In a conversation with a fellow film critic recently, they mentioned how, regardless of the outcome, they are always in favor of a filmmaker taking big swings with their production. From casting choices to production value to plot leaps, whatever it is, it's the going for it that is the win for this particular reviewer of movies.
And oh, how Francis Ford Coppola goes for the fences in Megalopolis, his decades-in-the-making passion project that is part fable part science fiction about a grandiose architect with dreams of rebuilding New York City (I mean...New Rome) and the feuding families in power who'll do anything to stop him. Oh, and he can also stop time.
Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, Megalopolis is about 20 minutes of plot and two hours of bloviating, a film that takes itself so seriously it comes out the other side as laughable. Adam Driver is Cesar Catilina, an architect and head of the Design Authority, apparently a city-sanctioned department tasked with reimagining the city of New Rome, New York, a metropolis facing stark divisions among its citizenry and a battle for the ages over power and control at the top of city management.
Giancorlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) is the city's overly confident but much reviled Mayor Cicero, and Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) is his beautiful daughter, Julia. A party girl with not much more to do than, well, party, she's a fierce ally of her father's but something about Caesar intrigues her, too. One of her closest friends is Clodia Pulcher (Chloe Fineman), who's one of a set of triplets, the mainly absent Claudette (Madeleine Gardella) and brother Clodio (Shia LaBeouf, in perhaps the most committed performance of the film). They are the grandchildren of Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), a mogul used to controlling everything and everyone around him. Coppola regulars (and family members) Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman show up as Caesar's mother and Mayor Cicero's right-hand-man, respectively. Laurence Fishburne and Aubrey Plaza round out the cast, he as Fundi Romaine, Caesar's man servant and our narrator for this slog of a saga, and she as Wow Platinum (yes, God help me, that's her name) as a journalist turned Caesar's mistress turned gold-digger and new wife to Hamilton.
It would take me longer than the film's running time to recount the full plot of Megalopolis, or at least the salient points such as they are. Suffice it to say that these warring families ultimately wreak havoc on each other and everyone they influence through various plots for revenge and retribution. Caesar at some point was accused of murdering his beloved wife, but Julia doesn't believe he could be capable of such a thing. Clodio is the oft-overlooked only grandson of a billionaire who doesn't trust him to be serious enough to take over the family business, so of course he goes about proving him wrong in the most chaotic ways possible. There's a murder plot (not of the former wife, another one), corruption and betrayal, and at some point there's even a chariot race inside an arena that feels part three-ring-circus, part Third Reich ominous.
Megalopolis is, for lack of a better way to put it, a movie. Coppola throws everything at the wall in the hopes some of his heavy-handed preaching might stick, and he has the clout and position in the industry to be yes-manned into whatever this film is now that it's out in the world. (A mess. It's a mess.) The crafts team on the film at least appears to have had a good time, as set design, makeup and costumes are all wildly impressive for a movie that's otherwise just plain silly. Togas are the trend of the day, and not even the men's button-down shirts are average or understated. Coppola wanted to go big, and he took his whole team with him.
Over the course of this misguided epic, Caesar keeps returning to a vision for building a new version of the city with a new material he's created that is apparently capable of doing anything and everything he wants it to (including heal him, which...well, you'll have to watch that particular subplot for yourself...). It's Coppola's ham-fisted attempt at drilling home a theme of possibility and potential, a reminder that the world doesn't have to be this way, that we can make things better if we commit ourselves to it. But it's all so chaotically and confusingly rendered that there's never an opportunity to actually believe in Caesar's scheme, let alone invest our attention in it.
Francis Ford Coppola is one of our greatest living directors, and his filmography has plenty to prove it (as it is for so many people, The Godfather is one of my favorite films of all time). In a hilariously tone-deaf pre-film discussion livecast at the screening I attended, Coppola shared that he could not find anyone to invest in his vision for Megalopolis, so he financed the film by selling one of (!) his wine businesses, using the profits to make the movie. One can't help but think that that money would've been better spent buying everyone he wants to see this film a bottle of wine instead. We deserve it.
Megalopolis is now in theaters.
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