Bodrojan considers Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”

 If You Can’t Change the World

Sam Bodrojan considers Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”

By Sam BodrojanOctober 27, 2024

Film

YOU DON’T GET movies like Megalopolis every century. That was the gist of the coverage surrounding the production and release of 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s bizarre new epic. The film, which Coppola has been developing for over four decades, had its initial production disrupted by the September 11 attacks; the final cut features never-before-seen Ground Zero footage shot by the original crew. The reportedly $120 million dollar budget was entirely self-financed by Coppola, who sold a portion of his own vineyard with seemingly no expectation of recouping that cost. Lionsgate is putting the film in theaters, yet as part of that deal, Coppola has had to market it on his own dime. There are three decidedly “problematic” actors with prominent roles. A recent trailer falsely attributed AI-generated pull quotes to Pauline Kael. A lawsuit has been filed over a trade paper’s account of the working conditions on-set. All of this lead-up felt almost naively glamorous, like it should spin into frame on a newspaper headline.

That energy carries into the film proper. Describing fragments of Megalopolis makes it sound not only shocking but also hysterically, majestically so. The eponymous city looks like it was made using Softimage. The Cannes premiere made headlines for featuring a scene in which Adam Driver has a conversation with a live audience member. [1] There is a subplot featuring a desecrated Virgin Mary figure who is clearly meant to evoke Taylor Swift. Shia LaBeouf eats Aubrey Plaza’s ass quasi-incestuously while they plot the hostile takeover of a bank. Characters spontaneously recite Hamlet, quote Rousseau, lapse into spoken Latin; extras scream “Don’t tread on me!” Half the dialogue is ADR with no attempt to sync the new audio to the actors’ lips. There are chariot races and musical numbers and Russian satellites that become nuclear bombs. Treating the film itself like gossip fodder for the event of its mere existence does a disservice to the comparatively straightforward viewing experience; Coppola’s vision is one of simple, unrelentingly legible, and totalizing cohesion.

The basic premise runs as follows: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a wealthy architect with dreams of systemically rebuilding New York Rome as “Megalopolis,” powered by the impervious Megalon, an element with limitless applications and properties. He is at war over plans for the city with the pragmatic, corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who once wrongfully prosecuted him over the untimely death of Cesar’s first wife. [2] This all grows more complicated as Cesar becomes romantically entangled with the mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) after she witnesses him manipulating time at will. Meanwhile, Cesar’s scorned ex, a minxy reporter named Wow Platinum (Plaza), seduces his uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), the richest man in the world, whose cross-dressing Trumpian son (LaBeouf) courts a far-right mob in his campaign for alderman. This all progresses with an odd rhythm, with hyperactive montage and tonal instability distracting the viewer from the film’s lurching pace and penchant for narrative and thematic asides. It feels like a movie made by someone who has already seen it thousands of times, with subplots concluded in split-second cutaways while simple establishing shots are held for three times as long as conventional wisdom would dictate.

The dramatic machinations mostly serve to highlight Megalopolis’s most obvious (and least successful) goal: to serve as a neoliberal polemic. Basically, the narrative asserts not only that democracy will counteract fascism within the United States but also that the American dream can achieve a utopian actualization of collective brotherhood that may propel us into a better tomorrow. The message is pat, out of touch, and disappointingly literal. This is not helped by the many tangents on a variety of hot-button issues, from the housing crisis to cancel culture, which even the edit itself seems to be pushing off the screen. For a movie with such a lengthy gestation period—one that is ostensibly so focused on the future—its observations feel restrictively contemporary. [3]

There are attempts to offset this failing via incessant quotation. Cesar, and by extension Coppola, urges “debate” and asserts that one of mankind’s greatest virtues is the preservation and implementation of historical fact, thought, and art. This means characters often interrupt each other to drop tenuously related wisdom from Marcus Aurelius or the Founding Fathers. I am unconvinced that this is a rhetorically successful gambit and not a kind of intellectual nostalgia.

