Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ has been a long-awaited dream project, taking shape in his mind for nearly 40 years and consuming half that time in its pursuit of reality. Now, with a hefty $120 million investment from his own winery capital, the New Hollywood legend presents an uncompromised opus, untainted by studio interference. However, while the film’s vision remains true to Coppola’s gonzo style, its execution is less concrete than the towering skyscrapers that define its setting, a modern Manhattan mirroring the crumbling grandeur of ancient Rome.
The controversy surrounding the troubled production of this strange, gaudy epic has shadowed the film itself, perhaps fittingly for a project with such blatant symbolic aims. ‘Megalopolis’ was a cause célèbre even before its polarizing premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, hailed by some as a triumph from a living master, while others decried it as an irresponsible financial gamble. The film, unsurprisingly, satisfies both camps, a radical passion project of the 1970s vintage, and a bewildering disaster. The heated debate surrounding the film mirrors its story, which revolves around Cesar Catilina, a brilliant and arrogant architect of New Rome, a city of the future and past, embodying the popular perception of America as another empire destined to fall from within.
Adam Driver, a contemporary movie star capable of portraying both mythic iconicity and raw human emotion, embodies Cesar. His casting, not surprisingly, echoes his previous roles as godlike creators, like the towering anti-hero of ‘Annette’ and the real-life speed-demon mogul in ‘Ferrari.’ Fueled by grief over his late wife, Cesar seeks to channel his passion into the utopian transformation of New Rome. It’s tempting to see him as a stand-in for the filmmaker, but Coppola playfully complicates that reading by introducing Cesar’s nemesis, the corrupt Mayor Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito), who goes by the name ‘Frances,’ a playful nod to the director himself.
To achieve his ideal of a perfect society, Cesar seeks a mysterious element called Megalon, capable of stopping time and reshaping space. Even before Coppola projects memories onto its floating shards, the viewer might perceive Megalon as a metaphor for the tools of a filmmaker. Only Cesar and Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel from ‘Game of Thrones’), a club-hopping socialite and the Mayor’s daughter, can see the effects of Megalon. Naturally, she falls into a Shakespearean romance with her father’s enemy, though their love story, meant to be the heart of ‘Megalopolis,’ lacks genuine heat, despite the actors’ best efforts. Like the rest of the cast, they embody concepts rather than characters: ambition, treachery, hope, and so on.
Coppola’s dialogue is stiffly theatrical, laden with meaning, peppered with quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Shakespeare. (At one point, during a press conference on suspended wooden walkways overlooking a construction site, Driver delivers Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’ monologue). Engraved title cards echo and reinforce the narration by Laurence Fishburne, who plays Cesar’s loyal driver and acts as the film’s Greek chorus. Truthfully, everyone in the film seems to be reciting from a stone tablet. Performances lean toward caricature, as if the actors were battling to avoid being overshadowed by their Caligula-inspired costumes or the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ scenery.
Aubrey Plaza (‘Agatha All Along’) plays the power-hungry reporter Wow Platinum with unrestrained theatricality. She begins as Cesar’s mistress, but eventually marries his filthy rich banker uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Meanwhile, Shia LaBeouf, with a sweaty giggle and exaggerated movements, portrays Cesar’s jealous, backstabbing cousin, who evolves into a Trumpian populist intent on exploiting the discontent of New Rome’s lower class. Coppola has deliberately chosen to cast actors who have been labeled ‘canceled,’ but it’s worth noting that most of them play villainous roles. The subplot involving Cesar’s enemies attempting to engineer a sex scandal to ruin him feels uncomfortably relevant, given the recent allegations against the director and his history of defending a convicted offender.
After decades in development, ‘Megalopolis’ echoes a lineage of past Coppola experiments: a hint of ‘The Godfather’s’ gangster melodrama, a touch of the theatricality of ‘One From the Heart,’ and a hefty dose of the sheer lunacy of his late-career reinventions like ‘Youth After Youth.’ On the surface, it most closely resembles Coppola’s stunning adaptation of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ with its hallucinatory superimpositions. However, ‘Dracula’ was shot on glorious celluloid, while the digital cinematography here gives his bronze imagery a bright, flat appearance, resembling a point-and-click computer game. Yet, there are striking sights in this fantastical fable. While the human drama of ‘Megalopolis’ is awkward, the film takes flight when Coppola abandons reality for flamboyant dream logic. Statues sigh, briefly come to life, and then collapse into the sides of buildings. A giant hand reaches from the clouds to grasp the moon. Cesar surveys his metropolitan domain from high above the city, perched precariously on construction beams or canoodling on the surface of a giant clock. When Russian satellites plummet from the sky, creating a hailstorm reminiscent of the horror of 9/11, Coppola stages the panic as cowering silhouettes against the glow of hellfire projected onto the sides of buildings.
This movie dazzles the eyes one minute, then offends them with its kitschiness the next. A long stretch set in Madison Square Garden, envisioned as a Colosseum with chariot races, jousting, and a virginal pop star descending from the ceiling like a Super Bowl halftime headliner, flirts with the broad satire of ‘Southland Tales.’ However, don’t expect too much trenchant commentary on the American experiment from a film that has been in development for four decades. This protracted gestation has, for better or worse, distanced ‘Megalopolis’ from any era-specific critique. It’s wiser to seek out its cult-courting insanity. This is a film where Aubrey Plaza outlines her supervillain plan while Shia LaBeouf performs a sex act on her, and Jon Voight fires arrows at his scheming relatives while boasting an enormous erection. You’ve likely heard about the scene where Cesar breaks the fourth wall to answer a question asked live during the movie, a viewing gimmick probably not coming to a theater near you. What you haven’t heard is how Driver says ‘club.’
One could cherry-pick a dozen deranged moments from ‘Megalopolis’ and make it sound like a masterpiece of crazed genius. But the film could honestly stand to be even more outlandish and, believe it or not, longer. At 138 minutes, it practically sprints through its final stretch, condensing the conspiracy against Cesar into an unsatisfying montage. ‘We’re in need of a great debate about the future,’ our hero eventually proclaims, summing up Coppola’s gushy thesis, his hope for a new age of solutions devised by the world’s great thinkers. Despite its bizarre turns, this is a rather sentimental epic. The true Megalon, it turns out, is… love. (No, seriously.) While one can be touched by Coppola’s optimism—his choice to create a film about the fall of Rome that suggests its downfall is not inevitable—his portrayal of utopia remains rather vague and flowery. Given all the years the director has spent pondering this project, you’d expect a more substantial conclusion than ‘We can do it, somehow!’.
Dramatically and philosophically, ‘Megalopolis’ barely coheres. It seems unrealized even in its unlikely realization, a glowing idea of a movie rather than the movie itself. But with Coppola, a neurotic tinkerer known for returning to the grand stories of his past, no cut is ever definitively final. Perhaps he will continue to search for the truth of ‘Megalopolis.’ Why shouldn’t a portrait of America as a perpetual work in progress look like a work in progress itself? ‘Megalopolis’ is now playing in select theaters, including some IMAX screens.
