The Madness of 'Megalopolis' | Review

Francis Ford Coppola flew too close to the sun

This will only be technically half of a review as I, of my own accord, left halfway through Francis Ford Coppola’s latest movie, Megalopolis.

For context, the last time I left a movie theater while the picture was still playing was when my aunt and uncle took me to watch Ron Howard’s The Grinch. That was December 2000, and I was approaching the age of four. In that case, I didn’t “leave” the theater so much as I screamed bloody murder and ran down the aisle when Jim Carrey’s green-furred creature first showed us his devilish grin. If only it were socially acceptable for me to do that as a twenty-seven-year-old.

Despite my own hype over possibly the most expensive independent movie ever made, Megalopolis is philosophical psychobabble masquerading as a movie, a tome of anecdotes and thoughts but no singular idea. It is a beautiful piece of art but an incomprehensible, baffling moviegoing experience.

A sci-fi Roman epic set in twenty-first-century America, Megalopolis tells the story of an idealist architect, Cesar Catilina (the ever-reliable Adam Driver), who is hell-bent on rebuilding the decaying city of New Rome as a sustainable utopia using Megalon. This magical material allows him to control space and time because… reasons?

Standing in his way is the city’s regressive mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who, at another time, attempted to incarcerate Cesar for the murder of his wife. Tension! Between the two men stands Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cicero’s daughter, who must choose between family and love.

On the edges of this political and philosophical tug-of-war is Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), who attempts to leverage the people’s anger against Cicero and Cesar to gain political power. Then, there’s Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a shock jock-style newscaster lusting for Catalina who works her way into the higher Escalon of New Rome by marrying Cesar’s uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight).

Did you track all that? No? That’s alright, cause neither can the movie.

Opting for brazenness over subtlety, Coppola beats the movie’s themes over your head in obnoxious fashion from the beginning, in which Laurence Fishburne warns of the similarities between the American republic and early Rome in an laughably bad narration over an image of the monologue’s words etched into the walls of Grand Central Station. It was really right then and there that I knew this was going to be rough.

In the seventy minutes I was able to stomach, the obvious allegory was played out in the most obvious of ways. New York City, with the Chrysler Building serving as Catalina’s headquarters, becomes New Rome. Clever! And Madison Square Garden still exists, but its famous basketball floor is now a gladiatorial arena. Cool? Yes, but still about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face.

The writer-director-producer is correct to warn about the parallels between America and Rome, but his conclusions are half-baked at best. Yes, politicians like Cicero and populists like Clodio scheme for themselves first and the people second. Yes, American politics has seen a dramatic uptick in populism over the past decade. Yes, we have a presidential election this year. However, it is not new. These tensions are as old as the Untied States. In one interview, Coppola said that we’re in the worst historical moment for the United States since the War of 1812. I guess he forgot what happened fifty years later.

In the title card, Coppola brands Megalopolis “a fable.” This might be the only act of modesty in a $120 million epic in which, essentially, the Old Master yells at the clouds. As a thought experiment, it’s provocative. As a movie, it’s incomprehensible. Having recently watched Apocalypse Now at my local Alamo Drafthouse on the biggest screen available, it’s baffling to me that the same man who had the greatest four-film run in movie history could make such an irredeemable slog.

Entire sections of the film, including a fifteen minute extended sequence in Madison Square Garden, are effectively self-contained episodes that hold no baring on the rest of the plot. The chunky dialogue elicited so many laughs from my Georgetown screening you would have thought it was a comedy. Pacing be damned! Plot? Who needs it! The bluntness in which the exposition was conveyed shocked even me and the human characters felt like their personalities were themselves carved from stone. I cared about none of them and, frankly, it seems like Coppola didn’t either. They were merely vessels for a freshman-level political philosophy course. The legendary director wanted to make his own version of Plato’s Republic, where ideas were debated and the good, the beautiful, and the true were pursued. What we got felt like the auteur equivalent of Battlefield Earth.

No actor—except for maybe the ever-reliable Adam Driver—escapes this movie unscathed. Even worse, none of them seem to be in the same movie. Nathalie Emmanuel turns in the most remarkably one-dimensional performance I may ever see. It’s almost miraculous how lifeless she is. Laurence Fishburne, mostly relegated to offer laborious narration, offers up the emotional range of Siri. On the other hand, Shia LaBeouf prances from one ridiculous costume to the next, often laughing through manic tears as if he’s about to be eliminated from RuPaul’s Drag Race, while Aubrey Plaza acts more like April Ludgate’s fake persona Janet Snakehole from the sitcom Parks and Recreation than she does an actual person. Putting any combination of actors together feels like an exercise in (dis)organized chaos, the result of a troubled production where Coppola encouraged his cast to improvise extensively on set. It felt like I was watching the world’s most expensive community theater production.

Nothing in the seventy minutes I watched gelled. Francis, who has had a long history with troubled film productions, just couldn’t bring all of his ideas together in a cohesive way. The actors never seem to be on the same page, the world building doesn’t demand the biggest of theatrical experiences, and the story struggles to hold its lofty ideals up.

Now, there are some good things about the movie, chief among them being the production design and cinematography. While an utter disaster on almost every level, this movie is a wonder to look at. And, as a visual filmmaker, Coopola directs with an energy reminiscent of George Miller in Mad Max: Fury Road. Often avant guard, it pushes the boundaries of anything he’s done before. It’s just a damn shame the story he’s telling can’t meet the moment.

There’s a world in which I return to this movie again out of nothing more than morbid curiosity—but I’d be alone on that front. Initial box office tracking for Megalopolis is anemic, with the most liberal estimates suggesting it could make $5 million on opening weekend. I wish I could say I feel bad, but I don’t. The man has five Academy Awards, owns one of the largest wineries in the world, and made The Godfather. He’ll be fine.

In a few different interviews, including at last night’s live Q&A with Robert De Niro and Spike Lee at the New York Film Festival, Coppola has claimed that he cannot see a fully formed movie in his head at first. “I’m not like Steve [Spielberg],” he claims. He has to write and re-write and write some more before he can see it in his mind. If only the Old Master rewrote Megalopolis a few more times.

Between this and the Cincinnati Bengals starting the season 0-3, I’m pissed.

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“Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable” opens nationwide this Friday. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence.

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