About an hour and a half into Francis Ford Coppola’s sometimes jaw-dropping and frequently interminable Megalopolis, the sometimes astounding and frequently inscrutable filmmaker finally delivers a scene that seems worthy of the film he seems to believe he is making. During a tense meal with his political rival and future father-in-law Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), visionary city planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) makes a passionate argument for the need to create a better world, only to have Cicero sharply retort about how every utopia carries with it a potential dystopia. For good measure, Cicero’s daughter and Cesar’s love Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) jumps in to make her father’s point with some deftly delivered Marcus Aurelius quotes.
For about a minute, Megalopolis crackles to life with the clarity it has been missing. But soon, the moment is past, and Coppola is back to jumbling together messily overproduced spectacle moments, which add up to far less than the sum of their portentous bits.
According to Coppola, the idea for Megalopolis was germinating for a few decades. Unsurprisingly, the finished result feels like something fussed over for so long its core concept has been lost under the flotsam and jetsam of rewrites. The baggy screenplay contains a plethora of ideas that seem grabbed almost at random and hurled together into a loosely sketched story of dynastic conflict and civilizational collapse. Inspired by the greed and power hunger that led to the fall of the Roman Republic and modern American Gilded Age cynicism, Megalopolis‘ self-described “fable” is about the potentially civilization-ending clash between dreamy ideals, cold pragmatism, and grubby populism. In practice, this works out to many scenes of Cesar mooning around his office dreaming of space-age cities while club kids throw a never-ending bacchanal.
The nub of Megalopolis‘ story is that Cesar, a wealthy genius of an architect, wants to build a fantastically beautiful and ludicrously expensive new city amidst the clattering Gotham-like mess that is the city of New Rome. His nemesis Cicero hates all that airy mess and would rather just slap a casino in the middle of town to generate some much-needed revenue. Recovering party girl Julia is falling in love with Cesar’s haunted yet playful intensity. (It’s easy to see why; one of the few actors to rise above the film’s chaotic lack of focus, Driver locates the character at a midpoint between Robert Moses and Willy Wonka that turns out to be weirdly arresting.) Meanwhile, the improbably named villains Wow Platinum (a wonderfully wily Aubrey Plaza as a femme fatale finance reporter with dynastic ambition) and Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf, wearyingly wacky) plot to whip up the city’s restive and ever-riot-ready people to bring down Cesar for largely inscrutable reasons.
Like Cesar, Coppola comes with great ambitions. It does not require extensive analysis to imagine that the director sees something of himself in Cesar’s often thwarted but dynamic dreamer. Coppola’s films are littered with borderline self-destructive visionaries, from Apocalypse Now’s Kurtz to Tucker’s innocent inventor, the older wizened Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part III, and even the mad military genius in the screenplay for Patton. What the protagonists of all those films have, however, is a credible talent, whether building cars, navigating Mafia intrigue, or killing large numbers of Vietcong or Nazis. Cesar’s skills are more ill-defined.
Megalopolis keeps telling us what a visionary Cesar is. He busts out the “to be or not to be” Hamlet soliloquy and is seen holding a copy of Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha for no good reason other than to establish him as a creative force. Much of his ability to craft the city of his dreams—when finally seen, is quite a thing. It’s more like the realm of Lothlorien in The Fellowship of the Ring than Manhattan’s Hudson Yards project—tied to something specifically not figuratively magical.
We are told early on that he created a new substance called Megalon, which allows for unprecedented new styles of building. Yet, while Megalopolis seems to imagine Megalon as a boundary-exploding source of wonderment, it ends up being more of a cheat by allowing Cesar to vault over the messy engineering challenges mere mortals would face. Then again, he is something of a wizard, as the first scene shows him literally stopping time.
The great disappointment about Megalopolis is not that its story makes little sense. Filmmakers from Guy Maddin to Terrence Malick, Bela Tarr, and Michael Bay have repeatedly shown that logical continuity does not impede the creation of sublime art or at least an entertaining spectacle. Coppola’s great error is also not that he decided to mix and match styles and settings. Who is to say that a mashup of Roman history, Robert Caro’s 1974 book The Power Broker, magical wish fulfillment, and crass vaudevillian political satire with the occasional music number—a glittery number by Grace VanderWaal as a 21st-century pop diva crossed with a Vestal Virgin shows Coppola hasn’t lost his knack for delivering punchy music interludes—couldn’t work? Who cares that the pseudo-Manhattan, which Coppola blew a fortune creating, all Art Deco and Doric columns, doesn’t make sense as “New Rome”, given all the references to things like Penn Station and Atlantic City?
What sinks Megalopolis is its lack of humanity and any organic connection to the intellectual arguments it keeps suggesting are bubbling under the surface. Except for a few exchanges between Cesar and Julia, where the performers briefly capture the whimsical madcap spirit Coppola seems to be striving for, the film is stultifyingly uninteresting. A few other performers climb out of the glitter-strobed CGI mess. But then Esposito, Plaza, and Laurence Fishburne (in the unenviable role of being Cesar’s chauffeur and the screenplay’s ostentatious narrator) can be expected to make something out of very little.
In Megalopolis, Coppola keeps layering spectacle on top of spectacle in the hope that something registers. The whole thing gleams like nothing else you will see on screens this year, as though the film has been washed in gold and rainbows. But at some point, Coppola seems to forget he is critiquing the spectacle and decides to live in it. “We are in need of a great debate about the future,” Cesar declares in a speech meant to delay a rampaging mob from destroying his crystal city of dreams. He makes a fine point. If only Megalopolis had been that debate.