Megalopolis is a film 40 years in the making. Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now) has been trying to get this film off the ground for decades, eventually using $120 million of his own money to get it made after no studios wanted to finance it.
It premiered at Cannes in the summer, where it divided critics and struggled to find a distribution deal to get it into cinemas. Even after it found distribution, the press surrounding the film has been a mess. To say that it’s been getting mixed reviews would be generous, and behind-the-scenes issues were the most publicised aspect of the film. Add in a cheeky AI marketing controversy, and you’re all set for one of the most disastrously promoted films in recent years.
Set in a present-day New York/Ancient Rome hybrid, imaginatively named New Rome, we follow Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the Chairman of the Design Authority, as he seeks to change the city through his architectural powers. He creates his vision of Megalopolis, a grand new city, with a mythic substance that he has discovered — possibly made from his dead wife, Megalon.
The rest of the film then presents a series of obstacles for Cesar to overcome. These include Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose daughter becomes Cesar’s main love interest, endorsing building a casino over Cesar’s utopia; Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) and her conspiracies against Cesar, based on reasons largely unbeknownst to the audience; and, finally, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Cesar’s cousin who wants to destroy Cesar because he’s jealous and also seemingly just crazy.
There are also the many side-quests the characters go on that have very little effect on the narrative, nor the character’s arcs. Grace VanderWaal plays a virginal pop star who old men start bidding to marry, only to reveal a sex scandal of hers with Cesar; a scandal that, after roughly ten minutes of an extensive abstract series of images of Adam Driver with a bunch of arms, is waved away never to appear again.
This happens quite a lot: Cesar also has time-stopping superpowers that appear a few times in the first half of the film and then not really again, as if someone forgot that was an aspect of the character.
It is very hard to say if this film is good or not. There are opposing elements all over the place, chief amongst them being the performances. You have Adam Driver doing his best theatrical Hamlet, whereas Giancarlo Esposito delivers every line, however ridiculous, with a heartfelt sincerity you have to admire. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Shia LaBeouf giving a truly deranged, unlikeable performance. It’s like a really out-there Nicolas Cage performance but without the charm.
The female characters, of which there are only two major ones, are given nothing to work with. Both are deeply in love with Cesar and, given that’s about all you can say about them, they are woefully underwritten. At least Aubrey Plaza has a great time chewing the scenery in what is definitely the most entertaining performance on screen here.
There is still an assortment of other big names who pop up. Laurence Fishburne is a welcome presence but delivers utterly pointless narration. Jon Voight is here, but only just. Not for lack of screen time, however — it just feels like he’s only half in the room at any given moment. Even Dustin Hoffman pops up for a couple of scenes, one in which he delivers the vital line “Look at that.”, before disappearing again for a huge stretch of film. Coppola is clearly a big enough name to attract a huge roster of talented (or once talented) actors but doesn’t seem to be able to herd them all into anything resembling cohesion.
This lack of cohesion is not confined to the actors; the film’s tone is all over the place. You can go wildly from a scene where the characters sit around a table quoting Marcus Aurelius at each other to a goofy shot of Caesar testing out a magical travelator. The visual effects imbue the whole film with a bizarrely unreal feeling but, as the film’s subtitle tells us, it is a fable, which means you can wave away whatever strange choices the film makes as it simply being a fable, focussing more on what the film is trying to say.
And what it’s trying to say is hard to pin down: there is clearly something autobiographical here — a film about a creative genius who keeps getting told no, until he goes ahead and makes the thing and it’s very successful. It is about as self-indulgent as that sounds, but it’s hard to ignore the genuine sincerity that shines through. There is a belief that one can change the world that is admirable.
It is unlikely that we will ever see anything like this again; most filmmakers can’t afford to self-fund anything, let alone $120 million, and Megalopolis is proving to be a remarkable failure at the box office. And for that reason, it may be worth your time. You’ll definitely get a conversation out of it, even if that conversation isn’t quite as profound as Coppola might have hoped.
2/5
