Film Review: Megalopolis

Score: 3.5/4

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis begins with architect and visionary Caesar Catalina (played by Adam Driver) practicing his ability to “stop time,” which he practices by freezing himself in the air atop a towering skyscraper. It’s an obvious metaphor for how Coppola, the film’s creator and ever the maestro, is placing himself in a vulnerable, dizzying place as an artist, in what is clearly his most personal film. The title comes with an announcement that this is “a fable,” which is necessary to absorb, since what follows is too much to take literally, but always compelling if we look at Coppola’s gargantuan, satirical as a waking dream. 

Driver’s Caesar is on one side of the political fence, adapting the look and rhetoric of the Roman empire and announcing the upcoming creation of the city of the title, while Mayor Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito), on the opposite side of the political spectrum, wants a more conventional approach to building the future, even as political corruption and moral rot are taking place. Cicero’s daughter Julia (played by Nathalie Emmanuel, in a star making performance) falls hard for Caesar. Competing for Caesar’s affection is the power-hungry tabloid journalist Wow Platinum (played by Aubrey Plaza), who is aiming to seduce and control Caesar. 

This is barely scratching the surface of the plot, which also involves Shia LaBeouf playing a foul villain aiming for Caesar’s downfall, and Jon Voight as a demented power monger. Voight’s performance is interesting in comparison to Dustin Hoffman’s performance- they both appear to be attempting Marlon Brando impressions.

With the overt Shakespearean references (Driver bangs out the To Be or Not To Be” monologue from Hamlet early on), knockout costume and production design suggesting futuristic and classic architecture and theatricality in the staging and performances, Megalopolis feels uncannily like Baz Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). I mean that is a compliment. Likewise, while the eye-popping coliseum sequence goes on too long, the send-up of excess and tabloid journalism in Coppola’s mad world feels akin to Idiocracy (2006). 

Here’s another film reference to get to the heart of what this film is like: Coppola’s film, with some scenes and moments not landing, but its best portions full of beauty and poetry, is imperfect, overstuffed but joyous in the same way as Wim Wenders’ equally daffy and misshapen but wonderful The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). If the names of those three films make you cringe, then you will probably be among those to declare this a folly and get caught up in the inevitable “mega-flopolis” press accounts of the film’s box office (which are not the same as the film’s actual achievements). 

The spellbinding scenes of Caesar shaping swirling matter into the architecture of his dreams is a marvelous representation of Coppola’s creative process. Likewise, the scenes of Driver and Emmanuel standing atop of a skyscraper, at a dizzying height, looking at the possibilities of the world and their growing relationship. 

Coppola’s story is so big and busy, the film, even at 138 minutes, feels like a truncated mini-series; the biggest flaw is that the focus and emotional rooting interest varies from scene to scene (for example, a major character is seriously injured at one point, only to be suddenly healed and a-okay a few scenes later). The best thing about Megalopolis is that, even when it feels garish and too much (which happens a lot in the first hour) and feels like it’s going to tip over entirely into high camp, there’s another knockout sequence and another thoughtful idea is casually tossed out that steadies it.

Aside from some late going plot dynamics that reflect the mafia maneuvering from The Godfather (1972), don’t expect this to feel like any of Coppola’s past triumphs. For those who have been following Coppola’s wildly experimental work past John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997), this feels like a companion piece to Youth Without Youth (2007), his terrific, equally challenging master class on time travel being a mental, not a physical, journey.

Megalopolis will likely be too much and too weird for most, but it gets better as it unfolds and amounts to a work as hopeful as it is beautiful. Driver was a good pick for the lead, as his brooding, dark presence is matched by a willingness to be playful. Likewise, his sea of co-stars, only some of whom come into focus (I’m still not sure who D.B. Sweeny is playing, and I couldn’t spot Balthazar Getty). Esposito, in the film’s best, most grounded performance, is excellent and Coppola couldn’t have picked a better narrator and father figure than Laurence Fishburne. In addition to Emmanuel’s engaging turn, Aubrey Plaza gives in to both the excess and media mockery in Coppola’s screenplay.

While the final vision of Megalopolis resembles the glorious, surreal architecture in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and William Cameron Menzie’s Things to Come (1936), Coppola’s screenplay offers some amusingly dated touches: I only spotted one cell phone, as the film depicts the use of newspapers as the most widespread source of media aside television. The idea of Roman philosophy and pageantry becoming mainstream in America is intriguing, but there’s no way the zeitgeist would embrace the horrible Roman haircuts. 

Overall, in its depiction of Caesar’s struggles to be a present, honest and faithful husband, Megalopolis emerges an earnest and moving tribute to the director’s late wife Eleanor (we’d realize this even without the final title card announcing it). The film is also Coppola using sci-fi and wild social satire as a window into his creative process and social embarrassments; watching Caesar’s struggle to conceptualize and see the fully realized creation of his dream city is an obvious reflection of Coppola’s own battle against financial ruin with his Zoetrope Studios struggling post-One from the Heart (1982). Taken as a fictional take on Coppola’s life makes Megalopolis even more fascinating, but just watching it at face value is also rewarding, in spite of moments that don’t work and/or performances that don’t connect. 

Thankfully, the film’s emotional center is intact (the final image moved me to tears) and I cared about Caesar, even as I couldn’t always understand him (admittedly, Driver was even better playing this kind of troubled genius in Michael Mann’s Ferrari, last year’s best movie that nobody saw). 

The scenes of political unrest and massive, outlandish protests make this especially intriguing to view during this election season- rather than pontificate if Coppola means for any of his fictional characters to be a stand-in for certain real-life figures, I’ll just state that the movie connects to the outlandish aspects of current American politics. Yet, Coppola’s film mirrors Lang’s film, which concluded by asking us if we as human being can connect the work of the hands with the intentions of the heart. I think Megalopolis has achieved that feat, in that it worries about how much we’ve lost in our detached cynicism as a reaction to human tragedy. 

Is there hope for humankind? Coppola thinks so and Megalopolis is his manifesto on how humankind will survive, not by the control of dictators, but through the visions of dreamers who allow love and compassion to coexist with world-building. It’s an old-fashioned way of looking at the future, but so be it.