For over half his life (which is quite a long time for an 85-year-old man), Francis Ford Coppola has carried the weight of an artistic obsession yearning for relief. The director has covered the gamut of successes and failures over six decades of filmmaking, carrying the accreditation of some of film history’s most revered products. Yet, even a man who birthed The Godfather (1972) was inflicted with the burden of an unrealized vision until recently.
In the coda to a prolific and chameleonic career, Megalopolis’ existence is a near miracle. Creative conflict, on-set controversy, and multiple public relations crises made distribution deals and marketing appeal an uphill battle. After self-financing the $120 million project with little realistic ambition of recouping the production and/or advertising costs, seeing the passion-project-title on the showtimes list for your local theater is an unequivocal win at a time when the proliferation of risk-averse existing IP storytelling and straight to streaming are popular forms of entertainment consumption.
For better and worse, Megalopolis is a polar juxtaposition to today’s norm in every conceivable variable, the complete brainchild of a brazen auteur leaving it all on the screen without studio interference or regard for cinematic conventions–a refreshing but flawed approach unlikely to be repeated ever again.
The film opens directly inside the conflict between a visionary and socially obtuse architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), and a power-hungry but politically declining mayor, Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The story (if one can be extracted) follows their competing visions for the future of New Rome, introducing themes of art vs. administration, hierarchies of power in a failing society, and cancel culture amongst the elite social class. These are amongst a vast flurry of thematic pursuits that enter and leave the frame with frustrating negligence, as the script experiments with one subplot before arbitrarily leaving it behind for the next.
A journalist named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) broadcasts the events before revealing her own self-serving agenda of financial greed, wooden romantic pursuits (incestuous and otherwise) do little to inform any sense of narrative thrust, and a satellite crash lands on the digitally enhanced semi-fictional realm of New Rome to little of no consequence. These sporadic touchpoints only begin to unravel the sprawling collage of moving parts that assemble as a fever dream of post-blunt rotation eurekas that has visibly tortured its auteur’s headspace through the better part of the last century.
Coppola’s long tenure in Hollywood has transcended the whims of an ever-evolving film industry constantly undeterred by industry constraints, shifting trends, or his own timeline of mortality. Now at an age where he is more than willing to fly in the face of the court of public opinion, Megalopolis is his greatest playground to date, the manifestation of his steadfast resolve to finally realize a film that failed to find the public many times in the past but draws on his earliest work from a time in the 80s where complete creative control was more willingly accepted in Hollywood.
As the final product unspools on screen, however, it’s hard to shake the sense that what we’re witnessing is less a proclamation for the future as its protagonist claims and more a saga of self-portraiture reflecting on the past of its director–Coppola’s cinematic legacy, his familial idiosyncrasies, and a restless mind trapped in a loop of unfinished ideas.
Driver’s Cesar is hardly a mirage in terms of his image as a stand-in for Coppola himself. This is, after all, a project the director has nurtured in his soul (and tortured by in his head) for decades, and there’s something both earnest and admirable about an artist of his stature using the immense assets and resources available to him (thanks to the partial sale of his winery business) to chase a dream on such a grand scale. Cesar moves through the story in a knowingly cartoonish blend of superhero and supervillain with the capacity to halt time, a power that does shockingly little to impact the narrative itself but rather exists to negotiate Coppola’s grappling ego with his fleeting mortality.
Cesar has affairs (both tangible and deepfaked); he longs for his late wife who passed away in vague circumstances with Cesar’s own involvement of foul play in question; he muses on the potential of a utopia built out of his experimental Megalon material that does whatever is convenient for plot; he quotes a survey of liturgical and historical landmarks; and he envisions a gold-speckled glowing organism of shelter for a society beyond the boundaries of sociopolitical strife. In short, he does, says, and thinks about a lot. How these wanderings are narratively related is usually unclear, but what remains consistent is Driver’s commitment to the clumsy absurdity of his universe. Unfortunately, that commitment isn’t enough to salvage the film from its own worst impulses, and the supporting cast around him are so tonally disparate that they aren’t on separate wavelengths, they are in separate solar systems.
Megalopolis is a cinematic oddity that dares to reach for greatness, occasionally brushing up against it, only to be dragged down by the very volatility in which it was birthed. For every transcendent theme—ideas such as the power of belief to maintain the structural integrity of society—there are multiple instances where basic screenwriting conventions are cast aside in favor of a chaotic, indulgent collage of overlapping storylines.
For every scene that dazzles with its visual audacity—images such as a crumbling animated statue of Justice imagining the fall of law and order as Cesar (Coppola) sees it—there are structural weaknesses that amateurize its message.
Much has been made about Coppola’s decision to self-finance the film outside the studio system, yet the lack of a guiding hand—be it a producer or an outside creative voice—becomes glaringly obvious as the film spirals out of control toward its boner to bow and arrow climax. There are moments of profound ideological beauty, but the connective tissue that should hold the film together is altogether absent.
In many ways, this film is a testament to Coppola’s belief that he alone can craft the ultimate cinematic experience, a project encompassing technique and innovation, agnostic to genre frameworks and impervious to storytelling conventions. But ambition without constraint can be dangerous, something that asterisks both the external production of the film and the internal architectural vision of its future.
The film ultimately feels like a compromised version of an impossible dream, an attempt to visualize a broad, ever-evolving sociopoltical condition into the constrained framework of a feature film. And yet, despite its incapability to contain its ideas, there’s an undeniable allure to its attempt at trying.
Megalopolis invites debate of its dauntless vision of a broken society from the perspective of its elite. It’s rare to encounter a work of such wide-ranging intentions, and while it may ultimately fail by the benchmarks of conventional success, it succeeds as a testament to the craving for original and audacious storytelling. Coppola may have burned his bank account in the pursuit of this dream, but in a world increasingly dominated by safe, formulaic filmmaking, there’s something undeniably admirable about that kind of risk.
It will not land box office glory or critical consensus, but it will undoubtedly linger in the cultural consciousness and generate conversations worth having at a moment when the industry is saturated by hapless products of the studio conveyor belt crying for an ounce of experimentation present here. It’s a film at war with itself: stratospheric in ambition, sublime in thematic reach, yet thwarted by basic narrative incoherence. Perhaps, like many of Coppola’s films, it will be reevaluated decades from now, its flaws recontextualized as prescient explorations of art and society. But for now, it stands as a deeply flawed, deeply personal endeavor that, at the very least, sets forth with unyielding earnestness about the self-satisfying sincerity of its thesis.
Megalopolis ponders whether a civilization requires its citizens to believe in it for it to exist. But as an act of self-portraiture, it also turns the question on its creator. If a film plays in an empty theater, does it exist? This film may be a mess, but it’s a beautiful, fascinating mess that verifies its existence in its unwillingness to sway from its self-serious conviction that it does exist, and it does matter, as long as its artists continue to believe.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Courtesy of Lionsgate