The Power Broker: MEGALOPOLIS

How small our imaginations and expectations have grown as a culture if we have no room to accommodate something as grand and singular—for better and for worse—as Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in over a decade, a passion project he partially financed himself, is a long, rambling, sometimes hallucinatory narrative set among the powerful in a city that’s somehow simultaneously modern New York and ancient Rome—New Rome. It’s a warped funhouse mirror of our present’s problems, and a cockeyed rearview mirror of problems we’ve had since ancient times. It’s a big swing, full of ungainly ideas and vivid juxtapositions. You’ll never quite guess what you’ll be seeing or hearing next. This has been greeted with sighs by some who seem preemptively exasperated by the financial folly the project represents. It’s so uncommercial they say; it’s so unusual and confused and messy. Others seem to greet it with schadenfreude, somehow gleeful at the supposed downfall of a once-great filmmaker. They seem to find it laughable that a master director in his mid-80s would dare try to make something bold and wild and weird—something so unmistakably his own, every idiosyncratic idea honestly intended. Indeed, this is a movie that’ll challenge conceptions of conventionality. It’s too direct and flat and ungainly to be called a mainstream narrative. It’s full of posturing and speechifying, theatrical symbolism and pulp philosophy, thudding narration and aloofly schematic emotionality. But it’s also too arch and vulgar and full of wriggly low humor and with passages of bewildering narrative density to be purely schematic art film. It refuses to fit neatly into any box other than, perhaps, this: a modern Francis Ford Coppola experience.

That din you hear when the mind fills up as the film unspools is the noise of every Coppola movie happening at once. Here’s a man who directed a little bit of everything: from a Warner Brothers musical to a 3D nudist movie, from a scrappy Corman horror picture to lavish all-star literary adaptations, from epic, luxuriously filmic period pieces to tiny, high-contrast experimental digital indies. Here’s a career that stretches the whole breadth and scope of American movies from the end of the studio system to whatever we call now. With Megalopolis, he’s giving it all back to us at once in one heterogeneous mixture. It’s the family saga of The Godfather and the special effects extravaganza of Dracula and the artifice of One from the Heart and the resourcefulness of a Dementia 13 and the self-portraiture of Tucker and the deeply personal superimpositions of Twixt and the scope of Apocalypse Now and the slapdash comedy of You’re a Big Boy Now and so on. But it’s also a mad jumble of other inspirations or comparison points—a carousing Felliniesque city of appetites; a Fritz Lang Metropolis of big, blocky metaphors; a Cecil B. DeMille epic of Golden Idols and fallen angels; a Star Wars prequel of green-screen politics and emotional constipation; a hodgepodge of anachronisms like Julie Taymor’s Titus; a Richard Kelly dystopia of disordered modernity. It’s filmed in an unreal honeyed glaze, with characters who pontificate and pronounce more than dialogue, and a storyline that’s a work of grubby modern scheming scandal and prejudice shot through with a vaguely classical sense of stakes and design.

We meet a troubled artist: an arrogant city planner (Adam Driver) who dreams of building a better future with glowing sci-fi public transit and a fabulous downtown bustling with life. That he might need to demolish areas of New Rome makes some forces upset. (He’s Robert Moses meets Hippodamus of Miletus.) Driver plays up the sanctimony and impetuous ego and the troubled, druggy, playboy image he both indulges and resists. And he’s just one of many in a powerful web of family and entanglements. His lover (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the daughter of the loathed Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). His Machiavellian party-boy cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is the troubled son of the city’s sleazy top banker (Jon Voight). Even his driver (Laurence Fishburne) has an important role: he’s a witness and a philosopher—a historian behind the wheel who narrates, sometimes in phrases chiseled in stone. There’s also a sneaky TV personality named Wow Platinum who plays up her shamelessness (Aubrey Plaza) and a pop star who plays up her purity (Grace VanderWaal). They’re all Power Brokers, trying to grow their influence and leave legacies, consolidate power, or use theirs to build a future. The figures strut like Roman politicos—with laurels and robes for Senators and Vestal Virgins alike—and appear on talk shows or in City Hall. They shout pseudo-Shakespearian speeches—and sometimes the real thing—through bullhorns and microphones and show up for chariot races in Madison Square Garden. It’s boldly iconographic, and interpersonally messy, high culture and low conflict colliding and kaleidoscoping, often enveloping and maddening.