Similarly, as a visual spectacle, the cinematic grammar is decidedly old-fashioned. The film luxuriates in its iris shots, double exposures, and speed-ramped gestures. Green-screened performers awkwardly break the barriers of a three-way split-screen montage. Cameras swing from crane shots into Dutch angles against the backdrops of a soundstage. [4] Coppola seems enamored of the kind of idiosyncratic and playful wonder of early cinema, but nothing here produces the kind of awe the film’s lofty ambitions seem to demand. For as much as this movie feels wholly unique, there’s never really a moment that is without artistic precedent. None of the editing advances beyond what Sergei Eisenstein was doing 100 years ago; none of the visual tricks goes beyond what Fritz Lang and Orson Welles accomplished way back when. Even the design of Megalopolis itself is a relic of midcentury “futurism.” This supposedly one-of-a-kind experience turns out to be merely well-curated pastiche.

So if Megalopolis fails to become the thing it seemed destined to be—this groundbreaking and radical motion picture of endless invention and depth—then what does it wind up being? Furthermore, why has it consumed my every waking moment since I first viewed it?

The critical consensus, even among the film’s defenders, suggests that Megalopolis is “technically” a poorly made film, as if an appeal to common fashion could provide empirical evidence of the movie’s worthlessness. I promise that my respect for the film’s craft is not contrarian posturing. There is an obsessively honed intuition for all variety of dramatic and visual flourishes on display throughout, weaving together various traditions from a few thousand years’ worth of popular entertainment. The Shakespearean climax is a virtuosic bacchanalia, featuring a Golden Age musical number, wrestling, circus performers, and a family dinner disaster. It is a ridiculously fun movie with the enviable quality where, while watching it, it is constantly impossible to determine what happens next.

Beyond its delightful buzziness, this is just a solidly made picture. Even with the janky CGI, each shot evinces Coppola’s strong sense for blocking. It takes skill, even for someone of his generation, to direct in a dead visual dialect with such fluency. He has a real knack for negotiating the tonal instability of the piece, which moves from the broadly vulgar to the sincerely didactic. Yes, it’s weird that its characters speak in bygone idioms and clunky transliterations, but it is a rare treat to have a film demand that its audience adjust such a basic expectation, a demand rewarded by at least some of its performances.

For all the spectacle, Megalopolis’s ultimate fate falls at the feet of its actors and their ability to sell the audience on the project’s more obtuse aspects. Plaza plays her part with the verve of a pre-code vixen, an astonishingly sincere performance that could easily have felt ironic or uncommitted. Esposito seems at first to be typecast as unnervingly competent and composed before fear begins to consume his character in the latter half of the film, when even his most inconsequential lines of dialogue are infused with a hollow desperation. Driver, despite mostly forgoing the kind of maniacal flittering that made his turn in 2021’s Annette (perhaps Megalopolis’s only contemporary peer in terms of neurotic retro inspiration), is remarkable, proving once again that he is the strongest and most graceful screen actor of his generation. And Emmanuel … well, she manages to at least avoid sucking all the air out of the theater every time she opens her mouth.

Perhaps that’s not her fault. Much can be made of the film’s sexism, though it would probably be missing the point. The movie does not loathe women (really, it is ecstatically enamored with them), but rendered as archetypes in a fable, the female characters are noticeably empty vessels for the men’s ideas and passion. Julia’s arc, to the extent that she has one, is to cease quoting her father and mimic her husband instead. Wow Platinum’s desires for political power are merely a tool for strong-arming the affections of Cesar himself. The women in New Rome only exist as refractions of the passions and ideologies that spring from the men who love them.

That’s not to say there are really any characters in the movie, as opposed to ideological chess pieces. The effect is not allegorical, but, rather, the performances become images themselves, ones that collide with any postproduction gimmicks. Every scattered component of the film rings with deep auteurist significance. Megalopolis is surely a film about legacy, about the world we leave behind for our children, but even that interpretation is misleading. Whether he’s exploring the legacy of New York, of baby boomers, of New Hollywood, or of America itself, Coppola can only ever really conceptualize these things within the framework of one very specific legacy: his own. The director has lamented how his generation desecrated the viability of the film industry, but certain references also situate the film’s relationship to more recent events Coppola has lived through: the opening scene recalls the early-2020s suicides at Hudson Yards; Cesar’s ostensibly shattering speeches sound ripped from the Build Back Better campaign trail. The limitations and inclinations of Megalopolis align precisely with the real-world implications of Coppola’s own wish to do right by the present and future needs of his family, his mentees, his city, his nation, from his own detached, outré perspective. Every bit of the film is an extension of Coppola’s psyche, evident via not some feigned omniscience but the fact that the nature of the project is so earnestly, obviously self-obsessed.

