By David D’Arcy

Two closely watched films in Toronto were dark dramas that couldn’t have been more different.

Who outside of Norway remembers Vidkun Quisling today? Maybe historians and students of the Second World War. Quisling (1887-1945) was prime minister of Norway during the German occupation, a gruff enforcer for the Nazis whose name became synonymous with collaborator.

Quisling’s rule was harsh, just what the Nazis wanted. Norway deported a thousand Jews to camps in Poland. Not so many, compared to the horrific broader picture, but only 12 of them returned. Quisling – The Final Days, picks up the narrative when the Germans surrender in May 1945 and the puppet prime minister, who expected to be treated with the respect befitting his office, is arrested. A young Lutheran pastor, Peder Olsen (Andres Danielsen Lie), is assigned to minister to Quisling (Gard B. Eidsvold) in prison after the church’s primate refuses the task. Erik Poppe’s gripping film, adapted from diaries kept by Olsen and his wife, takes us from the traitor’s loud assertions of patriotism, to a court’s judgment, to his execution by a firing squad. It’s a grim study of denial and defeat.

“Surely there must be some civilized people left in this country,” a baffled Quisling pleads before turning himself in, “you’re calling me a criminal ….. I’ve worked so hard for this country.” So much for remorse.

Eidsvold plays the man who led occupied Norway under Hitler as smug and certain in his politics. Even when the Germans surrender, the leader who met with Hitler as late as January 1945 is shocked when he’s put in handcuffs. Locked in a prison cell before his trial, he finds his spiritual future placed in the hands of the pious young Olsen, who is sworn to secrecy about counseling the collaborator. Like any tyrant, Quisling is angry and impatient. Struggling to sleep on his cot, he asks the young guard attending to him to switch the bright light off. The guard turns it off and back on again, an everyman’s expression of the country’s loathing for the thug claiming to be a misunderstood patriot, now brought down to size.

At every step, caged and scorned, Eidsvold brings rage, but also an unexpected subtlety, to the role of his country’s official bully. Not to give too much away, but the final third of the film takes place almost entirely in the condemned man’s cell, where pride battles with a stark begrudging recognition of mortality. We watch this struggle in relentless closeups. Poppe doesn’t flinch from showing the final moments of those final days.

Norway tends to focus on the underground heroism of some brave citizens rather than the many who collaborated during the wartime Quisling years. There’s still nothing revisionist here about Quisling’s crimes. But questions arise as we watch the man try to come to terms with himself with the help of Olsen the clergyman. Attempting to get the former strong man to open up, Olsen admits that there were moments during the just-ended war when he himself was less than admirable, a confession that the self-satisfied Quisling is willing to accept. But that’s about as far as kinship goes between a minister who endured the occupation and the traitor who presided over it.

Then there is the parallel to European politics today, where reactionary extremists are applauded, not punished, and court their counterparts on the American Right.

Those autocrats are not the simple stooges of foreign enemies, except in Putin-dependent Belarus (and in Ukraine before 2014). Yet in Quisling’s claims of being persecuted and misunderstood, and in his constant lies about serving Norway while following orders from Berlin, we find the same pattern of lying in the palaver of those would-be strong men close to home today. In our case, a leader who has already threatened to punish those who stood in his way after the last election – including Jews who vote against him this time – may not need an occupying army to install him back into power.

It’s a sobering prospect to consider, after watching scenes in which a country exults in the downfall of a tyrant.

A scene from April. Photo: TIFF

The politics in Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April lurch backward and forward through a bleak and cryptically symbolic drama that explores the risks and the stigma of abortion in rural Georgia (the former Soviet republic). And there’s a lot more than politics in this sometimes inscrutable film.

The deadpan Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is an obstetrician who supplements her income performing abortions in the countryside, a foreboding expanse which we encounter mostly in the dark. Think of the shadowy emptiness of a place haunted by visions worthy of Bela Tarr, and then place a pregnant patient there whose medical history is unknown and who forbids any emergency surgery. It is a recipe for things to go wrong. A baby is still-born under those conditions to a woman who refuses to have a cesarean section. Nina is forced to defend herself against accusations by the mother’s angry husband and by superiors at her daytime hospital job. Abortion may be legal in Georgia, but it is culturally taboo in much of the country.