It’s so much: political intrigue swamps idealistic agendas; a nuclear satellite is crashing to earth; a Deep Fake makes a phony scandal; there’s a new element that allows for fantastic creations; there are assassinations and uprisings and parades and concerts and telethons and press conferences—including an actual question from the audience, if you’re so lucky—and hostile takeovers and sex jokes and incestuous allusions and off-screen murder mysteries and cross-dressing and magical realism and tearful confessions and oddball line-readings and elaborate sets and gloriously fake backdrops and split-screens and montages and a score somewhere between a flourish of brass and an electronic pulse. It has computer-generated visions and concept art paintings and historical footage—like Hitler and 9/11—and flubbed lines and living statues and spinning newspaper headlines and a rewritten Pledge of Allegiance. Does it have clear politics? No, but it has the suggestion of them. Does it have philosophical perspective or insight? Sort of. All of that is a strange stew of half-formed impulses informed by its historical mishmash and a host of name-dropped oddities, like a scene in which a father and daughter bond by quoting Marcus Aurelius, or when a man arrogantly refers to his “Emersonian mind.” It certainly has style. It’s freed of the idea of telling a coherent story or legibly tracking character’s motivations or building conventional setups and payoffs. We’re left with a balance of the banal and the transcendent, as its enormous cast is full of figures who drift in and out of focus with the thematic web ultimately a justification for its metatextual melancholic hope in amorphous striving. Here’s where someone might exasperatedly ask: but is it good? Well, that’s complicated. It’s certainly nothing less than exactly what it wants to be. The result is disorienting, befuddling filmmaking. It’s not easy to recommend, but it’s hard to forget. I watched it knowing that I’ll be thinking about it forever.

Better Not Cry: HAPPIEST SEASON

Happiest Season, like any good grownup Christmas comedy, is a fizzy charmer leavened by the acknowledgment that, to adults, holidays can be just as much about family tensions and microagressions as togetherness and good cheer. So it is with the Caldwells, whose middle daughter (Mackenzie Davis) invites her serious girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) home to meet her parents (Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen). The problem: dad’s a conservative mayoral candidate and mom’s an equally clenched socialite. So they’ll have to be introduced as roommates for the time being. Thus kicks off a Christmas week in the closet, which of course draws out fault lines in the women’s romantic relationship as a simmering backdrop to the twirl of social engagements and similarly fraught emotional sniping and jostling between the other grown daughters (Mary Holland and Alison Brie) back in the nest. Here’s a movie that knows that grown people back in their hometown, under the roof of their childhood home, can all-too-easily revert to bad habits and adolescent pettiness. The combination makes the movie thoroughly cozy —fireplaces and sweaters and scarfs and snow-dusted small-town shops and sidewalks — but also tremulously prickly—as eggshell-walking sensitive as its leads need to be to navigate the stresses of the week. Like that great Jodie Foster picture Home for the Holidays, if not quite on that level, here’s a movie that’s full of types in interesting combinations, and generously proportioned to give each their due. The cast (down to small parts for Ana Gasteyer and Aubrey Plaza) enlivens the drama beyond the formula so much that, even when the screenplay leans into some mild farce, a wacky best friend (Dan Levy), and big speeches, it nonetheless rings true. The movie sparkles with good laughs, and amusing scenarios (the kind that only occasionally tip over into sitcom broadness). It benefits greatly from the chemistry between all involved, and by treating their dilemmas with the weight they require while not letting it deflate the whole soufflé on the rise.

