Megalopolis (Coppola, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

The only films we ever really talk about when it comes to Francis Ford Coppola are the ones he made in the Seventies. Granted, it was an historical run – The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now are as close to the pinnacle of American cinema as one artist has ever come. But when we talk about Coppola in the decades that follow, it is almost always in the wistful tone of what once was, a perhaps natural occurrence that follows the swift creation of four films in the running for The Best Ever. Though films like One From The Heart (the first great Coppola ‘disappointment’), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and his two S.E. Hinton adaptations The Outsiders and Rumble Fish have their champions, the prevailing narrative has long been that for a brief, shining moment, Coppola had it, and then, just as quickly, he didn’t have it anymore. Coppola’s restless creative spirit, though, belies this fact, and is one of the reasons why even now he is considered something of an outsider himself (while also being the patriarch of a Hollywood royal family, a strange but undeniable combination). There’s three distinct camps that we can divide Coppola’s work into – the golden years, the declining years, and the years lost in the wilderness. The declining years – the One from the Heart through to Bram Stoker’s Dracula years – are fascinating in the tense union of high production value, star power and an ambitious-to-a-fault visionary at the helm. This was capped off by The Godfather Part III, a film that lingered fatally in the shadow of its older brothers. Then came the wilderness years, which similarly resulted in a number of cult items (Twixt, for one) but is largely thought of as the tinkerings of an elder statesman to be kept far from the eyes of the wider public, kicked off by the disaster that was Jack (as far as I know, there is no cult following for Jack).

Does Megalopolis, the biggest and most discussed film Coppola has made in decades, represent a new era for the ageing auteur, or a particularly big piece of debris from the cascading ruins of a once illustrious career? Time will tell, though Coppola himself has indicated he doesn’t think Megalopolis will be his last. There’s something about Megalopolis, though, that from a distance screams ‘the final film’. Perhaps it’s that weighty title, or the parallel narrative of the making of the film, which saw Coppola investing most of his enormous wine fortune into the production. With its large ensemble cast and a sweeping narrative that considers the possibility of the founding of a utopia in the ruins of America, Coppola is returning to the enormous thematic concerns of those biggest of his films – society, the American dream, ascending and declining fortunes. It is a production that has been plagued from day one – for Coppola’s thumb-nosing self-financing, his casting of ‘cancelled’ actors, a disastrous AI-generated trailer debacle, rumours of shut-downs, walk-offs and on-set impropriety from the octogenarian himself, and so on. When it screened to a nonplussed Cannes audience, there was an almost feral glee to some of the pans, an assertion that Hollywood was right to have denied Coppola the chance to see his final vision, a film he’d been working on for decades, through to completion.

Whatever anyone thought Megalopolis, the latest work by the maestro himself Francis Ford Coppola, would be, it’s hard to imagine it would have been this. Of all the words we will use to describe it – enormous, ambitious, messy, offensive, gaudy, ugly, visionary, unwieldy, good, bad – the one that best sums it up is, simply, free. 

The resulting film is certainly not the resounding masterpiece some hoped for, one that would throw Coppola’s recent cinematic misfortune into sharp relief – it was all worth it for this final salvo! It is a mess on nearly every level, from the visual to the narrative to the dialogue to whatever it is Coppola is actually trying to say. Much of it evokes the stream-of-consciousness rambling of an old man’s declining mind. It is actively bad in places, resembling a straight-to-DVD sci-fi or a low-rent scripted drama one might find coming from the CW or Syfy. But, woven within and blaring out on a massive IMAX footage, there are also moments of utter transcendence, moments where I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear at the sheer nuttiness of Coppola’s unfiltered perspective playing out before our eyes. Like or not, there’s no other film that is even in the same stratosphere as Megalopolis in 2024, and Hollywood would probably like to keep it that way. It’s weird, in a way so little of art in the digital age is – a 120-million-dollar vision that is unmarred by focus groups or corporate interests, an often achingly, unbearably earnest monument to humanity’s potential. It’s hard to outright hate Megalopolis, and nearly impossible to totally dismiss. It is simply too unique within this current landscape, too unapologetic, too divisive and conversation-starting. The first time I watched it, I emerged flustered, frustrated and confused. The second time, I left on a high, eager to discuss what I’d just seen with my sister and uncle, who were watching it for the first time. That alone is something magnificent – I can’t tell you the amount of respectable dramas or megablockbusters I’ve emerged from with less than nothing to say. When we think of 2024 in cinema, for better or worse, we will think of Megalopolis.

Adam Driver, the modern actor with the best taste in auteurs, is the star here, playing Cesar Catalina, a genius celebrity architect in the mould of a modern-day DaVinci (or what Elon Musk probably wishes he’d see when he looked in a mirror), who is at once a beloved fixture and social pariah of New Rome, a city that is a mix of modern day New York and Ancient Rome, as the title suggests. I find myself thinking of Driver in another role, that of Leos Carax’ Annette, a film that similarly was made for a reasonably high budget and was incredibly alienating to a traditional multiplex audience in its unapologetic fealty to its own vision. There, Driver was also the anchor that held the story together amidst the chaos swirling about him, a role his stoic features and aloof presence slips into like hand in glove. Driver is a surprising performer, one whose limitations we don’t really see until they’re laid out before us – like his overcranked work in Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Here, Driver works hard to imbue a character that by lieu of the nature of Megalopolis must be at least partially symbolic of larger thematic ideals with something like human foibles, underlining that Cesar’s utopian vision of the future does not necessarily suggest perfection in the one who imagines it. It’s a subtler and more accomplished turn than may be initially grasped amidst the hubbub of a first-time watch. 