A normal person might assume that this means Cesar is a mirror for Coppola himself. This is somewhat true; there is a (knowingly psychopathic) braggadocio with which Cesar accomplishes his Ayn Rand–adjacent ambitions for a better world, displacing hundreds of thousands of people in controlled demolitions carried out for city planning. He carries this out like a director on a set acting with a feverous determination to produce something that will outlive him. Only the director of The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979) would dare compare himself to a man like that.

The dimensions of the movie’s roundabout intimacy converge into view from all directions. Coppola family members appear constantly. When Cesar professes to Julia that he cannot stop time without her, that she is the force that inspires everything he does, it echoes what Coppola has long said of his late wife Eleanor, to whom Megalopolis is dedicated. Talia Shire, the director’s sister, plays Cesar’s disapproving mother. In the film’s best scene, Cesar instructs a group of children who are helping him design the city; as they climb on top of each other, forming a living sculpture, he orders: “Make interesting shapes!” Coppola conceptualizes the family at the core of the film as an iconic and powerful force for progress, in a way that only the patriarch of the greatest living Hollywood dynasty could.

Toward the end of the film, Cicero visits Cesar in a plea to leave his daughter and her unborn child in exchange for the government’s total support of Megalopolis and a signed document proving that Cicero framed Cesar for his wife’s death. At this moment, he reveals his first name: “Frank. Or Francis.” Yet this plot thread is dropped almost immediately, and Cesar, after being shot by a child hired by his cousin, regenerates himself via the power of Megalon, a material that not only saves his life but also offers a quasi-divine personal catharsis. He becomes a martyr, a champion, an idea, inseparable from the new city, no longer functioning as Coppola’s surrogate.

In one of the very last scenes, we watch as Cicero’s wife rides a moving walkway into Megalopolis. Francis Cicero, who has grown increasingly reliant on a cane over the course of the film, watches her go in a state of agony, reaching his hand out toward her. She beckons to him, and he steps forward, out of love and desperation, bucking all fear, into a beautiful future he cannot imagine. And thus, everything about the film falls into place. The hallucinatory collapse of time and genre, all the disparate threads, feels both inevitable and essential: this is a movie about a man desperate to find hope for a future that will not include him, one that he may not even understand.

Ultimately, I loved Megalopolis. Perhaps I am being seduced by the allure of late-style auteurism. Perhaps I am too close to my own grandfather to not find myself fascinated and moved by such a holistic realization of the male boomer worldview. Perhaps there is a part of my brain that wants to solve an unsolvable artifact. Regardless, Megalopolis is a rousingly personal summation of a generation’s ethos, by one of its Great Artists, with all the follies of judgment and artistic limitations one might expect. Maybe there will never be another movie like it, but in its place, there will still be interesting shapes.

¤

[1] The live portion, it turns out, is completely superfluous to the thrust of the scene. An off-screen voice, as will be used in the vast majority of screenings, accomplishes the same goal artistically. I appreciate the showmanship, though.

[2] Less than a day before this movie, which features an extremely heavy-handed Eric Adams analogue who is booed at every public appearance, opened across 1,500 screens nationwide, the mayor of New York City was indicted. Not to erroneously invoke the divine, but God’s timing is always right.

[3] I’ve seen several claims that Megalopolis shares a lot in common with Southland Tales (2006). In a way, this makes sense: there’s the full-throated campiness, the lurid photography. But Southland Tales, a movie I love, is at its core a Marxist ensemble piece about the dissociative quality of life at the center of the empire. Any pretenses Megalopolis has to similar qualities are merely superficial: Coppola’s film is less savvy, more out to sea, infinitely more personal.

[4] It is striking whenever the movie features a scene that was not filmed indoors in a warehouse somewhere. The dominance of manufactured skylines and artificial lighting makes the handful of scenes shot under the real sun all the more vivid. It is an odd, likely unintended, but memorable effect. I wonder to what extent was the lack of scenes shot on the city’s streets, for a film so identified with New York, due to financial and/or logistical necessity, and to what extent the city did not look as the director envisioned.

LARB Contributor

Sam Bodrojan is a writer based out of Chicago. She has written for Reverse Shot, Filmmaker Magazine, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.

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