40 years of naysayers were right about Megalopolis, Coppola’s visually ugly and thematically inept magnum opus
From actors who came and went from the project to studios who pulled back funding, the haters very much knew what they were talking about. For a supposed labor of love, Megalopolis is visually hideous, narratively inept, and thematically tepid.
★✩✩✩✩
Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, and Shia LaBeouf
R. In theaters.
In 2023, I titled my review of Killers of the Flower Moon, "Someone needs to learn to tell Martin Scorsese 'no'", in reference to the poorly edited and overly-indulgent 3-and-a-half-hour runtime of the director's Osage Nation epic. Now, almost exactly a year later, we have a similarly acclaimed director's late-in-life epic in theaters. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese share much in common: both are Americans of Italian heritage in their 80s, both boast wins for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Best Director at the Oscars, and both are celebrated for their enormous contributions to cinema.
But, one small difference: where apparently his stature and bankability led to no one reining in Scorsese's worst impulses in his last picture, the path to Coppola's Megalopolis getting made is nothing but people saying "no." Since Coppola first envisioned the project more than four decades ago, actors have come and gone, production studios have offered and then pulled away funding, distribution companies have invested and uninvested, and Coppola himself has taken two steps backward for every one step forward with the script. There has been no end to the "no"s. And at the center of them all has been a rejection of Coppola himself: actors have complained of misconduct on set, the entire visual effects team was fired over "creative differences," and the first trailer for the movie made up diss quotes against Coppola's past movies. At each setback, everyone was saying Coppola couldn't pull it off—including Coppola himself. Damningly, a friend of the director diagnosed him as having "no excuse this time if the film was no good," and being frozen by "having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line."
And, lo-and-behold he couldn't pull it off. The haters were right; the naysayers very much knew what they were talking about. For a supposed labor of love, Megalopolis is visually hideous, narratively inept, and thematically tepid.
The story is held together by an extremely loose hodgepodge of weak political statements, sci-fi hand-waving, and sleepy historical allusions. It opens clunkily with low-budget CGI title cards in the style of Ancient Roman stone inscriptions telling us that the film is a "fable" before launching into a laughably literal retelling of Roman history updated to an alternate reality of the United States. We are introduced first to Cesar Catilina, an architect with the ability to stop time who wins the Nobel Prize for inventing an innovative new material, "megalon." He crashes a press conference and interrupts the corrupt mayor to argue for a utopian vision of "Megalopolis" as a megalon-empowered and rebuilt version of their city of New Rome. The mayor, Cicero, doesn't like this idea, preferring to build instead a casino district for tax revenue. Cicero and Cesar’s feud grows as Cesar falls for Cicero’s daughter, Julia.
Cesar leaves his mistress, TV presenter Wow Platinum (...yeah), and begins sleeping with Julia. Wow, looking to fill the gap left by Cesar's celebrity and wealth, corners billionaire Hamilton Crassus III and marries him in a huge Coliseum-style wedding event. The characters' fates swirl around each other as money, crime, partisanship, and plotting all imperil the city's leadership and future.
At each turn, Coppola's script incessantly muddies the waters between the "real" United States and the fictional New Rome palace intrigue. Halfway through the film, a Soviet satellite crashes into earth, conveniently opening up some of the downtown cityscape for Cesar's Megalopolis. Not only is the crash otherwise immediately irrelevant, its implications are left painfully unresolved; what is the place of New Rome (read: the US) in a version of the 21st Century where the USSR still exists? Coppola either seems to forget this development or simply not care about its implications; either reason is shoddy. Similarly, he insists on gauche political connections between the film and real life. A populist leader emerges at one point whose supporters don red hats and wave MAGA flags. In one scene, the leader hops down from a speech from a tree stump, which is revealed to be literally shaped like a swastika. These are half-hearted lip service to contemporary rote Hollywood liberalism without engaging in the story's actual connections to the leadership of Julius Caesar or Emperor Cicero. It's no surprise, then, to learn that the script for Megalopolis first started forming in 1977; its view of politics feels stuck in the past, with just the meekest of anti-Trump references to make it feel fresh to coastal audiences.
