Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia in Megalopolis.Lionsgate
Megalopolis
Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Shia LaBeouf
Classification 14A; 138 minutes
Opens in theatres Sept. 27
In a near-future city called New Rome, the architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is blessed with the sight of a god. Not only does the beloved urbanist possess a crystal-clear vision of how cities shape people and vice versa, a talent that has made him one of the most important figures in the Manhattan-esque burgh, but he can also seemingly control space and time, stopping reality at a whim. It is a gift that audiences of Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making new film might wish they had, too.
There are so many moments throughout the fantastical and overwhelming Megalopolis begging to be freeze-framed and pixel-by-pixel analyzed that it would take a thousand Cesar Catilinas hundreds of years to properly parse. Giant concrete statues come alive and collapse, as if briefly and tragically inhabited by the crushed spirits of Apollo and Bacchus. Skies rain down blood-red fire, the extinction-level destruction depicted with a morbid shadow play that feels both charmingly antiquated and terrifying. There is even one moment in which Coppola smashes the fourth wall like a Criterion Collection-swilling Kool-Aid Man, inviting moviegoer participation in a neo-vaudevillian attempt to shock audiences out of their senses.
This is audacious, rule-breaking filmmaking that absolutely no one who didn’t make The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and a dozen other touchstones could get away with today.
Yet even the deepest, most generous of studies into Megalopolis will fail to come to a conclusion all that different from the one experienced upon the very impression. Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.
The director’s first film in 13 years – after the maligned 2011 drama Twixt, which hasn’t quite gained the critical reappraisal that has become de rigueur for artists of the director’s stature – Megalopolis erects a big tent of ideas to form something of an homage to the Coppola canon. A heady blend of science fiction, Shakespearean drama, political thriller, and social farce, the film traces the backroom battle between two of New Rome’s would-be saviours.
In one corner is Cesar, who is destroying the decaying city block by blighted block in order to build a utopia built not with brick and mortar but Megalon, a mysterious substance he’s invented (or perhaps simply discovered), which bends reality around itself. Opposing such untested and perhaps dangerous progression is New Rome’s Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is clinging to tradition just as his daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) finds herself being pulled into Cesar’s forward-thinking orbit.
On the fringes of this tension are side characters so eccentrically sketched and named that they threaten to become flattened into 2D cartoons. There is Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a sex-pot television reporter who seduces the decades-older banking titan Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), uncle to Cesar and father to the Trumpian sociopath Clodio (Shia LaBeouf).
But that’s not all. There are copious Coppola relatives (nephew Jason Schwartzman as a mayoral aide, sister Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, granddaughter Romy Mars as a star-struck teen journalist), a grab-bag collection of Hollywood icons (Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne), never-given-their-proper-due character actors (James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, Balthazar Getty), and fresh faces (Chloe Fineman, Grace VanderWaal). The disparate group of performers mix together uneasily, though it is clear that Coppola delights in choreographing the friction between the old and the new, the idolized and the problematic. He knows, like everyone else in the industry and audience, that he will never get another chance to command such an army of talent.
Which makes the whole endeavour feel like that much more of a missed opportunity. Coppola allows his self-funded sense of autonomy to override any directorial discipline, letting the actors indulge their very worst instincts. Almost everyone here plays to the rafters with unrestrained goofiness. Only Driver, as disciplined as ever, and the meticulously controlled Esposito are able to rein themselves in. Playing opposing forces of the future, both actors add layers of empathy and complication to what might be stock embodiments of liberal and conservative ideologies.
There is also a decent case, though, to be made that Coppola knew exactly what he was doing by hiring, and then letting the leash off, LaBeouf. His bloodthirsty and incestuous tyrant Clodio might only come alive as a character during the film’s final half-hour, but for those late-game moments, the actor taps into his off-screen notoriety with a hundred-degree intensity that burns the screen to ash – the kind of raw work that has the tendency to poison personal lives, too. (What Coppola was thinking in enlisting Voight, who delivers his overstuffed dialogue with the vigour of a hospiced hound dog, is anyone’s guess.)
Once the film cycles through its various melodramas and big-question philosophizing, though, it becomes clear that Coppola has absolutely exhausted himself past the point of coherence. Which is of course admirable – there are few filmmakers willing to let themselves so blatantly bleed out onscreen, even if it becomes something of a chore to listen to every dying breath.
Through sheer force of will, Megalopolis will stand as a stubborn achievement of art, radical and unwavering. But it is not so sturdily constructed to avoid being chipped away over time. Which is of course the film’s own great joke on itself. Just as Cesar is so intently focused on demolishing the old to make way for the new, Francis Ford Coppola is destroying himself to make way for someone else to take on his uncompromising vision. We should all be glad he found a way to stop time, even if for one hell of a messy moment.