Continuity Errors: On the New Old Films of Francis Ford Coppola

“I TRY SO HARD to be in the future,” Francis Ford Coppola told biographer Sam Wasson for 2023’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story , “and always I’m pulled back by the past.” The director of The Godfather Trilogy (1972–90) and Apocalypse Now (1979) has spent decades with his gaze fixed in the rearview, the years since his storied 1970s run followed by failure, compromise, and personal tragedy. But his future has recently brightened. Steadily increasing its profits since Coppola’s acquisition in 1975, the Francis Ford Coppola Winery sold in 2021 for an estimated $500 million. With every penny of the shooting budget his own, Megalopolis , his long-planned superproduction, is wrapped and awaiting distribution ahead of its Cannes premiere. Though some less versed in his catalog might label Coppola’s auteurist preoccupation as organized crime, its prevailing theme is actually time—more specifically, our inability to ever truly regain it. Megalopolis takes for its subject the restoration of Republican Rome, transposing the events of the Catiline conspiracy to present-day New York. Following a natural disaster, an idealist architect (Adam Driver) clashes with the establishment figurehead, Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), over his vision for the future of the city. “I’ve often described Megalopolis as being in love with a wonderful woman whom you cannot have,” Coppola told his wife, Eleanor, for her 2007 documentary Coda: Thirty Years Later . It is another of the could-have-beens that have vexed Coppola throughout his career—what if Rome had never slid into despotism, if his New Hollywood hadn’t exhausted itself in 10 years, if the studios hadn’t turned their backs on him? Megalopolis ’s very existence seems to turn the clocks back, marking the culmination of a career devoted to setting down a relationship with time—one, evidently, that has shifted with Coppola’s personal fortunes. The press surrounding Megalopolis has predictably cited Coppola’s 1970s oeuvre, eliding the half century separating The Godfather Part II (1974) and the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. In the intervening decades, Coppola’s films— One from the Heart (1982), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Youth Without Youth (2007)—have grappled […]

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