Megalopolis (2024)
The long production hell-bound passion project of veteran director Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to very mixed reactions earlier this year and has now finally gotten its theatrical release. Here in Germany, at least.
According to early reviews I expected this to be more or less Ayn Rand's Fountainhead by way of Southland Tales. Which I was catiously excited for, I love me some Southland Tales, I won't hesitate for a second to say that I consider it one of the best movies of the 00's. And there was definitely some of that. What it really felt like, most of the time though, was more off brand Shakespeare by the way of French Magical Realism. A lot of this felt hilariously close to that 90's Baz Luhrman Romeo x Juliet movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
So, Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina. Cesar is a visionary inventor and architect in New Rome, as the name implies an anachronistic amalgamation of New York City and Ancient Rome. As corruption and decadence fester in the city, he is developing a bold vision for the future based on rebuilding the city using a magical material called Megalon which puts him at odds with conservative mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) whose daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with him while Cesar's cousin Claudio (an impish, crossdressing Shia LeBouf) and his ex lover, a media personality who goes by the hilarious stage name Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, vamping it up) plot against him.
The funny thing about Megalopolis is, you can see how the screenplay probably started off as a drama loosely adapting the Catilinarian Conspiracy to contemporary New York (or what passed as such back in the 70's when Coppola began writing it) and then, over the years, accumulated layers upon layers of other stuff the director wanted to to do with it until, once he actually had an opportunity to film it, it ended up as a movie that's pretty much about everything and nothing.
So, what's in Megalopolis? Hallucinatory images. People quoting Shakespeare, a lot. Satire on 9/11. Adam Driver stopping time. Frutiger Aero style futuristic architecture. Dick jokes. Monologues. Satire on the Trump administration. People randomly speaking latin. Metaphors being depicted in the most literal ways imaginable and people then explaining the metaphors out loud. Musical numbers. Implied incest. More monologues.
What it all ended up as is a series of very impressive visual setpieces that the plot is buried under, somewhere. Matter of fact, the movie feels like it's actively rushing through many of its plot beats (pieces of a satellite crashing into the city, sexual assault allegations against Cesar), that feel like they should be significant, basically resolving them right after they come up, just to find more time for its eccentric, elaborately choreographed surreal digressions.
What this means is, that this movie is far and away at its best when it leaves behind any pretensions of following a narrative entirely and descends into pure trippy, formalist music video montage mode. And when it does, which it does at long stretches at a time, it does get very lively and fun. Coppola clearly had no shortage of fun visual ideas that are sprinkled all the way throughout the movie, and densely accumulated at an extended circus (and yes, of course "circus" here refers to the Roman meaning of the word) sequence towards the middle. Please don't take this line out of context, but Megalopolis made me think of Citizen Kane in how almost every single scene is trying to do something visually interesting.
I won't say Megalopolis ever comes together as a great movie but it definitely stands head and shoulders above mediocrity and I think everyone claiming otherwise is being disingenuous. The material is messy but Coppola still directed the hell out of it. A lot of it is actually funny, some of it perhaps not intentionally but a lot of it certainly is. The actors all have the appropriate amount of deadpan or over the top exaggeration that their respective roles require. Adam Driver plays the whole genius eccentric shtick just right and Aubrey Plaza, as one of the few actual specialized comedic actors in this, delivers a hilarious take on that scheming shakesperean villainess archetype.
What Megalopolis just lacks is an actual well thought out message that sticks. It has a lot of rambling about society and empires and humanity and civilization and The Future and utopianism and corruption and art and love and whathaveyou but it never really has much more to say than "love each other and put your faith in bright young people with bold ideas." Which is fair enough, I guess, but for a movie this pompous and verbose it does feel rather simplistic. In one of the movies many monologues, the protagonist proclaims that "Building a utopia is not about providing answers, but asking the right questions." which, at this point, feels a bit like a punchline. Asking questions and leaving them standing seems to be all anyone's doing these days.
All things considered, I do think its heart is in the right place and if nothing else I had a lot of fun watching it. Make no mistake, that extra half star (... if you're reading this on Letterboxd) is mostly out of respect for actually finishing a project almost 50 years in the making. But aside from that I feel like a lot of the backlash against the movie is unwarranted. Yes, it's a vanity project directed by a 85 year old man who's somewhat out of touch with modern culture but it's fun, it's bold, it's full of creative and dynamic direction and it's nothing if not earnest. Compared to something like Civil War, which is about as pretentious and dishonest as this movie is accused of being, it feels like the real deal. It is more of a high camp variety show of colourful and surreal segments than it is the shakesperean urban drama that perhaps it was intended to be at one point but it's still one of the most vibrant and ambitious releases of the year. It deserves some good will.
