Francis Ford Coppola’s anticipated, largely self financed, and already highly divisive epic Megalopolis is an odd duck to say the least, but I’m sure the veteran filmmaker wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The real discussion surrounding Coppola’s latest lies in parsing whether or not the writer-director’s massive swings amount to anything narratively or artistically substantial. Megalopolis is sure to make viewers form strong opinions based on its structure, content, morality, and approach, but as a film only about two-thirds of it really works. It’s unbridled chaos, untethered by form and expectation, but indebted to classic works of literature, art, and design, which makes it easy to get lost in until the whole thing suddenly sets off on a road to no place interesting in its final stages.
Set in the decaying, classist metropolis of New Rome during the 3rd millennium, Megalopolis revolves around the life and career of Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), the world’s foremost architect, scientific mind, and head of the Design Authority. Cesar is responsible for the creation of a revolutionary building material that could not only construct his dreams of a futuristic city befitting the gods, but also can be applied to a variety of other medical and social ills. He can also stop time, making the universe’s most finite resource into a renewable source of inspiration and energy into one of his greatest secret assets. He’s a controversial figure, prone to womanizing and offending the city’s biggest power brokers, but also heralded as an indispensable visionary.
It’s not hard to read into this material at its most obvious. Coppola clearly identifies with Cesar, and Driver’s witty, commanding performance is more than willing to indulge his director. Megalopolis is every bit a story of an artist trying to mount their magnum opus, and the resulting film boasts a lot of creative ideas, clever satire, and blatant provocations. Megalopolis is a lot of movie – inarguably too much – but in the early stages of what might turn out to be Coppola’s last film on such a scale, my racing mind felt alive with the possibility of it all.
The highly stylized, computer generated, golden hued world of Megalopolis draws primary inspiration from not only Coppola’s life as a perpetually frustrated innovator, but also from more obvious sources like The Fountainhead, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Art Deco design, and Grecian myths. There’s no shortage of contempt for bureaucrats and purse string holders (as exemplified by Giancarlo Esposito’s withering mayor and Jon Voight’s drunken billionaire industrialist), big money power brokers (Aubrey Plaza’s starfucker television analyst who becomes romantically entangled with both Voight and Driver’s characters), alleged do-gooder false prophets (Shia LaBeouf as the prankster, activist son of Voight/Driver’s cousin, Grace VanderWaal) as a “vestal virgin”), and boot licking sycophants (Jason Schwartzman’s ineffective personal assistant). Coppola has a list of gripes a mile long and has folded them all into a deeply personal passion project, making Megalopolis function like the darker flip side to his other huge dream project, One from the Heart.
Just like that (better) passion project, there’s a distinct amount of romanticism to be found in Megalopolis, best exemplified by a tender and fraught relationship that Cesar shares with the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero (cast standout Nathalie Emmanuel), but the tone here remains pervasively pointed and cynical. Also like One from the Heart, Megalopolis is opulent in the extreme: a satirical bacchanalia that’s part opera and part garish fashion show, replete with knowingly overwritten dialogue that’s made for scenery chewing (and there’s plenty to feast on). Framing his epic as “a fable” allows Coppola carte blanche to be as forceful and over the top as he pleases. The overlapping editing works like a charm. There are mirrored shots, split screens, and canted angles aplenty. The sight gags are bawdy and the set pieces pack the frame with visual splendour, particularly a haunting moment when Cesar visits the only flower shop in purgatory and an extensive sequence set at Madison Square Garden that underlines and emphasizes Coppola’s stance that this is a look at the hubris and fall of the American Empire.
Thematically, Megalopolis is a take it or leave it proposition. In Coppola’s eyes there’s inequity on all sides and everyone has sinned. For all of its continually mounting, cyclical, subtextual discussions about the differences between legality and morality (something that assuredly extends to the film’s casting) and warring cults of personality, Megalopolis caps all of them off with an anarchic, almost trolling smugness. But thanks to Coppola’s lack of stylistic and narrative restraint, Megalopolis remains consistently intriguing and transfixing…
…that is, until it stops being interesting, indulgent, or even trying to engage with its audience. Right around the moment that Coppola breaks the fourth wall with a unique stylistic choice (one that I witnessed during its screening at TIFF, but mainstream Canadian audiences will only see during specifically noted “enhanced” IMAX showtimes during the film’s run), the whole thing breaks down. It’s a strange pivot point because not only does it add nothing whatsoever to the film, but that the entirety of Megalopolis from that point gets sucked into an even messier and less coherent black hole following its execution.
Possibly as a result of the project’s much noted production woes, financial constraints, or simply because the material wasn’t as sound at the end as it was for the first two acts, Megalopolis closes things out with a rushed conclusion that wraps things up in an unsatisfactory manner. Things that were laid out in lugubrious detail in the early stages are wrapped up with uncharacteristic bluntness or forgotten about entirely. The romance and fetishistic stylistic romanticism of building a new world crumbles as a much as the plot, and try as the cast might to keep things lively, the final third of Megalopolis reeks of resignation and compromise, the very things Coppola has spent so much time railing against. When compared to some of Coppola’s more recent low key outsider efforts like Twixt and Youth Without Youth, it becomes clearer that grandiosity doesn’t always suit the filmmaker when he’s trying something a lot more philosophical and experimental. Here is a man with a carnival’s worth of resources, but he only has the mental and financial bandwidth to keep it going for a short amount of time before the charm wears off.
The final passages of Megalopolis are actively bad, but they also serve as a backhanded compliment to Coppola’s final punchline. While Caesar is building a city of the future, his accomplishments will be rendered irrelevant because the world can’t keep up with his pace. Coppola can’t keep up with his own expectations here, and while much of the early going plays like a filmmaker prepared to go out in a blaze of glory if this project kills his career for good, it winds up being a net loss that’s doesn’t amount to the sum of its enormous parts. Megalopolis comes out of the gate with a lot of fury, energy, style, and purpose, but it forgets to funnel all of that into either one or several places, leading to a film that dissipates the longer it goes on. It’s not an outright failure as some would frame it as, but definitely a disappointment.
Megalopolis opens in select theatres on Friday, September 27, 2024. It screened as part of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
