Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Before a NYFF screening of Megalopolis, director Francis Ford Coppola sat with Spike Lee, Robert De Niro, and moderator Dennis Lim for a live-streamed introductory panel. These events go one of two ways: a thoughtful, engaging discussion about art occurs or everyone strokes egos for a banal, commercial endeavor. This was, unsurprisingly, the latter. No one wants to talk about the films Francis Ford Coppola has made in the last 25 years. He’s a Name, though, so organize a panel, sell some tickets, and put on a masquerade of excitement for a new Francis Ford Coppola movie. That the talk consisted of Lee pointing out he’s a tenured professor, Coppola rambling about selling part of his winery to self-fund the 120 million dollar film, and De Niro getting a round of applause for a milquetoast comment about Donald Trump only made the industry farce starker.

Then the film started and Coppola’s garish vision of an American Rome on the precipice of being swallowed by hedonism and greed splayed out before the audience. That the film is a long, indulgent disaster is funny enough. That Coppola seemed to have no self-awareness that sitting on a stage flippantly discussing the fortune he spent on it parallels the grotesque displays he put in his film is perhaps the greatest art the film achieves. But why should he or anyone watching think those two things are connected? These panels are just what the film industry does. His own brilliance cannot be questioned because of a few films he made decades ago. It’s taken as fact that we regular folk get excited to stare up at him while he talks about…how neither Lee nor Coppola remember how they met.

Coppola did seem to have the best of intentions with Megalopolis. It clearly speaks to deep faults in American culture, drawing parallels to the past to show how these things could lead to a precipitous fall. Not much else about Megalopolis is clear, but at least that decent heart shines through.

The rest of the film is bogged down by too many ideas and too many narrative threads. The primary driver (pun intended) is Adam Driver’s Cesar, an architect with dreams of building a utopia. He’s also invented a semi-magical building material, Megalon. And he’s part of one of the wealthiest families in America. And he has a bad boy reputation to maintain. And he’s courting the Mayor’s daughter. And he might have killed his wife.

This is what I mean by too many ideas and threads. Under the weight of all that, Cesar doesn’t have room to exist as a character, and Driver is left flopping about. Julia, the Mayor’s daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel), is even less defined and sports an inconsistent accent. The two other main characters, Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Cicero and Shia LaBeouf’s Claudio, are little more than stuck-in-the-mud villains, although LaBeouf gets to wear a dress and be eccentric. 

In this story, the good guys are Good and the bad guys are Bad. Coppola doesn’t realize that, though, and dangles completely obvious untruths before the audience. Obviously, Cesar did not kill his wife. He’s the unabashed hero of the film, spouting the story’s morals so you don’t miss them. His ‘complications’ are mere weight bogging the film down, and because this is a self-financed passion project, there was no one to tell Coppola what should be cut.

Coppola does still have flare, though, and the attention he brings to the film’s maximalist production is occasionally breathtaking. Even as characters spout laughable nonsense, they occasionally move through wondrously beautiful tableaus. Or, if the film is in full critique mode, wondrously grotesque ones. Again, Coppola’s heart is in the right place, and even in his strange confusion, he highlights many prescient faults and strengths.

The film desperately needs wrangling, though, which is a fault that lies almost directly at his feet. He wrote, directed, and financed this mega monstrosity, and it’s clear there was no one to tell him how incoherent the whole thing is. Non sequiturs abound along with inexplicably strange imagery and a hell of a line delivery of “so go back to the club” by Driver. Some actors are playing it straight. Others think they’re in a camp masterpiece (most notably Aubrey Plaza, who plays a gold-digging TV personality named Wow Platinum). All together, it’s a singular piece of mayhem. Many will be driven to laughter by its unintentional absurdity. It’s a terrible film, but it’s never a boring film.

Coppola, per his own words and through Driver’s Cesar, states that the film is about the beautiful future we can build if we all come together and discuss what we want. But that’s not what happens in the film. Megalopolis shows one extremely wealthy artist creating his vision for the future, a parallel to Coppola’s own journey to making this film that is almost impossible to ignore.

Coppola’s creation is terrible. But is Cesars? Coppola holds off on showing the particulars of the utopia Cesar creates, which I assume is an attempt to let us imagine it in our own way. What he does show is a glowing moving walkway that takes people to it. It’s an image so maddeningly banal and restrictive, literally a path laid out by a singular creator for everyone to follow, that it undermines Coppola’s stated goal of encouraging us all to create our future. But hey, this is coming from a guy who spent $120 million on his own passion project. And really, would any film, even a masterpiece, have an impact that would exceed what $120 million in the hands of a robust, well-intentioned charitable organization could do?

Release: Available now in theaters
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight