Francis Ford Coppola is the Architect of American Decay

When Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, critics were polarized. While some saw the self-financed epic as a visionary masterpiece, others found it incoherent, hammy and bloated with too many ideas. The film struggled to find both a distributor (until Lionsgate swooped in several weeks after Cannes) and an audience upon its September release, greatly underperforming at the box office.

Coppola, aged 85, had experienced this before. Widely agreed to be one of the great American filmmakers of the late 20th century, he famously premiered an unfinished version of Apocalypse Now, his Vietnam War epic now regarded as just one of his masterpieces, at Cannes in 1979. Although reviews were fairly mixed, the film eventually shared the Palme d’Or with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum — reportedly due to then-artistic director Gilles Jacob applying pressure on the jury.

Megalopolis is certainly messy and overly sincere, but the roots of its ideas can be traced back through his career. The film covers his fascination with how violence corrupts the soul, how children grapple with their unwanted inheritances and the moral rot at the core of American capitalism. But Coppola’s earlier works delineate these themes through neat, precise storytelling, starting, of course, with The Godfather.

The Godfather, 1972

Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel of the same name—itself a cultural phenomenon that sold millions of copies—treated the mafia with a Shakespearean majesty, offering an alternate view to the mob dramas that dominated the era. Marlon Brando is magnificent and fearsome as Vito Corleone, the aging don of a Sicilian-American crime family. Coppola thrusts viewers into his domain from the opening scene, revealing a formidable Brando in Corleone’s opulent office surrounded by his henchman. A local undertaker has arrived to ask the Don to enact revenge on behalf of his daughter after she was assaulted by two men; the undertaker withers under Corleone’s unfeeling stare. The scene is directly followed by the wedding of Corleone’s daughter Connie (Talia Shire, Coppola’s sister), a long, lavish affair at which the wider family is introduced, and through which viewers understand just how profitable Corleone’s violent reputation is.

When the family’s fortunes are at risk of changing due to the emerging drug trade, and Corleone’s moral refusal to partake, it is his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) who emerges as the most level-headed heir to the empire. Initially reluctant, Coppola depicts his steady acceptance of his role in the family business through several astonishing sequences—namely, the cuts from Michael’s sombre expression at his godchild’s baptism to a montage of the rival crime bosses being murdered under his orders. Though it’s Brando on the poster, it’s arguably through Pacino’s performance that Coppola best explores the cost of maintaining power through violence, and the theme of imprisonment through inheritance—the kind imitated by the likes of The Sopranos and Succession decades later. Michael may rise to ruthlessness, but Pacino never manages to lose the twinkling iotas of pain and doubt that linger in his eyes.

The Conversation, 1974

Coppola followed The Godfather with The Conversation, a tightly scripted, introspective story of a surveillance expert who begins to unravel when he suspects he may have become complicit in a murder. The Conversation is remarkable enough on its own, but even more so within the context of Coppola’s filmography: unlike the expansive tapestries of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, The Conversation focuses on one man’s paranoia and loneliness, and how that is compounded by the technology he depends on for a living. Released almost immediately after the Watergate scandal shook America, the film is a tech thriller that captured prescient questions about how technology warps our perception of truth, and the ethical conundrums of an increasingly recorded world.

The plot is simple: Harry Caul (played by an outstanding Gene Hackman) uses advanced technology to spy for wealthy clients. He becomes obsessed with playing back a conversation between two lovers he records early in the film, which he believes indicates their lives are in peril. He begins to endanger his own safety and privacy in pursuit of the truth from his client. The audience soon learns Caul is haunted by a past instance when his spying led to the murder of innocent people, and thus he lives a life of near-total isolation, holding everyone at arm’s length, including his kindest colleagues. This is punctured only by brief liaisons with his lover Amy (Teri Garr), fleeting moments of vulnerability which Caul cuts short by refusing to share anything about his life.

Coppola’s stroke of genius with The Conversation is depicting surveillance as what we now know it to be: an irreversibly pervasive technology that greatly eroded people’s right to privacy. Caul’s entire life is his work, and therefore he cannot escape surveillance himself. Even his faith evokes a feeling of being watched, when he sits in the confession booth and bares his inner fears: the priest is never seen, only felt as a watchful presence. His pursuit of justice for the imperiled couple seems at first an attempt to atone for his role in a previous murder, but as the film builds to its tragic conclusion, the audience learns that Caul may be doomed. After putting walls up in his personal life, and turning information into profit in his professional life, Caul may face an eternity of looking over his shoulder. In the last scene, Caul’s paranoia forces him to tear his apartment apart searching for microphones; the final image of Hackman lying among the wreckage, playing Caul’s precious saxophone, is one of the most haunting of Coppola’s career.

Apocalypse Now, 1979

Based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Apocalypse Now is Coppola’s vivid, bombastic journey into the heart of American imperialism in the Vietnam war. Martin Sheen plays Benjamin L. Willard, an officer already traumatised from the war who is tasked with leading a small crew upriver through Viet Cong territory and into Cambodia. There, he is under orders to execute Colonel Kurtz (a terrifying, imposing Marlon Brando), a Special Forces officer who has gone rogue, committing unspeakable violence on his own terms and amassing followers who view him as a demigod.

The upriver journey provides Coppola with a linear narrative through which to dive layer-by-layer into the horrors of war and colonialism. He is fascinated by how violence changes the psychology of men. In one of the film’s most staggering early set pieces, the helicopter squadron led by Lieutenant Kilgore (Robert Duvall) raids Viet Cong territory with napalm to assist Willard in getting to the mouth of the river, with “Ride of the Valkyries” by Wagner playing through loudspeakers. For Kilgore, who “loves the smell of Napalm in the morning,” the adrenaline rush of dropping bombs brings him a high like no other. Ambivalent to the killing he has just overseen, he follows the assault by begging one of Willard’s associates to follow the high by going surfing.

As the men journey further upriver, Coppola journeys deeper into the colonial psyche and its multitudinal evils. The men encounter French planters midway through their journey, consisting of a wealthy white family oblivious to the violence around them, which feels like no less than a slip back in time. When Willard finally meets Kurtz, Sheen’s wide eyes reveal a mix of horror and awe. Kurtz is ensconced in some kind of temple, the approach of which is littered with corpses. Kilgore’s recklessness was just a prelude; Kurtz is lost to his addiction to war and to the hubris he has accumulated through fear and violence. 

“There’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil,” a character tells Willard early in the film. “And good does not always triumph.” Throughout the rest of the film, Coppola is suggesting a darker, and perhaps more truthful alternative to that statement: when war forces men to hate other men, evil is given ample chance to triumph. 

Megalopolis, 2024

Where the aforementioned films narrowed their focus to specific wars or societal paranoias, Megalopolis leaps ahead to the future and casts its net even wider. One could take it as a commendable act for a director eager to try a bit of everything late in his career, but as a viewing experience it’s baffling, muddled and unintentionally funny.

In Apocalypse Now and to an extent The Godfather, Coppola was interested in how American hubris and neoliberalism creates volatility for its citizens. Megalopolis takes this further, set in an alternate future New York called New Rome, which, like its namesake, is the centre of a crumbling empire. Adam Driver plays Cesar, an architect whose discovery of a mysterious new material may upend New Rome’s great inequality and lift its citizens out of poverty; how exactly this will happen is unclear.

Coppola’s story of one man’s dogged commitment to creating utopia is admirable, but it becomes lost among hammy dialogue, inconsistent performances and a difficult-to-follow plot. Most egregious is its depiction of women. Coppola has never written much of substance for his female characters, but in Megalopolis they have little more to do than provide sex or an empathetic ear for the male leads. 

Time may look back on Coppola’s ambition fondly, but for now the director’s back catalog serves as a reminder of his once-brilliant ability to hone in on America’s ugliest undersides, and the human cost of the country’s endless pursuit of profit and power.