Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a grand experiment. A frustrating but enthralling dive into Coppola’s vision of what film (and, by extension, life itself) are, have been and could be.
After nearly thirty years of development and an influx of his own personal resources to ensure maximum creative freedom, Francis Ford Coppola’s potentially final film is as deliberate and obvious an agglomeration of its creator’s view on film (and life) as any director has ever committed to the screen.
That view is one that emphasizes family and charity versus the self-annihilation of greed and consumption, themes which he approached regularly in both his career (this is essentially what The Godfather is about) and his own personal life. Bundling that with all his hopes and aspirations for cinematic experimentation — this is the Coppola of One From the Heart and Rumble Fish in full flourish — produces an experience both frustrating and mesmerizing in the scope of its ambitions and failures.
Megalopolis embraces metaphor with the same vigor as it rejects subtext, explaining at every moment what it is and what it means while also leaving it to the viewer to assemble this strange jigsaw into something comprehensible. It’s a defiant and daring experiment ultimately made for an audience of one. Is it a good movie? Not in any conventional sense. Is it great art? Yes, without question.
Trying to describe it is like trying to describe the outline of a snowflake, an exercise in futility that will tell you nothing about the item itself. Ensconced in the Manhattan-like city of New Rome — the capital of an alternate history where Rome itself never fell and instead rose to a position of modern global opulence very much like modern America but with Latin names and gladiator arenas — civilization teeters on a precipice as the increasing poor threaten to bring down the established system of the rich and powerful and an old Soviet-era nuclear satellite slowly falls from orbit and threatens to land on the city.
In the middle of this stands architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), discoverer of the nigh-magical substance megalon, which can transform itself to match its owner’s needs and desires, whether that be an orchid-shaped high-rise or replace part of a destroyed skull, who wants to build a new, self-sustaining version of the city which will shield and support its populace, removing want and need from their lives so that the can focus on what truly matters. But first, he has to tear down the old city to build the new one. Also, he can stop time on command.
Sitting in his Chrysler Building office, looking down at his constructs like Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, Catilina isn’t interested in using his strange power or constructs to save anyone from slow-falling destruction; he’s too consumed by visions of his late wife that even with his strange genius he cannot revive or escape.
Though focused on creating the future, Catilina is obsessed with the past and, more so than anyone around him, keenly aware of how the future is constantly coming to be and then falling behind. He freezes time constantly, trying to hold onto moments before they move beyond him and disappear. This is very obviously a reference to the filmmaker and his attempt at the same via the captured image. It’s obvious because everything in Megalopolis is obvious. There is no subtext.
He is also broad and theatrical and consumed by his own ego. He is clearly and obviously, the type of man who would introduce himself by quoting one of Hamlet’s great monologues before segueing into an expiation on zoning. And yet this is not supposed to be part of who he is; it’s a warmup exercise for Driver, the actor, which Coppola capriciously stitches into his frame.
Flubs are left in, and actors experiment with dialogue, resulting in line readings that can easily tip into the flat or inane even as they experiment with the most straightforward of dialogue. It’s part of the collage of contrasts that is Megalopolis, specifically auteur driven towards a definitive vision and yet filled with accidents just thrown in on the day.
It’s easy to see Coppola reaching back to his Apocalypse Now experience, gestating new ideas and scenes each day with confidence in his ability to bring it all together into a complex whole. Any trick he has ever conceived is given its due … triptych screens, detached images, at one point, even a live question and answer from Catilina to an audience member in the theater.
He’s like the film school student taking every strange idea his professors tried to stamp out of him to make his films conventional and understandable and finally using them all. Almost anything any conventional film has ever decreed not to do, Megalopolis does.
It’s not the kind of filmmaking that will work for all actors. They can either flow with it like a leaf on a river or be sucked under and lost forever. The actors who are able to drift with it — Driver, a vamping Aubrey Plaza as gold-digging news presenter Wow Platinum, and a committed Shia LeBeouf as Catilina’s jealous and vengeful cousin — add dimension and humanity to a strange fable both aching for and devoid of both. Driver and Plaza, in particular, are able to pull humor out of straightforward dialogue and, with it, life.
It can result in fantastic scenes like Julia Cicero’s (Nathalie Emmanuel) first meeting with the mercurial Catilina. The strides into his office like an embarrassed Marius Goring approaching Anton Walbrook in The Red Shoes, requesting a letter she’d written in pique about how he treated her father, the mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), and suddenly becoming entrenched in his process. It can also result in terrible scenes Julia’s first meeting with Catilina, where she expounds on his faults like she’s reading from an Arby’s menu. Megalopolis contains multitudes.
As Julia becomes more entangled with Catilina’s life and work, she learns of how her father may have framed him for the murder of his wife, old allegations his former lover Wow is more than willing to use to revoke his funding and keep his rich uncle’s (Jon Voight) money for herself.
And yet, the more Megalopolis delves into these narrative threads, the less they matter. Like Catalina, staring into his own past and trying to will it to change the same way he can stop time, watching Megalopolis urges the viewer to will it into the form of conventional storytelling to better support its flights of genius. It is endlessly frustrating.
This is not just formalist experimentation for experimentation’s sake. Everything Coppola is saying about film, he is saying about modern civilization. For Coppola and Megalopolis, the two are one and the same. It’s not so much that Coppola doesn’t understand the basics of filmmaking or storytelling, it’s that he outright refuses them.
This is not the time for such convention; civilization is at stake! We don’t just need to build new structures to keep our art growing and alive; we need them to keep our world intact as well, and they won’t come from greed and conflict but by putting fear aside and taking a glowing ramp into the future. Megalopolis is a glorious mutant, but it is through mutation that life continues to thrive. We need it like we need air.
MEGALOPOLIS REVIEW RATING: 5 OUT OF 10 (BUT REALLY 10 OUT OF 10)
Lionsgate will release Megalopolis in theaters on September 27, 2024. The film is rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language, and some violence.
Joshua Starnes has been writing about film and the entertainment industry since 2004 and served as the President of the Houston Film Critics Society from 2012 to 2019. In 2015, he became a co-owner/publisher of Red 5 Comics and, in 2018, wrote the series “Kulipari: Dreamwalker” for Netflix. In between, he continues his lifelong quest to find THE perfect tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich combination.