And how confidently the movie knows its lead characters' hearts. The proceedings are attuned to their shifts of feeling and desire. It knows keenly the way an off-hand comment can cut like a knife, a new situation can throw new light on a person you thought you knew. Stewart, especially, enters the picture as the outsider, and the way she gingerly tries to ingratiate herself with the family and do right for the woman she loves, even as she questions her (and their!) priorities, is written across her every gesture. (Stewart is truly one of the finest performers of her generation for how casually she holds the screen and communicates a scenario, even without a word.) I was invested in the emotional complexities at hand, even as the movie does its best to use them as grist for the feather-light touch it uses to draw them out and tie them up. Ultimately, the film plays fair by its characters while wearing its heart on its sleeve. And writer-director Clea DuVall not only gets great dynamics out of the cast, and paces out the comedic and dramatic bits with fine timing, but helms it all with high gloss and Christmassy production design and needle drops. It’s refreshing to find any studio comedy (albeit rerouted to Hulu in another of this year’s endless necessary schedule shuffles), let alone the rare Christmas one, that works this well at a human level. It’s broadly appealing and appealingly specific.

Wedding Smashers: MIKE & DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies with a title that tells you just about all you need to know about its plot. Mike and Dave need dates to their sister’s wedding. It’s their father’s ultimatum. You see, these rowdy brothers have made it a habit of bringing their hard-partying frat-boy lifestyle to family gatherings, which have resulted in property damage, personal injury, and great embarrassment. Somehow this is pinned on their drive to impress the ladies, so mandatory dates it is. The act of finding two women to take an all-expenses-paid trip to a destination wedding at a Hawaiian resort has a cracked reality show vibe as Mike and Dave throw an ad up on Craigslist and watch the applications roll in as it goes viral. Played by the buff Zac Efron and the doughier Adam Devine, the guys are totally self-centered and incredibly privileged. The movie’s smartest move is to find them perfect foils in a pair of sloppy, silly con women (Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza) who decide to play classy and bilk themselves a vacation.

The result is a reasonably diverting gender flip on the Wedding Crashers idea, with Kendrick and Plaza running away with the entire film out from under its ostensible stars. So what if the movie’s named after and rooting for Mike and Dave? This should be Alice and Tatiana’s story. They’re freshly fired waitresses who rouse themselves from a snack food and daytime television enabled stupor to wash up, put on nice dresses, and pretend to be the sort of girls the guys would love to show off to their wealthy family. They force a Meet Cute and, bada-bing bada-boom, they’re off to Hawaii. It’s not exactly a sophisticated con they’re running. One claims to be a schoolteacher (“I’m always noticing spellings…” she coos) who loves her students despite, “how dumb they are,” while the other says she manages a hedge fund, describing her daily office life as a matter of checking on the hedging. The appeal of the movie rests entirely on their rowdy free-spiritedness, and in the performances of Kendrick and Plaza. Refreshingly casual and candid, they drip with sarcasm and filthy improvisational patter.

For a stretch in the middle – as the family (including sister Sugar Lyn Beard and father Stephen Root) are convinced they like these fun-loving frauds while the boys’ emotional stability is slowly undermined – there’s enjoyment to be had in the rowdy vulgarity. Kendrick and Plaza are funny as their characters are unable to hold onto their “good girl” facades because it’s too much fun just being themselves, doing ATV tricks, slamming back shots, ordering room service, and slipping extra bills in a masseuse's pocket to make sure the bride-to-be has an extra special session. But too often the script by Neighbors’ Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien falls back on the usual tricks of the subgenre: drug trips, surprise nudity, long punchline roulettes in which the cast stands around tossing out improvised insults. And as its plot gears start grinding to a treacly conclusion it asks us to care about the interminably dopey guys as well. Efron earns some sympathy, showing a capacity for mellowing and meeting his responsibilities halfway. But Devine can’t come down from the self-centered stubbornness, which drives him to entitled fits. The movie’s supposed to end with people learning lessons, but it’s more about forgetting than forgiving.

