The world is in a bad state. The future looks bleak. Something needs to be done. But what?
Francis Ford Coppola not quite sure. But he is sure something needs to be done. So why not take the $120 million he made selling his winery and use it to make a movie about how something needs to be done?
This seems to be the driving force behind Coppola’s work. Megalopolisa project by the fearless author behind The Godfather, The Conversationand Apocalypse Now spent decades dreaming it up before finally financing it himself. The end result, after all that conceptualization, is truly one of the most idiosyncratic films of the 21st century.
Megalopolis feels overcooked and undercooked, crammed with equal parts bold ideas and utter nonsense. Parts of it are jaw-droppingly beautiful; others feel shockingly threadbare. It’s deeply personal and occasionally borderline incoherent. It’s begging its audience—the entire world!—to come together for a brighter future. But how?
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Coppola isn’t so self-absorbed as to think he has the answers. Instead, he presents what the on-screen subtitle calls “a fable” that conflates contemporary America with ancient Rome. In a version of New York City renamed “New Rome” (the police cars even say “NRPD” on the side), the corrupt and antiquated Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) comes into conflict with a visionary architect named Cesar Catilina (Driver Adam) about the latter’s dream of tearing down old buildings to build high-tech ones made of “Megalon”, a building material invented by Cesar himself that can stop time and has other vaguely defined magical abilities.
Like a classic myth, the turf war between Cicero and Caesar involves all of their respective families, including the mayor’s beautiful socialite daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emanuel), who is interested in Caesar’s bold architectural ideas and Caesar’s power-hungry cousin Clodius (Shia LaBeouf), who yearns for his family’s fortune, controlled by the aging banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight).
At a surreal press conference held on catwalks above a massive model of New Rome, Cesar lays out his vision for “Megalopolis,” a futuristic utopia that he wants Cicero to let him build. A few scenes later, however, Cesar tells his lover, an amoral cable news journalist named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Square) that the actual form of the Megalopolis itself is meaningless. All that matters is that people take the idea seriously and engage with the issues such a place raises.
This is one of the many times when Megalopolis when Coppola seems to be speaking directly to the audience through Driver. The New York Film Festival The special screening of the film was preceded by a panel discussion featuring Robert De Niro, Spike Lee and Coppola, who candidly recited some of Driver’s dialogue from the film in full. He told the audience that he firmly believes that humanity has the solution to creating a brighter tomorrow, if we can just get organized and build it.
Besides this commendable but extremely nebulous feeling, Megalopolis doesn’t say much, or offer any concrete steps toward achieving this grand vision of a utopian tomorrow. (The film suggests that it would definitely be helpful if the guy pushing for this utopia were an architect out there as handsome and charismatic as Adam Driver, who also invented a substance that defied the laws of physics. If anyone could do that, that would be great.)
Megalopolis‘ the story is equally ill-defined. It goes down several dead ends with no discernible purpose, introduces extremely familiar faces for what amounts to cameo roles (Dustin Hoffman shows up for a few unnecessary scenes; Laurence Fishburne (plays the narrator and also Cesar’s right-hand man—until the end of the film, when he simply disappears and never returns.) The entire film revolves around Megalon, but what he can do, where he comes from, or how he connects to Cesar’s late wife and her death (or murder?) is never explained.
This is not to say that the film is boring; there are always There’s something surprising around every corner in Megalopolis. In one scene, characters start speaking in Latin. Jason Schwartzman plays the drums at one point! Aubrey Plaza plans a corporate takeover while straddling Shia LaBeouf on a conference room table! A virgin pop star (Grace VanderWaal) performs in a dress made from a Megalon that turns her body invisible!
And yet, scattered throughout this sometimes silly story, there are some genuinely beautiful visuals. In one scene, Cesar and Julia fall in love at magic hour high above Nova Roma on a whimsical construction site. They discuss an artist’s ability to freeze time in his work, so Julia begs Cesar to literally stop time, and when they kiss, that’s exactly what happens. It’s a lovely sequence. Later, Coppola switches to an elaborate montage that combines history and fantasy, with the frame divided into three vertical sections, each passing through different interconnected images. It’s like something Dziga Vertov might have done if you gave him access to an IMAX camera and Final Cut Pro. I loved it. Which is why, as much as I was perplexed (and occasionally irritated) by parts of MegalopolisI won’t rule it out completely.
Still, I can’t fully understand why some scenes, like the one on the rooftop with Cesar and Julie, look beautiful, while others look like rejected animations from Jurassic World sequels. Despite the quotes and allusions to great works of art and literature—at one point Caesar performs Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be” because, like, that’s it the question, man — the filmmaker I thought about repeatedly during Megalopolis was Neil Breen, the maverick eccentric who spent years making offbeat movies that he wrote, directed, and starred in. (Many of his heroes possess Caesar-like intellects and magical powers as well.)
Breen’s films aren’t good in any conventional sense, and they’re rarely lucid. But they seem to come from a place deep inside the man, who is speaking sincerely from his heart about whatever weird crap he has rattling around in his head at any given moment. And because he pays for these things himself, no one can stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants. You can call his films bad, but you can’t deny that they’re also pure.
The same goes for Megalopolis. It’s a Messalopolis of story tangents, verbal digressions, and unforgettable images. Whatever other value judgments I might want to place on its script, its performances, and its overall clarity, I find it very hard not to like something an artist sacrificed a portion of his fortune to make.
Additional considerations:
–Before the New York Film Festival Megalopolis As the screening began, a sign on the screen warned, “This performance features a live theater participant element.” Essentially, at one point in the film, a man from the audience (I don’t know where he came from or who he was) approached the screen and asked a question to Adam Driver, who seemed to hear the question and respond. It was bold and very brief, and I’m not sure it did much beyond underscoring Coppola’s message that we need to let go of the old and dream of the new — but I enjoyed the novelty anyway. (I believe the interactive scene will be repeated in special IMAX screenings around the country during the film’s wide release, too.)
-After finishing my review, I took a look at MegalopolisCheck out the Letterboxd page to see what other viewers thought. Some of the reviews were five stars, praising Coppola’s audacity and vision. Others tore the film apart for its illogical storytelling and a cast that no one seemed to be on the same page about. I found myself agreeing with every single thing in every review, both good and bad. It’s that kind of movie. And it deserves that kind of rating.
RATING: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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