Matthew Goldenberg's 'Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: A Fable': A Review

Does Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating passion project live up to the hype?

Francis Ford Coppola has been working on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable for almost as long as I’ve been alive; I cannot remember a time when I knew who Coppola was and I didn’t know about his passion project. That Coppola, who is now 85 years old, has finally realized his vision - and done so at great personal cost - is inspiring. He is, of course, one of the all-time greats; The Godfather is arguably the best narrative film in the medium’s history to date, and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now are all nearly as good. So in discussing Megalopolis, I’d like to be respectful and tread lightly.

I think Megalopolis is a bad movie.

I came to this conclusion by admitting to myself that if it was not the dream project of such an iconic filmmaker, I wouldn’t feel the need to treat it kindly. It feels like an optimistic young hippie who recently took his first college philosophy course has made a movie under the influence of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, and Neil Breen.

Put another way: to praise Megalopolis is to respond to the hype and ONLY the hype surrounding the film, and not the film itself.

How to even sum up the plot of the movie? Very loosely inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 B.C., Megalopolis is set in “the third millennium of the 21st century” in a city that appears to be New York but is called New Rome. There, we meet Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an… architect? Engineer? City planner? Scientist? Wizard? It’s never really clear. Whatever his profession, Cesar has created (discovered?) a new miracle metal, adamantium vibranium unobtanium megalop (I may be misspelling that), which can be used to construct not just buildings, but to help heal the critically injured and to create moving sidewalks like the ones at airport but not, I guess?

Cesar dreams of using megalop to build a utopia, Megalopolis, but his aspirations are opposed by a cadre of antagonistic forces, including Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a former D.A. who once prosecuted Cesar for the alleged murder of his wife; an envious cousin, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who is kinda like Donald Trump by way of Marilyn Manson, and is rumored to be sleeping with his own sisters (including Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman); and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a performative journalist (think Megyn Kelly turned up to 11) who is in love with Cesar but marries his rich uncle (Jon Voight) because Cesar won’t commit to her. Complicating matters is that Cesar, an inveterate womanizer, begins a love affair with Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel).

Also, Cesar somehow has the ability to stop time, although he doesn’t understand how does it, and only Julia is capable of seeing it happen for reasons unbeknownst to either of them.

It’s hard to criticize Megalopolis effectively without contradicting myself: I feel like I understand precisely what Coppola thought he was doing, but also, I have no fucking clue what Coppola thought he was doing. Or, rather, I get what he’s saying, but I don’t get why he thought this was the most effective way to say it.

For all of Coppola’s ruminations on breaking new ground in the medium of cinema and the need for audiences to experience his movie on IMAX, Megalopolis often seems remarkably like a play, with people just kinda standing around and talking (in fact, there’s a scene early on where Cesar recites the entire “To be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet in front a room full of people, and it’s not super-clear if they know he’s reciting a monologue or Shakespeare doesn’t exist in this reality and these are meant to be Cesar’s own words); the characters are mostly one-dimensional and the performances are as broad as Apocalypse Now Redux is long; although characters sometimes engage in subterfuge, the dialogue is free of subtext, and, as in a Shakespeare play, often goes so far as to narrate aloud the action we’re watching; some of the special effects feel deliberately-stagey, too, like a less-lush Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the CGI, which I believe was intended to appear photorealistic, often looks cheap and dated; there’s even a much-ballyhooed sequence involving a live actor in the audience (more on that later). Megalopolis feels more like one of the theater director Ivo Van Hove’s mixed-media productions (Network, West Side Story, etc.) than a cinematic breakthrough.

Come to think of it, wasn’t William Castle doing this shit like 60 years ago? And is it really all that different than 4DX productions, where the chairs shake and the audience gets spritzed with water and there’s Smell-O-Vision or whatever?

That’s how I felt during that scene with the live actor: like I was experiencing a subpar gimmick. The entire thing lasts about 20 seconds, during a press conference scene; you never see the face of the actor; and his dialogue is part of the film’s sound, so all he needs to do is gesticulate as though he were saying the lines. Then Cesar “looks at him” and says something and he walks off. That’s the whole bit. Not that I’m anti-union, but if the poor schmuck who has to do this is a trained performer and not just one of the theater’s usher getting a little bonus scratch, it could only be because of union regulations. No rehearsal would be required to carry out the scene; what the performer has to do barely qualifies as acting.

None of these deficits would be so bothersome if Megalopolis were engaging narratively or intellectually. It’s not that I disagree with Coppola’s philosophy or idealism… but the way he expresses it is so uninteresting. He never gives the audience 2 + 2 and allows them to solve for four; he tells us 2 + 2 = 4, and then he tells us again, and again, and again… it’s didactic and trite and it gets old pretty fast. There are a handful of striking images to remind you this is the same guy who made The Godfather, but the movie is frequently stagey and uncinematic, all tight close-ups of people saying exactly what they are thinking or feeling in that moment.

Similarly, the film’s political sentiments, though outwardly progressive, are often authentically regressive; specifically, the narrative reduces women to doting muses and manipulative whores and not much in-between. It’s honeslty not the best look coming from a director who allegedly made unwanted advances towards some of his female cast members.

Megalopolis isn’t even narratively daring - there’s no playing with structure or form here. It’s just, like, 138 minutes of Adam Driver telling you that the world could be a better place over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Truthfully, I don’t even really understand Cesar as a character, or how it comes to be that the central conflict is resolved at the end. Megalopolis finally just kind of sputters to an conclusion on an unearned triumphant note (imagine if, say, George Lucas cut the destruction of the Death Star sequence from Star Wars, but kept the final celebratory scene where everyone gets medals for their heroism - that’s how the end of Megalopolis feels).

Driver and the rest of the cast struggle bravely to bring some life to this thing, but Coppola hasn’t given them material worthy of their immense talents. Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s nephew), and Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister and Schwartzman’s mother) all show up for small and thankless roles. The stand-outs are LaBeouf, who goes full Nicolas Cage in his pursuit of consuming the scenery, and Plaza, whose trademark archness serves the over-the-top tone well. The best scenes with Driver and Emmanuel are the few intimate, naturalistic moments they’re allowed together; they’re Brando in Leigh in Streetcar, only trapped in a less-than-stellar production of Waiting for Godot.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, “Hey, this sounds like one of those movies that’s so bad it’s good!”, it is and it isn’t. The audience with which I saw the picture did guffaw in places they clearly weren’t meant to, but those guffaws were too few and far between to truly qualify Megalopolis as a cult classic.

As I said earlier: I get what Coppola is saying, but don’t know why he thought this was the most effective way to say it. Why did he have SUCH a burning desire to convey cookie fortune wisdom in a broad tone situated amongst undergraduate-level semiotics? How is it possible for a genius to work on something for 40+ years and come up with this? I am earnestly baffled.

Look. I would love to be wrong about Megalopolis. No, really! I would like to look back at this review in a few decades and feel as foolish as the critics who initially panned Apocalypse Now must feel. But right now, that feels about as likely as a grand critical reassessment of The Room. You are tearing me apart, Francis!