By M. Faust

Metacritic.com collects and summarizes opinions from leading film reviewers, assigning each movie a rating from 0 to 100. The 59 reviews of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis span that entire range, pretty evenly divided in the range from 20 to 90. That is not something you see very often. 

If you have any interest in American cinema, there’s no question that you should see it. It is likely to be the last film from one of the major filmmakers of the independent era, whose battles with the Hollywood system have been legendary. Coppola conceived of the film 40 years ago, sought funding for 20, and eventually decided to cover the $120 million budget himself rather than have to put up with any studio interference. That is an act of hubris you seldom get to witness. 

Sure, it’s a mess, but it’s Coppola’s mess (he also wrote it), and he’s standing by it (he has spent a lot of time in recent decades re-working his old movies, most notably Godfather 3, The Cotton Club and Apocalypse Now. Should he live long enough—he’s now 85 years old—will he take to tinkering with this one as well? It wouldn’t surprise me.) 

This is the official précis of the movie, presumably either written by Coppola or at least approved by him: 

MEGALOPOLIS is a Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.

I offer this summary because plot is not the film’s strong point. Coppola seems more interested in staging set pieces, both spectacle and character oriented, that don’t do much to advance the story. I don’t know how much of that $120 million was spent on staging chariot races in a facsimile of Madison Square Gardens, but it can’t have been worth the investment. A sex scene between Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf (both of whom remain fully clad) is cheekily amusing, but seems to be included for its own sake. 

Other story points go weirdly undeveloped. Catilina is grievously wounded in an assassination attempt, but those wounds seem to heal with little explanation. Cicero offers Catilina a bribe to stop seeing his daughter, a bribe that Catilina seems to accept, but we later see them as a happy couple. If there were explanations for these seemingly significant developments, they flew beneath my notice. 

The key to the movie is the tension between the artist driven by his personal vision and the needs of the society in which he functions. You may recall that as the theme of Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). It also recalls Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which Coppola once wanted to film. 

I wouldn’t call the finale of Megalopolis one of which Rand would have approved, but Coppola does seem to be equally indifferent to the needs of “the little people.” All of the film’s major characters are of the One Percent. The masses only show up to look bothersomely pathetic in view of Catilina’s need to realize his vision, or to be easily manipulated by a demagogue. In the film’s most jawdropping scene, a large swath of New York—sorry, New Rome—is devastated by an accident. Yet there is no discussion of the loss of life, which must number in the tens of thousands. It’s just a plot device to clear space in which Catilina to build a prototype of his “utopia” (a science-fiction concept that literally defies description.) 

I must admit that I was carried along though much of Megalopolis’s 138-minute running time by its confidence and exuberance. At least in its opening hour, it is blatantly artificial and arch to the point of camp. (The last time Coppola had this much money and this little restraint, the result was 1981’s One From the Heart.) It’s filled with little jokes that, intentionally or not, erode its general self-serious nature: a shot of a textbook written by Catilina, Design Architecture and Organic Chemistry, made me think of physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock star Buckaroo Banzai. 

One could go on all day taking apart the various elements of Coppola’s cinematic stew. But what it all boils down to is the artist demanding that he get his own way, with Catilina as a clear surrogate for the filmmaker. Announcing in 2022 that he would  self-fund Megalopolis, Coppola said this: 

“There’s a certain way everyone thinks a film should be, and it rubs against the grain if you have another idea. People can be very unaccepting, but sometimes the other idea represents what’s coming in the future. That is worthy of being considered.”

I’m not sure that Megalopolis doesn’t represent the future of filmmaking. But then, I’ve always been a pessimist. 

M. Faust is a veteran film critic and a contributor to The Buffalo Hive.