I finally watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and found it an engrossing train wreck. In many ways it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but this cinematic insanity is just too singular and bizarre for me to write it off.
I felt well prepared for this movie after the reviews of Coppola’s self-financed passion project. A few kinder ones praised its boldness and ambition, while the majority declared Megalopolis a pretentious, dull and unwatchable abomination. Perversely, rather than putting me off as poor reviews usually do, this time they got me intrigued, and after seeing the movie I feel like I can agree with every review all at once. It’s a fascinating failure, both rushed and bloated, full of baffling choices and grand ideas clumsily executed, yet I was weirdly captivated by it, even through its more tedious stretches.
Adam Driver, who at this point needs a better agent and better film picks, seems to have made a hobby of appearing in ageing directors’ long-gestating passion projects that ultimately fail to make a splash either artistically or commercially. Here he stars as Cesar Catalina, a brilliant architect with a host of personal demons, who dreams of transforming New York City, rebranded here as New Rome. In case you didn’t notice that Coppola is drawing comparisons between the decaying Roman Empire and the modern-day United States, there are ancient Roman names, fashions and some very unfortunate haircuts sprinkled in, Cesar’s ridiculous cut being the worst offender.
Cesar, who for whatever reason has a Neo-like ability to stop time, is the inventor of Megalon, a groundbreaking building material that’s both malleable and strong. He dreams of building Megalopolis, a utopian city that would grow and evolve along with its inhabitants, but he’s met with fierce opposition from the city mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who detests Cesar’s arrogance and dismisses his plans as pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Their battle of wills is further complicated when Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Cesar. Also in the mix are Cesar’s filthy rich banker uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), his hedonistic son Clodio (Shia La Beouf) with ambitions of his own, and a trashy TV reporter named, umm, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). There’s also Laurence Fishburne as Cesar’s loyal driver and provider of ponderous narration, and Dustin Hoffman in a pointless cameo.
It’s hard to convey just how much Megalopolis fails on the basic story level. I watched in disbelief as its various plot strands either dragged on interminably, or zipped past while amounting to stuff all. There’s an explosion of ideas about the fate of empires, societal structures, art and creation, family bond and betrayal, but the problem with explosion is that it can leave a giant mess. Maybe there was little hope of anything coherent emerging from an overcooked script that was revised and rewritten and added to for about four decades. Then there’s the dialogue… oh my. I am not necessarily against the dialogue that sounds artificial or heavily stylised, but Megalopolis just never hits the right balance, veering from pompous recitals of Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius to howlingly bad lines that I’m sure will live on social media for all the wrong reasons.
Visually, I did enjoy the film’s arresting blend of Art Deco and futurism, and some of its costumes, sets and sequences are genuinely impressive, breathtaking even. During Cesar’s night drive through the streets of New Rome, giant statues come to life and slump over in exhaustion, a heavy-handed metaphor for the collapsing society maybe but definitely memorable. Other times, Megalopolis looks like a cheap sci-fi show from the 90s, shockingly amateurish and flat. The constant swing from sublime to ugly and back again made my head spin at times.
On acting front, pretty much everyone here has their bad and embarrassing moments, but some pull through better than others. Adam Driver, bless him, has never given a performance that wasn’t 100% committed. No actor in the universe could have held this movie together, but he gives it all, lending Cesar his familiar blend of haughty and neurotic, and refreshingly finding humour in the role. Aubrey Plaza and Shia La Beouf as cross-dressing, maybe-incestuous Clodio are likewise having fun with their preposterous characters. Giancarlo Esposito and Nathalie Emmanuel give more earnest and straightforward performances as Cicero and Julia, and there are times when the father-daughter relationship actually approaches something resembling emotional weight. Other times, they feel like they belong in a different movie altogether.
There’s every reason to see Megalopolis as confused, preachy, self-important, self-serving ramblings from a director long past his prime. To my surprise, as the movie neared its conclusion, I realised that I grew strangely fond of it, and was glad that Coppola managed to get his personal project off the ground after all. I’m now genuinely sorry that I didn’t get to see this big hot mega-mess on the big screen.
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