Megalopolis review: Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed, insane sci-fi opus

Megalopolis lived in Francis Ford Coppola’s imagination for nearly 40 years, and he spent about half of that time, on and off, trying to get it made, to convert his bold blueprint into reality. Watching the belated culmination of those efforts — the glittering, ridiculous fever dream filling IMAX screens this weekend and probably no other — it’s hard to shake the impression that the movie mostly still lives in his imagination. Footing the bill with some $120 million of his own winery capital, the New Hollywood legend has emerged with an opus uncompromised by studio interference. But if he’s remained true to his gonzo vision, he’s given it a shape much less concrete — and less elegant — than the mighty skyscrapers of the film’s setting, a modern Manhattan built in the crumbling image of ancient Rome.

The controversy surrounding the troubled production of this strange, gaudy epic has threatened to overshadow the movie itself, though maybe that’s fitting for a project of such blatantly symbolic aims. Megalopolis was a cause celébrè even before its polarizing premiere at the Cannes Film Festival: For every cinephile prepared to salute a sui generis triumph from a living master, there was a bean counter ready to cluck their tongue at an “irresponsibly” costly flop. Should it come as any surprise that the movie will satisfy both parties, that it can be safely characterized as both a radical passion project of 1970s vintage and a bewildering disaster? Naturally, all the feverish debate about the movie mirrors its story, in which a grandiose dreamer devotes everything to his pursuit of the impossible.

That dreamer is one Cesar Catilina, brilliant and arrogant architect of New Rome, a city of the future and the past that looms like a monument to the popular notion of America as another empire destined to fall from within. Cesar is played by Adam Driver, one of few contemporary movie stars capable of conveying a mythic, iconic quality and a rich, tortured humanity at once. (No wonder he keeps getting cast as godlike creators, like the towering superstar anti-comic of Annette and the very nonfictional speed-demon mogul of Ferrari.) Seized with grief over the death of his late wife, Cesar pines to channel his passion into the utopic transformation of New Rome. It’s easy to regard him as a surrogate for the filmmaker, though Coppola cheekily complicates that reading by revealing that the hero’s nemesis, the corrupt Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), goes by “Frances.”

To achieve his ideal of a perfect society, Cesar looks to a mystery element called Megalon that can stop time and reshape space. Even before Coppola is projecting memories onto the surfaces of its floating shards, a viewer might understand Megalon as a metaphor for the tools of a filmmaker. Besides Cesar, the only person who can see the effects of the substance is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel of Game of Thrones), a club-hopping socialite who also happens to be the mayor’s daughter. Naturally, she falls into a Shakespearean romance with her father’s enemy.

Their love story is meant to be the nucleus of Megalopolis, but there’s not much heat between Cesar and Julia, try though the actors do to generate some. Like the rest of the cast, they are not playing characters so much as concepts: ambition, treachery, hope, etc. Coppola’s dialogue is stiffly theatrical, freighted with import, peppered with quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Bard. (At one point, during a press conference conducted on suspended wooden walkways overlooking a construction site, Driver delivers the “To Be or Not To Be” monologue from Hamlet.) Coppola uses engraved title cards to echo and reiterate the narration by Laurence Fishburne, who plays Cesar’s loyal driver and the movie’s Greek chorus of sorts. In truth, everyone in the movie seems to be reading from a stone tablet.

The performances trend toward caricature, as if the actors were fighting not to be upstaged by their Caligula-cosplay wardrobes or the Atlas Shrugged scenery. Aubrey Plaza (Agatha All Along) vamps loudly as power-hungry reporter Wow Platinum; she starts as Cesar’s mistress, but eventually marries his filthy rich banker uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Meanwhile, Shia LaBeouf sweatily giggles and capers in the role of Cesar’s jealous, back-stabbing cousin, who becomes a rather Trumpian populist determined to weaponize the discontent of New Rome’s lower class. Coppola has made a publicist-vexing point of proclaiming that he deliberately hired “canceled” actors, though it’s worth considering how he’s cast most of them as villains. That said, a subplot about Cesar’s enemies trying to engineer a sex scandal to ruin him gels uncomfortably with the recent allegations against the director and his history of vigorously defending a convicted offender.

After decades in development, Megalopolis can’t help but mirror a whole lineage of past Coppola experiments: a little of The Godfather’s gangster melodrama, a little of the theatricality of One From the Heart, a whole lot of the utter lunacy of his late-career reinventions like Youth After Youth. Superficially, the movie it most resembles is Coppola’s ravishing adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, what with its hallucinatory superimpositions. Of course, that film was shot on glorious celluloid. Here, the digital cinematography gives too much of his bronze imagery the bright, flat appearance of a point-and-click computer game.

Still, there are sights to see in this strikingly phantasmagorical fable. If the human drama in Megalopolis is awkward, the film picks up considerably when Coppola is ditching reality for flamboyant dream logic. Statues sigh, spring briefly to life, and then collapse into the side of buildings. A giant hand reaches out from the clouds to grasp the moon. Cesar surveys his metropolitan fiefdom from far above the city, resting precariously on construction beams or canoodling on the surface of a giant clock. When Russian satellites begin falling from the sky, creating a hailstorm that mirrors the horror of 9/11, Coppola stages the panic as cowering silhouettes projected against the side of buildings by the glow of hellfire. This movie dazzles your eyes one minute, offends them with its chintziness the next.

A long mid-film stretch in Madison Square Garden, envisioned as a Colosseum with chariot races, jousting, and a virginal pop star who descends from the ceiling like a Super Bowl Halftime headliner, flirts with satire of the broad Southland Tales variety. But one should not expect too much trenchant topicality from a movie 40 years in the making. That endless gestation has estranged Megalopolis, for better or worse, from any era-specific critique of the American experiment.

It’s smarter to look to it for cult-courting insanity. This is a movie where Aubrey Plaza lays out her supervillain plan as Shia LaBeouf goes down on her, and where Jon Voight fires arrows at his scheming relatives while boasting an enormous erection. You’ve surely heard of the scene where Cesar breaks the fourth wall to answer a question asked live during the movie — a viewing gimmick probably not coming to a theater near you. What you haven’t heard is the way Driver says “club.” You could cherry-pick a dozen deranged moments from Megalopolis and make it sound like the height of crazed genius. But the film could honestly stand to be nuttier — and, believe it or not, longer. At 138 minutes, it practically sprints through its final stretch, condensing the conspiracy against Cesar into unsatisfying montage.

“We’re in need of a great debate about the future,” our hero eventually proclaims, summing up Coppola’s gushy thesis, his hope for a new age of solutions devised by the big thinkers of the world. For all its bizarre curveballs, this is a rather sentimental epic. The true Megalon turns out to be … love. (No, seriously.) Of course, it’s possible to be touched by Coppola’s optimism — his choice to make a film about the proverbial fall of Rome that says it’s not inevitable that Rome will fall — while still finding his portrait of utopia rather vague and flowery. Given all the years the director has been turning this project over in his head, you’d think he’d come to a more substantial conclusion than: “We can do it, somehow!” 

Dramatically and philosophically speaking, Megalopolis barely coheres. It seems unrealized even in its unlikely realization, still more of a glowing idea of a movie than the movie itself. But with Coppola, a neurotic tinkerer known for returning again and again to the grand stories of his past, no cut is ever definitively final. Perhaps he’ll keep searching for the truth of Megalopolis. Why shouldn’t a portrait of America as a perennial work in progress look like something of a work in progress itself?

Megalopolis is now playing in select theaters, including some IMAX screens. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.