This isn’t an entirely successful movie. The setup is great, but deserves more of a farcical verve to stir things up. The side characters (a good cast of cable-TV character actors, including Veep’s Sam Richardson, Breaking Bad’s Lavell Crawford, and Silicon Valley’s Alice Wetterlund and Kumail Nanjiani) stay rather one-note. The mishaps never really cascade or escalate in the best door-slamming misunderstandings tradition, because consequences are dropped to get to the next sequence. A face run over in a freak accident has bruising for a jokey reveal, then quickly fades. An encounter in a steam room between a game Plaza and a seductive cousin-of-the-bride is used for shock value, but has no satisfying payoff. The movie excuses its characters’ behaviors when convenient, or holds it over their heads’ when needed. It’s all at the whims of the predictable plot beats instead of snowballing organically, and thus can’t quite make the turns from R-rated frankness to sweet sentimentality it tries. The balance of sweetness and sourness is off. But even though the thing doesn’t cohere as well as it should, director Jake Szymanski keeps the pace moving, the tone relaxed, and the jokes just above the insult-to-intelligence line. Plus, he knows how to step back and allow Kendrick and Plaza to run circles around Efron and Devine. As a lazy summer distraction, that might be good enough.

Checked Off: THE TO DO LIST

I appreciate the effort to tell a casually randy teen comedy from the perspective of a young woman, make the film explicitly about labels and expectations that go along with being a woman, and end with the girl taking control of her body and coming out on top. I would’ve appreciated all that a whole lot more if Maggie Carey’s The To Do List managed to be funny while it was at it. Instead of another Bridesmaids, Easy A, or The Heat, the kind of funny female-driven comedy that leads for a round of patronizing women-can-be-funny-too surprise from certain predictable corners of the media landscape, this underachieving movie has a killer (and sadly underrepresented) hook in its point of view without the goods to back it up. It’s not an occasion to say, “women can star in a comedy, too,” but rather “women can star in a bad comedy, too.”

The movie’s essentially a loose collection of thin bits about a high school valedictorian (Aubrey Plaza) looking to spend her summer before college shaking her good girl image. Being a bookish, studious, conscientious young lady, she makes a checklist of acts to do in just a few months. Her attempts, cringingly awkward and gross, fall between gossip sessions with friends and shifts at the community pool. The success of the film hinges upon how funny a viewer finds these episodic sketches, which are light and forgettable, trending towards gross-out gags that are either too much or not enough. (One in particular, a riff on a similar gag in Caddyshack, is disastrously gross.) At most, I felt a desire to laugh without ever actually laughing. Nothing goes wrong enough to complain, but nothing goes right enough to entertain. It's a movie of good intentions and weak execution. It’s set in 1993, for example, but that idea never goes further than lots of great 90’s hits on the soundtrack and the wardrobe department dressing everyone in the most unflattering fashions of the era.

Similarly, the cast is underutilized. Plaza has a sardonic low-key approach that's an awkward fit with the anxiety and naivety in her character as written. She's a real talent - good on Parks & Rec and with great voice work in Monsters University and the English dub of From Up On Poppy Hill - but this movie doesn't play to her strengths. She's better than the material. That goes for the supporting cast around her as well. They’re all appealing performers – Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele as the best friends, Rachel Bilson, as the vapid older sister, Connie Britton as the open-minded mom, Clark Gregg as the uptight dad, Bill Hader as the slacker pool manager – but even they don’t have more than a small moment or two to shine. As the guys the lead crushes on or who have crushes on her, Scott Porter and Johnny Simmons are appealing and underwritten, which is partly a good joke on how these roles are typically portrayed when a young man's in the lead and those roles are filled by young women. One’s a hot but dull blonde; the other’s a cute brunette who's taken for granted, but all around better for her. Sound familiar?

While watching the film, I intellectualized the novelty (importance, even) of the point of view and some of it was technically funny, but I just wasn’t entertained. Even the best moment would be the weakest in a better comedy. It's not bad, just, despite its raunch and purposeful button-pushing, weirdly sloppy and mild. A tepid milestone, it’s a film that says girls deserve crummy teen sex comedies too. True, but that doesn’t mean the results are any worthier than crummy teen sex comedies from a guy’s point of view.

