Megalopolis is the career-culminating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola, a director whose over 50 years of filmmaking have set his name in stone. This time—more than 13 years since his previously, mostly self-financed ghost story Twixt—he borrowed the full $120 million budget for Megalopolis against the 25 percent stake he owns in the fifth largest wine company in the world, which he acquired by merging one of three wineries he owns with another major winery when apparently he couldn’t find anyone in his voluminous and storied family who wanted to run it.
In other words, Coppola’s risks are not those of a struggling artist. He’s isolated both by his wealth and his fame; he’s a world-renowned filmmaker who has already bankrupted himself for art once before, who is deeply familiar with the loud whoosh of critics and the public alike throwing up their hands, who has suffered and exorcized unimaginable personal pain in his relentlessly personal films, but whose optimism still seems a privilege. Here is an 85-year-old icon, legacy already a foregone conclusion, coming to terms with what he will actually leave behind. And he’s brought popular canceled guys Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, and Dustin Hoffman along for the ride. One almost wonders if Kevin Spacey was too busy.
Undoubtedly, Coppola is out of touch, which makes Megalopolis as annoyingly naive as it is refreshingly positive about the fate of our species.
Set in the alternate history of New Rome—vaguely adorned with the aesthetic of a kind of modern-ancient Rome—revered architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver, who, for better or for worse, is so locked in with Coppola you actually believe the painful koans coming out of his mouth) has begun to experiment with bending time and space to his will. He’s discovered a new material he calls Megalon, a kind of indestructible organic goop that seems to be the soul of his dead wife manifest and also maybe nanobots.
Coppola, who wrote the film, offers no salient sense for what Megalon is or how it works, just that Cesar spends long hours using it to “design” various thingamajigs that will eventually be part of the utopia of Megalopolis.
Labeled a “fable,” Megalopolis is pretty open-hearted in its intent and unconcerned with the mechanics of its fantasy. It’s about understanding the power of love (I guess), harnessed through the act of creation (I suppose), as the only way to galvanize humanity and avoid the end of civilization (yes, OK). What it is not about is how exactly we’re supposed to do that when we don’t have a 25 percent stake in the fifth largest winery in the world to use as collateral.
An archetypal Randian genius of impenetrable self-confidence, Cesar believes that Megalon is the key to rebuilding New Rome, a falling empire that Coppola overtly compares to America in more than one of Lawrence Fishburne’s gravitas-laced voice overs. Cesar’s foil is Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), mayor of New Rome and ardent supporter of the status quo, who believes Cesar’s ideas to be dangerous and Megalon unproven.
Meanwhile, Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), can’t help but become Cesar’s lover when she witnesses Megalon in action. Emmanuel is radiant, but hampered by Coppola’s inability to write a woman character who isn’t some great muse or greater impediment to the greatness of men.
Accordingly, a cornucopia of character actors limn every lavish inch of the production, either lining up to side with Cesar’s ambitions or to get down and start wiggling along to the empire’s death throes, like Shia LaBeoufplaying Cesar’s sleazy cousin and aspiring politician (potentially the most LaBeoufian role Shia has ever had).
We have Aubrey Plaza as desperately psychopathic femme fatale Wow Platinum (my god, these names!); Jon Voight as Joe-Biden-like magnate (and Cesar’s uncle) Hamilton Crassus III; Dustin Hoffman as mumbling lackey Nush Berman, and D.B. Sweeney, the beleaguered face you remember from your childhood, as Police Commissioner Stanley Hart! And of course, Coppola must have his family on hand, which means sister Talia Shire as a quixotic mother and nephew Jason Schwartzman as a quixotic drummer, as well as son Roman Coppola as second-unit director. Truly, the night sky is empty because the stars are all here!
And what of this night sky? Gold and molten, endlessly lovely stretched out behind Adam Driver’s meanest of mugging. What gobsmacking dreamstuff to behold! A scene in New Rome’s coliseum—a chariot race that transforms into an auction to support the virginity of a young pop star (Grace Vanderwaal)—steams with an intensity that’s meant for the IMAX screen. In fact, everything about Megalopolis is steaming.
Every interaction in New Rome is one leap from nonsense, and every image pitched between unmitigated symbol and literal explanation.
This isn’t Dune; Coppola will explain his film. In fact, he wants to hold your hand gingerly through this world. When a vision of a deific hand grasping the moon emerges from the film’s narrative, Mayor Cicero wakes from a nightmare to reassure the audience that this was his dream, describing verbatim the image we just saw. If Coppola believes we must have a great debate about the future, then Cesar will declare, “We must have a great debate about our future!,” even though there is maybe only one actual debate in this movie. This is the silly, obvious, and spectacular creation we get from a man wielding all the freedom afforded him.
It’s more than impressive. It’s infectious. And occasionally, often enough, it comes together as a singular visual spectacle that is both the culmination of everything Coppola’s learned up until this point, and something altogether unmoored from expectations.
It’s hard not to imagine that another version of Megalopolis will surface not too long from now, because Coppola can’t help but revise every movie he makes, can’t help but revise himself. His filmography is its own long debate about which versions are better.
It’s hard not to go into this film knowing the full weight of its context: that this has been in the making for four decades at least, that it’s such a strange anomaly that this film is here—an expression of a master maker’s unfiltered spirit splayed out honestly in the twilight of his career—and that it involves seeing Shia LaBeouf’s pubic hair on a massive screen.
Coppola has said that Megalopolis has rejuvenated his hunger to make more movies, and that something so dumb and luminous would make Coppola say that is a blessing. Because when Megalopolis is truly singing, it gestures at the passion and poetry that come from an artist with nothing left to prove.
Megalopolis opens in wide release Thurs Sept 26.
