Von Sternberg than the realist textures of the New Hollywood at their grittiest. No one knew what to do with it, except put him on thin ice. It is certainly no surprise that his new film Megalopolis positions itself as a grand cinematic comeuppance, an existential statement of world-shaking import, and it will surely be no surprise when it makes no money at the box office.

Like Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, these films have gone down as one of the nails in the New Hollywood coffin, the glorious death spasm of a cinematic way of life. As with any meta narrative, there’s more than a little truth to the story and quite a bit that simply sounds good, but Coppola was certainly reduced to less elephantine projects, no longer able to get away with pretty much anything he wanted. Initially turning to one of the resident fascinations in early ‘80s culture, its fixation on or interpellation of (or recursion to) ‘50s youth culture, he adapted two of S.E. Hinton’s generation-defining young adult novels: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. The latter, in particular, is phenomenally exploratory, absolutely not the work of a filmmaker who had accepted his position as a studio prisoner at that point. But both were relatively cheap, ushering the way for Coppola’s next big-deal picture, which, unlike his earlier films, wasn’t even a passion project. Instead, it was the brainchild of producer Robert Evans, who had worked with Coppola on The Godfather, and who initially asked Robert Altman to direct. But that was before Evans and Altman’s own famous New Hollywood travesty (and very good film) Popeye, which similarly turns back to the era of their shared childhood in the 1930s, wasted millions of dollars hanging-out and coking-up on a beautiful travesty of a film-set that they built from scratch.

Eventually, the stars aligned, and The Cotton Club was released in highly truncated form, the producers heavily excising most of the material around the titular Cotton Club’sAfrican-American performers and workers, replicating the racial dynamics of the space itself, the famed Harlem night club that featured a largely black stage show and an all-white audience. Much like the nightclub itself, the original film relegated its black cast to a handful of musical numbers and skirted past their “off-stage” life in apparent fear. Nominally the story of two enterprising entertainers, white Dixie (Richard Gere) and black Sandman (Gregory Hines, his character’s brother played by his real brother Maurice), the black couple was sidelined in the original version (as Coppola famously tells it, the executives told him there were “too many black people”), leading to a whitewashed and straight-laced success story.

The 2019 restoration, however, is an altogether different creature, one of the few truly iconoclastic big-budget Hollywood pictures during the ‘80s, feeling legitimately like one of Robert Altman’s concurrent experiments (for instance, his Popeye). That doesn’t mean the new version is a masterpiece, or even that it is necessarily the ideal version. Like any good encore performance, this version doesn’t so much complete the original as reorient and reconfigure it, sending it outward in unexpected directions, even diffusing it into competing stories that both echo and disorient each other. What was initially a relatively straightforward tale of tragic gangsters becomes a more Altman-esque exploration of a social milieu without a real protagonist, a collection of scenes and sequences dancing around an absent center. In the restored version, Gregory Hines is restored as a co-lead, but the addition of several performances and incidental scenes reshapes the film into something well beyond the story of any pair of brothers: a burlesque that stops and starts the film repeatedly, moving it across competing tonal registers rather than striving for cohesion, which might have too easily into a story of American racial reunion and romance.

Coppola’s film proceeds in an oddly leisurely, mournful mood, following characters who are eager to make it in the rat race and yet not indulging in the tempo of their aspirations. It feels as though the film is aware that following this path would simply be accepting the terms of Hollywood success story that had already devastated Coppola. Instead, the film explores its nooks and crannies, stopping to luxuriate in various set-pieces and hang-outs, generally searching for any opportunity to defray the injunction to linearly narrate a rise-and-fall story. It doesn’t so much bear the scars of its famously troubled production as reveal them as structuring absences. It looks beautiful, clean, and cohesive, lacquering itself in so much soft lighting that the termites beneath the visage can’t but reveal themselves.

In its looseness, this is the inverse of Rumble Fish, which opens with a truly spellbinding constellation of impressionistic images that slowly congeals into poetic but more narratively straightforward meditation on teenage aimlessness and longing. Conversely, The Cotton Club mimics a straight-faced Hollywood period piece and slowly shivers apart over 2 ½ hours, in some sense a harder and perhaps more rewarding sensibility. Fittingly, and perhaps consciously, Gere and co-star Diane Lane don’t register as strongly or as centrally as any other film would have figured them, while a slew of talented scene-stealers, from Fred Gwynne to Bob Hoskins as a couple of mobsters who are potentially romantically involved to Laurence Fishburne as an identity-conscious local gangster to the Lena Horne analogue Lila Rose (Lonette McKee), resonate energies the film knows it can only partially catch-up to or organize.

There are obvious downsides to all this, especially if what one is looking for is a psychologically grounded portrait of turn-of-the-‘30s life, a narratively cohesive entity, or a documentary vision of the past. Little about The Cotton Club “progresses.” Time stalls and then lurches, characters linger and then stutter ahead. People disappear for large swathes and then reappear as seemingly different characters in the nominally same body. There isn’t a single character that we comfortably watch “grow” or “change,” but the characters aren’t exactly flat either. We simply aren’t privy to their inner selves, leading to a film that is much less about people than about world-historical forces encircling them and circling them around one another. For every climactic moment, especially an early, disturbingly sudden murder inflected with Italianette-horror violence that briefly moves the film into giallo territory, there’s another that elides or eludes development, or abstracts it into a cinematic montage that compresses time and space not to tell a story but to constellate moods and sensations. Even the former killing, honestly, feels retroactively like an inevitable effusion of the character’s type than a thought-through decision on the part of a character. Everyone seems to be performing their role.

And this isn’t even to mention the several phenomenal song and dance numbers, including a terrific interweaving of the music and gangster plots at the conclusion that uses sound and image to develop themes that aren’t really present in the film’s actual story or dialogue. A pair of newly-restored numbers are just as difficult to get a bead on, and just as compelling: a mask-like rendition of “Stormy Weather” by McKee, and a delightful conclusory number for the Hines brothers that, frankly, seems to begin and conclude their entire character arc in the span of two minutes (which I don’t necessarily mean as a criticism). The Cotton Club accretes like this: through scenes, segments, and their gaps rather than in their connections. It asks us to do much of the work to connect them into a narrative, or to choose to forego that task entirely. It almost seems, through all of this, that Coppola was trying to make an anti-statement, a self-conscious collapse of a film that pretends to be a big epic and then refuses to indulge us. Or, if one is less generous about things, it may just be the film owning up to the difficulties of its modern re-editing. Whatever your perspective, a newly reintroduced conversation between Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne is perhaps the most revealing of the film’s mode. It adds layers and layers to a relationship that the film seems to suggest they want to leave in the background, and it is only brought into the light in a telling moment where no one is looking, a truth that the film cannot, or chooses not to, hold on to.

Score: 8/10