This parable about the sufferings of women in a male-dominated culture and the plight of women who try to help them is unnerving in its fatalism. The action — if that’s the right word — moves at a creeping pace, another Tarr trademark. April can feel like a horror film without a monster. Yet Kulumbegashvili gives us a figure – a character? – thats monstrous enough. That presence is a humanoid shape with reptilian textures that slinks around – an observer of injustices, a witness of rural horrors, a victim, a conscience?

If this odd figure in cutaway shots defies explanation, other elements in this film of chilling visuals come off as clear as an anthropologist’s journal. Women stuck in village life are doomed to be pregnant most of the time, and the culture is so closed that medicine isn’t given the opportunity  to help them. April will be praised for the staggering power of its images which appear like bumps in the road on which Nina drives her car in the dark. That said, the jostling arrhythmia of the director’s picaresque storytelling (plus the spectral creature) suggest that what we have here are parts of a whole that’s still in pursuit of a style. The film feels like a work in progress – imaginative and improvised — akin to the medical procedures that the film depicts with so much uneasiness. Like the patients in April, audiences who can bear the experience will be grateful to receive what help Kulumbegashvili provides.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Megalopolis, 2024.

Written and Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, James Remar, Chloe Fineman, Isabelle Kusman, D.B. Sweeney, Haley Sims, Balthazar Getty, Bailey Ives, Adams Bellouis, Madeleine Gardella, and Romy Mars.

SYNOPSIS:

The city of New Rome is the main conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

Somewhere buried underneath the bluntly narrated New Rome parallels to America’s current downward spiral, the family scheming, betrayals, sociopolitical commentary, endless philosophical musings quoting other famous works and speeches that never quite stick or mean much, sci-fi concepts such as a biological building material dubbed Megalon, the earnest desire to build a promising future and preserve crucial aspects of the present and past, and an ensemble where everyone seems to think they are in a new movie from scene to scene, is a good film within legendary writer/director Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-development-hell passion project Megalopolis.

These haphazard elements come together for a final scene that is sincerely moving. The preceding 2 hours and 10 minutes is an onslaught of ideas presented and ambitious set pieces (ranging from living, breathing, suffering statues to extravagant Roman-inspired weddings with modern twists such as wrestling matches replacing gladiatorial combat to futuristic envisionings of a better world) carrying an impressive, transfixing visual language (courtesy of cinematography from previous Francis Ford Coppola collaborator Mihai Malaimare Jr) that ensures even if viewers are flabbergasted at how disjointed and unwieldy the narrative is, it is undeniably hypnotic and striking to absorb.

The question then becomes, does that mean anything if the film is ambitious to a crippling fault and a structural disaster? An early scene sees New Rome Chairman of the Design Authority/architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver, who is either miraculously on Francis Ford Coppola’s wavelength or so locked into his distinct take on the character that, if nothing else, it’s a memorable performance for right and wrong reasons) stopping time during the demolition of a building. The reason doesn’t matter, but at times, Megalopolis is similarly catastrophically crumbling (under the weight of its gigantic audacity) that one wishes they too could say “time… stop!”, take a breather, and digest what’s happening for a moment.

By the way, yes, Cesar can stop time. However, it’s an ability that plays more into characterization than anything plot-specific, which might be why it’s one of the few and far between elements that work here. Not only is he a man who can stop time, but he is also paranoid that there isn’t enough time to accomplish his ambitious dream of building a futuristic utopia called Megalopolis. There is also something about the idea of someone who can stop time yet still feels as if they don’t have enough, which is trippy and compelling.