Around Cesar swirls an enormous cast of family members, lovers, enemies, soldiers and opportunists. Ostensibly the central conflict of the film is the war of ideologies that Cesar finds himself embroiled in with the Mayor of New Rome, Cicero, as played by Giancarlo Esposito, who does well to overcome the clunkiness of some of the dialogue with which he’s saddled. Caught between the two is Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is loyal to Cicero but admires Cesar’s vision, falling in love with him as the story proceeds. Some of Cesar’s notable allies include his driver (Laurence Fishburne), a budding historian, and Jon Voight as an addled billionaire bank titan who also happens to be Cesar’s uncle. On the side of Cicero is Jason Schwarzmann as a member of his entourage and The Tragedy of Macbeth’s Kathryn Hunter as his wife. Also in the mix are Shia LaBoeuf doing the most as Clodio Pulcher, Cesar’s cousin who harbours a secret, Iago-like hatred for the man, and Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, a gossip columnist and social climber in Cesar’s orbit. Many more characters come and go, and Coppola doesn’t necessarily make it easy to keep track of whose motivation lies with whom throughout. The sense one ultimately gets is of players within a game larger than any of them recognise, swept along by the current. Some of the cast are up for the challenge – Plaza is especially good in an entirely thankless villain role, making a meal of several diabolical sequences – while others flounder, most especially Emmanuel, a likeable enough but fatally plain actress who is simply not up to the task of finding nuance in her cipher of a role. Others barely warrant a mention, like Schwarzmann and Fishburne (and, in what is essentially a cameo, Dustin Hoffman), who all seem to be there mostly to support a friend’s grand vision. Worst is Voight, who ambles across the screen, haggard and unpleasant to look upon. A sentiment I agreed with from a patron leaving the cinema – ‘I’m most embarrassed for Voight’.

What is genuinely fascinating about Megalopolis are the endless contradictions that it indulges in. It’s a film awash in references – to Roman philosophers, Shakespeare, Siddhartha, the news, The Fountainhead, countless others – yet above all else there’s this feeling of stream-of-consciousness digression, as though we’re being pulled along by Francis Ford Coppola’s restless thought process like we’re holding the leash of a big, excitable golden retriever. For a film that shares its name, there is remarkably little to know about Megalopolis, the city Cesar aims to build within the ruins of New Rome, aside from some often hilariously gaudy CGI that resembles this utopian meme above all else. How it functions, and why it is better than what the citizens of New Rome are currently living in, is left unexplained. It simply is better. Coppola, an old man living what one imagines is a relatively sheltered life from online discourse, is hugely passionate about the need for debate – and yet Cesar, a semi-Randian figure, is presented as unquestionably right in every moment of the film, the drama being the limitations narrow-sighted bureaucrats place in his way. It is a film at once awash in hippie principles of peace and love and the idea that we are all one people, and yet possessed of a rich vein of pro-capitalist conservatism that positions the rich, famous and powerful as the ones with the right to mould the world in their image. The masses, here usually represented as dirty children behind wire fencing, are there to watch on in abject astonishment. Coppola directly links civil unrest and working class resentment to Trumpism and Nazism, in a bawdy subplot that finds LaBoeuf’s Clodio emerging as a counterculture charlatan playing on public anger to boost his own position. It’s a movie whose narrative drive plateaus so deeply between the second and third act that scenes were met with a chorus of yawns in the IMAX cinema where I watched the film for a second time, and yet the overwhelming sincerity and sweetness of Coppola’s vision almost makes the drag forgivable. Almost. On first watch, so much of this seemed unintentional. On second watch, I started to see a design at play – was Coppola trying to make us laugh, to make us shake our heads in disbelief? How much credence is he afforded, after all?

In the time since Megalopolis appeared before audiences, it’s been compared to a range of other work positively unimaginable when the film was first announced. To me, there are traces of the Wachowskis and Richard Kelly – I’ve seen Southland Tales invoked more than once. I saw some Leos Carax, Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee, F.W. Murnau. Others have compared the film to the silent films of surrealist René Clair, or the American comedy genius behind Wet Hot American Summer, David Wain. Others still have seen traces of Godard, and George Lucas’ prequel trilogy. The greats are there – Eisenstein and Chaplin, Powell and Pressburger. There’s also been comparisons to Neil Breen, that purveyor of gleefully terrible cinema, and of the films of Baz Luhrmann. Creed music videos and the films of Terrence Malick. These all feel apt to me, and speak to the idea that Megalopolis is must-see cinema because of the fact that no single comparison provides accurate summation. So much of the film doesn’t sit well with me at all – not least the presence of LaBoeuf, a domestic abuser; Jon Voight, an odious reactionary; and Dustin Hoffman, who is essentially a featured extra in the film. This is to say nothing of Coppola himself, who remains a profoundly complex individual with worrying, murky allegations swirling about him. And yet, I can’t deny I was moved by the five words that appeared at the end of the film – ‘for my beloved wife Eleanor’, who died before the film could be introduced to the world. There is something moving about the very existence of Megalopolis as it is – unvarnished, great and terrible all at once. It is quite probably the film of the year. Whether it’s a good film is another question.

I also want to mention that tomorrow evening, Friday 27th of September at 8pm, the Capitol Cinema Film Club (that I programme with my partner Amanda) will be exclusively screening American cult comedy icon Conner O’Malley’s new debut feature Rap World at 8pm. The event is hosted by Tim Batt and will feature a pre-recorded Q+A after the screening. It is one of the funniest films of the year and will almost certainly be on my end-of-year Best Of 2024 list. Find out more about Conner O’Malley here. Maybe I’ll see you there?

Megalopolis is in cinemas now.

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