Francis Ford Coppola is considered by many one of the great masters of American cinema, and for good reason. He’s got a number of undeniable classics under his belt (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now), and has always made movies his own way regardless of what others say or what’s popular at the moment. That said, there is an entire generation who have never seen Coppola do anything contemporary with any cultural significance. As he’s gotten increasingly experimental (remember Twixt?), Coppola has also become irrelevant. Unfortunately, he’s also now produced a film that is guaranteed to make him the target of ridicule, Megalopolis, and the jokes are well-earned.
Megalopolis is a disaster, to be blunt. A bloated, self-important debacle that shows Coppola has forgotten how to tell a story without explaining every detail. He no longer trusts his audience. He overloads the film with exposition, exhaustive use of metaphor, and over-the-top performances from well-known actors bordering on comical. The story begins with Laurence Fishburne, one of a million actors in a throwaway role, laying out the entire theme for us as if we were schoolchildren. We’re told that Megalopolis is a fable. That it will deal with a dying metropolis, New Rome, as it tries to hold on to the knowledge and lessons of the past. Well, thanks. What are we watching the movie for?
The futuristic New Rome seems to be part New York City, part Gotham City, and part Rome at the fall of the empire. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a genius capable of stopping time, literally. Why he’s able to do this is never quite clear. He has envisioned a gleaming Utopia and has discovered a unique element that will help him build it. This puts him at odds with the current mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is concerned with the city’s present-day troubles, which include severe wealth disparity, housing, immigration and other problems that parallel our own. Cesar and Franklyn have a long-standing beef that goes beyond their current ideology, but it only gets worse when the mayor’s socialite daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), begins studying under Cesar and falls in love with him.
Going in, I really wanted to like Megalopolis. Coppola invested decades of his life and more than $100M of his personal fortune to get this passion project made. And for what it’s worth, he made it the way he wanted to. Visually, it’s stunning, with DP Mihai Mălaimare Jr. creating a gleaming capital that looks like it was built for the gods. Coppola holds nothing back. In one stunning arena sequence full of gladiator combat (including pro wrestling matches!!?!?), chariot races, and a pop starlet (played by Grace VanderWaal) auctioning off her virginity to rich, old billionaires, the “bread and circuses” portion of the film is eye-popping to behold and looks great in IMAX.
Unfortunately, the actual story is clunky, indecipherable junk overloaded with terrible performances. Driver is sort of an enigmatic guy anyway, so he seems perfectly at home when the egotistical Cesar is spouting off bold declarations and lording his brilliance over others. If that were all the role called for it wouldn’t be a problem, but there are long stretches where Cesar goes on some kind of fever dream and he transforms into a drug-addled libertine and it’s just ridiculous.
Other performances are far worse, though. Poor Nathalie Emmanuel seems to have no idea what her character is doing from scene to scene. She’s the victim of some god-awful writing that transforms Julia from a party girl to practically the Virgin Mary in a heartbeat. Esposito, a brilliant thespian who can do literally anything, also can’t make heads or tails out of his Franklyn Cicero role. He can’t decide whether to play him reservedly or with a melodramatic flourish. To be fair, Coppola struggles to get the tone right himself, so it’s no wonder his actors do, as well.
Fortunately, Shia LaBeouf and Aubrey Plaza know what’s up. They have the two most enjoyable parts in the film. Labeouf is a significant, humorous presence as Cesar’s jealous cousin, Clodio, who longs to destroy him and take everything for himself. Plaza plays the hysterically named Wow Platinum, a Wall Street journalist and Cesar’s scorned ex-lover who plots to destroy him. LaBeouf and Plaza’s crazy matches Coppola’s crazy, and they seem to be having a ball.
It’s perplexing the number of familiar actors given nothing to do, their characters dropping in and getting written out without much explanation. One can imagine most of them did it to work with Coppola, but even so, this is humiliating stuff. Jason Schwartzman is the oddest of all, playing a nondescript member of Franklyn’s entourage. Dustin Hoffman looks weirdly out of place as Franklyn’s fixer, before getting shuffled out of the film for no good storyline reason. Before the film during a live Q&A, Coppola spoke about casting actors who had been “canceled”, and this can only mean Jon Voight who plays Cesar’s uncle and benefactor. It’s a terribly embarrassing role, one that makes Voight look older than he is and kinda feeble. But he does get the biggest knee-slapper scene with Plaza, LaBeouf, and a trusty bow-and-arrow. So congratulations Mr. Voight on your best performance since Anaconda.
Megalopolis drones on and on, its 138-minute runtime feeling like 831 minutes. At one point in our screening, after Cesar delivered a speech that did its best to sum up this monstrosity, the audience gave polite applause, thinking the movie was over. But no, there was still quite a lot left to go, and you could hear the chuckles when they realized it. It’s not that Coppola doesn’t know how to end the movie, although that is certainly the case. It’s more like he doesn’t want Megalopolis to end, to bring to finality this thing that has consumed so much of his life for so long. The word that will get thrown around about Megalopolis is “ambitious”. Coppola’s career is littered with similarly ambitious projects, some that paid off and just as many that crashed and burned. Coppola probably sees a lot of himself in Cesar, but there’s no Utopia at the end of this risky gambit, just a pile of flaming rubble.
Megalopolis opens in theaters on September 27th.