Funny People (2009)

With Funny People, his third film as director, Judd Apatow, the most prolific peddler of the modern R-rated comedy, has brought more ambition and less restraint, creating the type of generously textured, yet also turbulently messy, film that is precisely the type of film that deserves to be debated. It vibrates with a sense of vitality that at times makes up for the flaws. This isn’t exactly a masterpiece – I don’t like it quite enough to make that claim – but it’s the kind of interestingly tangled work – at once confidently controlled and dangerously personal – that a filmmaker can sometimes create that will inspire passionate, and justified, feelings both against and in defense. I will defend the film, for despite the genital-centered jokes that appear with inordinate frequency, as is the Apatow standard, this is a subtle and adult work, delving headfirst into tricky themes and remaining mostly unscathed.

The film stars Adam Sandler, in an oddly self-reflexive role, as successful comedian George Simmons, who has long since graduated from stand-up to land in the big-bucks studio comedies of precisely the kind in which Sandler has been known to appear. He’s the classic case of a man with everything he ever wanted, yet nothing that truly matters. As the film opens, we follow Simmons as he walks through a public space, stopping to take pictures or sign autographs for adoring fans. We end up with him in an examining room where he is told that he has a rare form of leukemia and only an eight-percent chance of surviving. We then follow him back into the world fully expecting, having been conditioned by countless disease-of-the-week dramas, for Simmons to grow and change, learning life lessons while battling the disease. This doesn’t happen, or at least, not exactly.

This is where we meet Ira Wright, a struggling stand-up comedian played by Seth Rogen. He lives with roommates, also comedians, one (Jonah Hill) his colleague in the amateur stand-up world, the other (Jason Schwartzman) relishing his glimmer of success with a mildly successful, if mostly derided, NBC sitcom. It is at the improv where George sees Ira’s act and later calls him and offers him a job as a joke writer. The film then follows George and Ira through an odd relationship, positioned somewhere between personal and professional, with interesting emotional pushes and pulls, naturally arising conflicts with uneasy resolutions. Apatow is unafraid to follow his characters down tangents in plot while in pursuit of emotional truth. In fact, the whole third act of the film could be considered a tangent, dealing with characters who, by that point, have been unseen (Eric Bana) or half-glimpsed (Apatow’s loveably cute daughters) and foregrounding a romance subplot involving Leslie Mann that is arguably unnecessary, but I went with it.

The movie is lumpy and misshapen, I won’t argue that point, but it rarely feels like it steps wrong. Even distracting cameos from real-world celebrities are easily ignored in the flow of the feelings the film evokes, in the rich texture of supporting roles like Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, and RZA who, though given few scenes, create fully realized characters that weave in to the greater tapestry. The film is not about plot. Instead, this is a film about character and emotion, tone and mood. Apatow, working with the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has crafted a movie with understated beauty in the images and rhythm. How often can that be said about a big studio summer comedy? This isn’t just a comedy, but it’s also unfair to label it a dramedy, as some are quick to do. This is a drama, pure and simple. The characters happen to be quick-witted individuals who crack jokes as a default when dealing with any situation. These are funny people, no doubt about it, but they are living the same dramatic lives as any other set of people. Since Apatow started as a stand-up before becoming the success that he is now, it seems that Apatow sees himself in his two leads: Ira is who he was; George is who he all too easily could have become.

This is a film, in ways both subtle and sweet, about lives in transition. The arcs the characters travel never feel predetermined, they never creak with convention. Everyone knows by now that comedians are rarely the happiest members of humanity, and Apatow wisely avoids making this the theme of his film. Nor does he merely use the central question of disease and mortality to show us once again how confronting the abyss of death can cause radical change within an individual. With Funny People, Apatow isn’t content to restate. He’s interested in exploring the trickier, subtler terrain where people change in small, not big, ways. In doing so, though this is far from a perfect film, it casts a spell that only messy, tricky, passionately personal films can.