But the movie isn't just politically milquetoast, it's downright nonsensical. With whiz-bang graphics and bizarre needle drops, Coppola's supposedly ultra-personal ode to artistry feels like a bad Baz Luhrmann outing—and unlike the Australian's luridly appealing Romeo + Juliet or more polarizing Elvis, both of which are grounded in something (Shakespeare, or a factual biography), Megalopolis quickly loses its bearings. How fast is the eponymous city being built, for instance, and what does the electorate think about it? Why do voters rally against Cesar, and then turn on other characters so quickly? How does megalon heal Cesar's eye so quickly, and how do technology and humanity come together in his bionic half-state? For how many scenes there are with journalists' bulbs flashing and reporters' pencils scribbling, what is the role of media in New Rome? These questions are critical not just for a viewer to follow the plot, but also to understand Coppola's apparently "vulnerable" interpretation of artistry and creation in a hostile world. The director clearly wants us to think of him alongside the greats: Cesar flippantly launches into a Hamlet soliloquy, Cicero describes his own name as "Frank—like Sinatra," and a newspaper headline describes a crime as "like Hitchcock!" But it's hard to take those comparisons seriously when the film hardly makes sense.
For a movie this personal, its failure singularly lies in the hands of its director. However, it doesn't help that the leading actors are all in over their heads (and apparently phoned some of their commitment in; thanks to COVID-19, only about a third of the cast even rehearsed together). Adam Driver as Cesar neither leans into the campiness of his time-stopping role, nor is he strong enough to carry the enormous burden of Coppola's architect metaphor. Giancarlo Esposito doesn't have half of the corruption or panache of real-life New York Mayor Eric Adams, and can’t even hold a candle to Gotham's politicians from any Batman installment. When it's revealed he did some legal tomfoolery early in his career, for instance, we struggle to believe he ever showed that level of skill or menace. Nathalie Emmanuel is immediately forgettable as the central love interest; Laurence Fishburne plays a bizarre secretary-plus-film-narrator dual role; Jason Schwartzman is criminally underutilized (in his own uncle's film!); and Dustin Hoffman is given a rushed off-screen death after a decent couple scenes.
Only one storyline, and the actors embroiled in it, salvages the movie from self-serious techno-optimism: Jon Voight's role as the hapless head of the national bank is buffoonish in the best way, and plays hilariously into the ridiculous meddling of Aubrey's Plaza's Wow Platinum and Shia LaBeouf's Clodio Pulchur. It's obviously absurd, but the incestuous pettiness over an old man's estate must no doubt be on the 85-year-old Coppola's mind as he surveys his Hollywood-steeped family. Quick cuts away from Driver's long-winded scenes to the cattiness of Voight, Plaza, and LaBeouf are welcome breaks, and the only time my theater laughed with instead of at the film.
It goes without saying for anyone who's seen clips of the movie, but Megalopolis is comically ugly, and remains half-pregnant with how much it wants to be New York and how much it wants to be New Rome. (In fact, it's neither! Megalopolis was shot in Atlanta and in Fayetteville studios. No wonder everything looks so plastic.) Shots seem literally unfinished sometimes, such as when a scene of the fictional parallel to the New York Stock Exchange has banners out front that literally read "NYSE". Even the Coliseum, which is a cool spin on Madison Square Garden, features large swaths of space just taken up by CGI crowds mulling about. The same goes for the score, in which contrived drums and coffeehouse jazz dull any semblance of drama.
After a grueling 138 minutes, Megalopolis ends. And, as it begins, it once again pulls out the tacky Roman iMovie-slide title card, but this time with a revised Pledge of Allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to our human family, and to all the species that we protect. One Earth, indivisible, with long life, education and justice for all." It's perfect: the exact level of surface-level commentary and hokey utopianism as the rest of the movie, with phoned-in audio and cheap visuals. I'm left with no doubt that all the people who told Coppola "no" were, unfortunately, right.