Two of the craziest films of this year were released only one week apart in September. But despite their shared, unwavering thematic and audiovisual ambition, the two movies couldn’t be further apart in quality.
Warning: This review contains spoilers!
“Megalopolis”:
Of the many words you can use to describe Francis Ford Coppola — whether that’s genius, obsessive, fearless, authoritative or creep — “Megalopolis” adds another word to the director’s lexicon: optimist. It’s no secret that American cinema is dealing with a turbulent state of affairs, but amidst the chaos and uncertainty, Coppola has been vocal about his enthusiasm for cinema’s future. And to spark the revolution, the now 85-year-old auteur spent $120 million of his own money to turn this four-decade-long passion project into reality, a point of heartfelt admiration. What “Megalopolis” is not, however, is a good movie.
For a punishing — but perversely engaging — 138 minutes, the film’s scatterbrained narrative crux promotes a philosophical debate between the utopian humanism of Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina and the regressive populism of Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero. Further augmenting their dispute is the fictionalized, Roman-themed backdrop of New York City, riddled with classist poverty, socioeconomic decay and an urgency for change. There’s not much ambiguity about which side the movie takes, with the film explaining to ad-nauseam the so-called genius of Driver’s character, but equally unmistakable is reading Cesar as a subtextual directorial self-insert.
Since he was driven to bankruptcy by the commercial failure of his romantic-musical extravaganza “One From the Heart” (1981), Coppola’s relationship with Hollywood producers has been a complicated one. Even in the 1970s, when he went on an unprecedented run of making nothing but canonical classics like “The Godfather” (1972) or “Apocalypse Now” (1979), he infamously and relentlessly clashed with producers who wanted to stifle his creative vision. So, when considering his utopian vision of singular, auteur-driven American cinema crashed and burned with the collapse of his production company Zoetrope Studios — around the time he conceived a rough draft of this film — one can understand where the inspiration for “Megalopolis” came from.
But when viewed from this lens, I can’t help but wonder what this film could’ve been had Coppola’s uber-expensive passion project been unhampered by four decades of delays and presumed creative revisions.
There’s no getting around it: for every stunning shot, at least three or four baffling ones diminish much of the movie’s formalistic power. They’re so bewildering in their cartoonish attempts at satirization, untactile digitalized imagery and poorly conceived compositions that they hold a shockingly amateurish quality — perhaps the last thing you’d expect to hear for someone with a legacy as revered as Coppola’s. The same can be said for the ensemble’s performance; for every competent performance, à la Driver or Esposito, you have the Jon Voights and the Shia LaBeoufs of the world, who — on top of the tonal miscalibrations of their characters — also highlight Coppola’s grossly one-note perceptions of women.
The most egregiously blatant example is, of course, Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum, whose entire nothing-of-a-character’s purpose is to exploit her sexuality to rise up into the ruling class. And how does the movie deliver its karmic justice? By having Voight’s Hamilton Crassus kill her with a hidden bow-and-arrow disguised as a boner. The regressiveness here is self-explanatory. Granted, I don’t inherently mind the concept of a female quasi-antagonist who wields her power through sexuality, but when almost every woman in the movie is obliviously objectified, it becomes degrading.
Even Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia Cicero falls victim to Coppola’s indulgence, purely functioning as Cesar’s love interest and a vehicle to push the film’s philosophical debate to the forefront. There’s another problem, though: this so-called “philosophical debate” is nothing more than a thesis. It’s a stagnant, severely undercooked manifesto that doesn’t evolve as the narrative progresses and seldomly engages in an honest, back-and-forth dialogue between populism and utopianism. By the end, when the movie arrived at its foregone conclusion, I felt bitterly unsatisfied. Did something so devoid of a narrative through line truly earn an ending where utopianism is the solution to humanity’s problems?
Whatever you believe, “Megalopolis” was made for one person and one person only: Francis Ford Coppola. If it gives him the closure he needs, good for him.
Rating: 3.5/10
“The Substance”:
If Coppola dreams of the Roman Empire, then Coralie Fargeat fever dreams of David Cronenberg. If the camera’s gazing objectification of women in “Megalopolis” was a mere accident, the camera’s unhinged witness to the deformation of a woman’s body was deeply intentional in “The Substance.” Add those two things together, and you get an utterly hellish experience and an insolently ominous, unkind movie.
The story is fundamentally built on falsehoods. Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle takes a black market serum to become a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of oneself after being dismissed from an aerobics television show she hosts for being “too old.” However, instead of a best-case scenario where the substance magically de-ages herself, it creates an entirely new symbiotic body in Margaret Qualley’s Sue. Because Elisabeth must uncompromisingly switch between the bodies every seven days, it’s established early on that she never gets the bodily autonomy she so desires, which is part of the story’s tragedy.
But that tragic undercurrent is established well before we see Elisabeth’s back gruesomely split and sewn: amidst her systematically induced self-hatred, Elisabeth is still a good-looking woman. The fact that she’s driven to take such a deranged serum is fundamental to the critique of Hollywood, a woman-in-trouble framework “The Substance” operates on.
Granted, this is also a framework of an extremely unsubtle, heightened reality. Fargeat’s camera obsesses over male-gaze-like shots of Sue’s body — with closeups and the film’s aggressive sound design amplifying the effect tenfold — but what makes it work is the contextual consciousness of the camera, subverting its gaze of the female body into something intentionally excessive and uncomfortable. Its approach almost instinctively reminds me of Darren Aronofsky’s work, especially “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), a film that gains its transformative formal power through its brutality. But while Aronofsky’s script exudes confidence, Fargeat doesn’t fully trust her audience, occasionally hammering home its plot points through clunky callbacks that foreshadow the horrors and consequential nature of the serum.
To the movie’s defense, that isn’t remotely a dealbreaker; it’s too sparse to trigger anything other than a mild ick. However, you can make a solid case that the movie’s third act — admittedly wicked entertaining in its mean-spirited body horror — is an unintentional act of hypocrisy on Fargeat’s end.
I’m surprised to have gone this long without talking about the film’s main selling point, but almost everything you’ve heard, as hyperbolic as it sounds, is true: The body horror in “The Substance” is indescribably and repulsively gross. I’m immediately brought back to the scene of Dennis Quaid’s Harvey — a not-so-subtle nod to the notorious Harvey Weinstein — eating shrimp with such recoiling viciousness that it might single-handedly make you stop eating shrimp forever. But if the opening hour makes you want to flee the theater, the last half-hour might make you pass out.
While the blood-splattering, bodily self-destruction and tension-building are jaw-dropping at the moment, I can’t help but feel the film genuinely relishes in its protagonist’s suffering. When the third act kicks in, there’s this feeling you get where you think the movie is about to end, that you’ve witnessed the worst these characters could have gone through, only for it to keep on going, effortlessly ramping up the shock factor as you endure through some utterly heinous stuff. In a way, that’s applaudable; most “edgy” horror movies feel tame by comparison, but this feels really evil.
I’m willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn’t hold it against you if you don’t.
Rating: 8/10
