Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which the legendary, multi-Oscar-winning filmmaker has been working on in some form or fashion for the better part of 40 years, is a great, sprawling folly—a film of such simultaneous ambition and foolhardiness that it is hard to separate where one begins and the other ends. I have not seen a film so simultaneously serious and silly since Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), which was also a grandiose science-fiction epic that combined interpersonal drama, politics, and immense world-building in an alternate United States of the near future. However, while Kelly’s film was fueled by the hubris of youth and worked in its own twisted way, Megalopolis, which Coppola funded himself to the tune of $120 million, is fueled by the hubris of age (he turned 85 the month before the mixed Cannes premiere)—and it doesn’t really work, twisted or otherwise.

Of course, Coppola has been down this bumpy road of maverick against-the-grain filmmaking before. Many times, in fact. Too many times, perhaps. The dust had barely settled on his mid-’70s Oscar- and Palm d’Or-winning trifecta of The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and The Conversation (1974) before he was off to the jungles of the Philippines making Apocalypse Now (1979), an insane masterwork of unbridled moxie that has haunted him ever since. He learned all the wrong lessons and soon crashed at the box office with his modern musical One From the Heart (1982), the debts from which he spent the next 25 years paying off. He has since returned sporadically to the big screen with the idiosyncratic, but relatively low-budget efforts Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011). Megalopolis, though, is a different beast altogether.

Subtitled “A Fable” (always a bad sign), Megalopolis is set in a near-future in which what appears to be New York City has been reimagined as New Rome. The title is apt since the political maneuverings of the major characters reflect in various ways the conspiracies and dramas of ancient Rome, with the overall thrust of the film’s thematic weight lying in the heady question of whether the United States of America is on the same doomed trajectory. To reinforce the weightiness of the cross-historical parallels, Coppola has saddled all of his major characters with statuesque Roman names, the only exception being Aubrey Plaza’s scheming journalist-turned-trophy wife who is named Wow Platinum. The protagonist is Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a brilliant and ambitious architect who is at odds with New Rome’s corrupt mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catilina wants to revitalize New Rome by building the utopian megalopolis of the title, which he plans to construct with a new building material he has invented called Megalon, while Cicero, who was once a district attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted Catilina for murdering his wife, wants to keep milking the status quo and build a giant casino. Catilina is clearly Coppola’s idealized stand-in, the great artist with a vision that no one else seems to understand and appreciate and whose control over his medium is so immense that he can actually stop time.

Things get more complicated when Catilina becomes romantically involved with the mayor’s wild-child daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who comes to believe in Catilina’s vision for the future. The edges of the narrative are ringed with all manner of eccentric social climbers and power brokers, notably Jon Voight’s Trumpesque Hamilton Crassus III, Catilina’s uncle and the world’s richest man; Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher, a rabble-rousing nephew with grand political and financial desires; and Laurence Fishburne’s Fundi Romaine, who drives Catilina and narrates the film. There is also a virginal pop star played by Grace VanderWaal, Talia Shire doing some kind of late-career impersonation of her brutal Godfather character, and Jason Schwartzman doing something in the background of several scenes.

As a project that has been percolating for more than four decades, it isn’t surprising that Megalopolis is a mushy stew of good and bad ideas drawn from a huge swath of American political history that reaches from Vietnam to Trumpism. The film is both deeply contemporary and amazingly anachronistic; you can feel Coppola reaching in every scene and every line of dialogue toward something grandiose and meaningful and important, but the film simply collapses under the weight of all that reaching. None of the characters feel like anything other than archetypes plugged into the pageantry, which is why the film never engages on an emotional level. What Coppola achieved in the Godfather films (yes, even the much maligned Part III) was a balanced interweaving of the intimate and the epic, which meant that the films worked as both intense human drama and political allegory about the nature of power. Working again with cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr., who has shot all of his films since Youth Without Youth, Coppola creates a wide array of memorable imagery, some of which is genuinely stunning and evocative. Yet, those images have nothing to moor them, so they tend to evaporate as soon as the characters start debating, quoting Shakespeare, or otherwise engaging in the inanities of the plot. There are some points when you might be tempted to think that Coppola is actually making a parody of his own ambitions, but it seems more likely that the truth lies in his determined seriousness, and that may very well be why the film fails so spectacularly. Richard Kelly at least made Southland Tales funny.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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