Cesar is opposed by the polarizing Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is less concerned about the future and more interested in doing something about the present. Yet, he mostly appears to be selling the usual political lies to keep up public trust. However, that support is gradually fading and soon transitions into full-blown riots (with other factors coming into play.) As such, he is determined to do whatever he can to put up a roadblock for Cesar, even if it means slandering his public image as possibly having murdered his wife since the body was never recovered. Mayor Cicero’s socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) attempts to fool Cesar in disguise and gather some intel (one of the film’s most unintentionally hilarious scenes, and one that is inexplicably being used to market the theatrical run), which is easily seen through and gets her belittled in such a manner that, to be a fly on the wall while everyone was working through the performances would have been a treat.

Nevertheless, romance eventually develops and becomes the film’s heart, and it probably should have been a more significant focus. Instead, Megalopolis is caught up in backstabbing wealthy relatives of Cesar, including a billionaire bank owner played by Jon Voight (he looks seriously confused and not in a funny way, but the concerning late-career Bruce Willis way where there turned out to be a neurological diagnosis in play), a power-hungry cousin (Shia LaBeouf) willing to doublecross anyone, and Cesar’s former mistress and gossip-obsessed newscaster Platinum Wow (Aubrey Plaza delivering the most consistent performance, and a fittingly crudely nutty one at that even if the character comes across as a misguided, uneasy helping of rampant misogyny from the film’s controversial filmmaker.)

The in-house scheming and drama between them take away from a relatively moving romantic subplot between Cesar and Julia, even if there still isn’t any real character development happening. It more comes down to a feeling radiating from the screen. Considering that aspects of Cesar’s egotistical personality and humiliating slander are on full display, it also doesn’t feel out of the realm of possibility that Francis Ford Coppola is throwing up a version of himself on screen (a theory more credible considering the ending credits dedicate the film to his deceased wife). Francis Ford Coppola’s call to action to build a better world with updated principles is admirable and even something some people need to hear, but one wishes that he constructed a better movie out of it than Megalopolis.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

In the annals of horrific Hollywood-related crimes that have left a lasting imprint on Los Angeles, the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders have always ranked in the top tier. The bloody killing of pregnant actor Sharon Tate and others over two days by members of a cult headed by Charles Manson has sparked its own cottage industry of books and films, including Quentin Taratino’s “Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood.’

But acclaimed novelist and former Times reporter Michael Connelly has always been fascinated by another dark and savage incident, fueled by sex and drugs, which he says left a deeper scar on Hollywood and L.A. culture — the 1981 Wonderland Massacre, in which four people were brutally slain inside a posh home in Laurel Canyon.

Adult film star John C. Holmes, drug kingpin Eddie Nash, famed entertainer Liberace and his “boy toy” Scott Thorson were among the colorful personalities caught up in the case. A juror was bribed. Even after three trials, there were no convictions, and the killers were never brought to justice, making the Wonderland murders one of the LAPD’s most infamous cold cases.

The details, Connelly contends, were outrageous even by Hollywood standards: “There’s aspects of this story that I don’t think would work in fiction because you actually have to be more believable in fiction.”

After decades of writing bestsellers — many of them featuring the fictional, no-nonsense Los Angeles Police Department Det. Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch — and adapting his novels into popular series (Prime Video’s “Bosch,” Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer”), Connelly is finally taking a deep dive into his obsession with the blood-soaked slaughter in MGM+’s “The Wonderland Massacre & The Secret History of Hollywood.”

With the four-part docuseries, which concludes Sunday at 10 p.m. and will be available to stream in full, Connelly, partnering with documentary filmmaker Alison Ellwood (“Laurel Canyon,” “The Go-Gos”), extends his exploration into the case, which started with his 2021 Audible podcast. The project also probes Hollywood’s decadent culture of nightclubs and underground parties during the 1970s and ‘80s.

A centerpiece of the project is an extensive interview with Thorson, who was portrayed by Matt Damon in the HBO film “Behind the Candelabra” — his memoir of the same name served as the basis. An addict who operated in Hollywood’s dark circles, Thorson served as key witness in the Wonderland case. Thorson died in August of cancer and heart disease.

