Francis Ford Coppola has never been one for small swings. Every single one has to be for the fences. Sometimes, when you do that, you could hit a home run, such as The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. However, you also risk whiffing completely and falling on your face. Coppola’s latest, Megalopolis, an epic fable about power and creation, belongs at least near the latter category.
It is a bizarre drama, filled with stilted philosophizing and awkward performances from a stacked cast. Coppola was obviously trying to make some grand statement about ambition, capitalism, greed and thought, using ancient Rome as a metaphor for modern society. Somehow, all of this is weird, extremely heavy-handed, confusingly executed, cheap looking and, most surprising, boring. Only a director of Coppola’s considerable ability could make something this disjointed and ridiculous so dull.
Everything in Megalopolis (133 minutes, without the end credits), from the sets to the costumes to the plot and dialogue, feels strangely unfocused. It’s like Coppola shot all of his ideas and assembled them in a way that makes a dreamlike sense to him. It definitely doesn’t make narrative sense. There are a few shots, and a couple of entire sequences, that are kind of compelling because there is no attempt at realism. Everything is heightened, including the drama and acting. Yet it is mostly frustrating, occasionally unintentionally funny and not at all enlightening. It is a mess about a visionary, made by a visionary.
In contemporary New Rome (imagine today’s New York City with a Roman theme), Cesar Catilina is a genius architect who has the ability to pause time. He is working on revolutionizing the city by rebuilding it using a fantastical new material. This puts him up against the mayor, who is terrified of change. When Cesar enters into a relationship with the mayor’s daughter, the political intrigue threatens to destroy everyone.
Francis Ford Coppola supposedly spent $120 million of his own money to make Megalopolis. Despite this, the movie doesn’t look very impressive. The backgrounds look like backgrounds. The costumes look like costumes. Nothing is convincing. A couple of the shots where Cesar stops time are interesting, though they lack purpose. At no point does this talent actually become useful to the story or characters. It is just a way he can control his surroundings, like a director controls his set. That is about as subtle as the symbolism gets. While this is clearly a passion project through and through, whatever points Coppola is trying to make are buried amid the excess and over-the-top execution.
The cast, as mentioned already, is amazing. Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman all show up. The only ones who come out of it unscathed are Plaza and LaBeouf because they seem to understand how absurd this is and play their parts accordingly. Plaza plays a gold-digging journalist and LaBeouf plays Cesar’s jealous, cross-dressing, cousin. Driver, who is on-screen the most as Cesar, doesn’t seem to have any idea what he is supposed to be doing, thus his line readings are distractingly inconsistent and without energy. Pretty much everyone else gets lost, outside of an embarrassing line of dialogue or three.
A lot will be written about what a disaster Megalopolis is. I always say how much I admire a director willing to take a chance. I’d rather a risk that fails than a movie that plays it totally safe. Francis Ford Coppola took a big risk (then drew a target on his back by lashing out at anyone that criticizes it). While the result is a massive misfire, it wouldn’t be a shock if someone tries to reassess all the strange choices Coppola made here in a few years and reclassify it as some kind of misunderstood masterpiece. What I see is a director so caught up in his own vision he forgot to make it so other people can see it. But it still wouldn’t be a shock.
1¼ out of 5
Cast:
Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina
Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero
Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum
Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero
Shia LaBeouf as Clodio Pulcher
Jon Voight as Hamilton Crassus III
Dustin Hoffman as Nush “The Fixer” Berman
Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine
Written/Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Comments