The first chapter of the series, “The Heat of a Cold Case,” outlines the gruesome discovery on July 1, 1981, of four people — Ron Launius, William “Billy” Deverell, Joy Miller and Barbara Richardson — who had been bludgeoned to death. The victims were members of the Wonderland Gang, a group of small-time drug dealers. Launius’ wife, Susan, survived the attack but suffered brain damage and partial paralysis.

The slayings were allegedly ordered by Nash as retaliation for a robbery at his home, but Nash and his bodyguard, Gregory DeWitt Diles, were acquitted of the crime.

In a video interview, edited here for length and clarity, Connelly and Ellwood discussed the effect of the Wonderland case on Hollywood, its connection to the crack epidemic, the cat-and-mouse interactions with Thorson and whether there’s a possibility of reopening the case.

Why have the Wonderland murders intrigued you more than the Manson family murders?

Connelly: They’re both brutal, very shocking crimes. They both have something to say about the culture of their time. But Wonderland was on the precipice of huge change in terms of drugs being much of the inspiration and cultural change. It was the shifting to drugs that were designed to addict. That headed toward crack, which destroyed communities. So the impact was much more significant than the Manson case. Its tentacles go all over the place. It’s not only Los Angeles but representative of what happened in our society in the ‘80s.

Ellwood: When Michael first approached me, I had just finished “Laurel Canyon,” about the music scene there. The Manson murders marked the midpoint of that, this dark wave that no one was suspecting in this bucolic place. It had been mind-expanding drugs before, and then the drugs turned to cocaine. The artists leave, and then these houses become drug dens occupied by thieves. The image of what Laurel Canyon had been was taken over.

Michael, when did you first start obsessing over this murder?

Connelly: I first came to Los Angeles from Florida in the mid-’80s to cover crime for the Los Angeles Times. Any kind of story where people got away with murder was intriguing to me as a journalist. Then I transitioned to novels, and what happens in novels? Everything gets solved, there’s no loose ends. The opportunity to explore this case where justice was never served is something that intrigues and obsesses me. Over time, I’ve come to know almost every detective who has worked on this case. It has really stuck in their craws and that kind of transferred to me.

One of the most shocking images is the bloody footage from the actual crime scene.

Ellwood: It’s really brutal. I watch a lot of movies, so I’m used to gore. But when it’s real, it’s very different. There is much worse imagery, which we did not use.

How is the docuseries different from the podcast?

Connelly: It’s a visual story. The archival stuff that Allison and her team were able to pull together took it several steps above a podcast. The footage from the crime scene alone is significantly different when you see it. We got fresher interviews.

Michael Connelly and Alison Ellwood took a noir approach to shooting the docuseries.

(MGM+)

What was the main element to make it into a film?

Ellwood: The story struck me as a very negative image of what L.A. had become during this era, so we really wanted to take a noir approach. We have a lot of night driving with Michael, and very moody settings for the interviews.

The Zoom interviews that Mike was doing with Scott Thorson were immediately intriguing. You could see this back-and-forth, cat-and-mouse game that Michael was having to play with Scott. I thought, “Wow, we got to get them in a room together.” So we went to Musso and Frank’s in Hollywood, a luxury, old-time environment. Scott had hung out there a lot.

Connelly: He’s such a strange and interesting character. All these cops counseled me: “You got to watch him, don’t trust anything he says.” I went from being very standoffish about him and not trusting him to really enjoying our conversations. It was an interesting relationship. He was such an interesting foil who I would try to catch in a lie. Believe me, I tried. I thought it would be helpful if I showed him to be an unreliable narrator. I never told him where I lived, never gave him my cellphone number. But I ended up kind of liking him, despite all the bad things he did. And that’s a very strange thing for me. We knew he was sick when he did the interviews, but it was still shocking when he passed.

Is there a possibility of the case ever being reopened?

Connelly: Yes and no. Our work on this project got the head of the cold case unit of the LAPD to come in with the file and talk to us. But she basically said the case doesn’t have the things that would usually bring about a cold-case investigation decades later, like DNA and fingerprints. Someone would have to come forward to start this again.

Ellwoood: Certainly all of the detectives would be happy to bring this case to closure. It really is unrequited justice. People got away with murder.