It’s been 13 years since Francis Ford Coppola last released a film, and 32 years since his last one that really measured up to the legacy and reputation he built for himself in the ‘70s, unable to capture the same continuous success that his auteur contemporaries like Scorsese and Spielberg have. Finally now, though, we have Megalopolis, Coppola’s decades-in-the-making, self-financed, and ludicrously ambitious passion project. It’s the sort of film that mostly defies conventional rating systems – if someone told me that they found it absolutely terrible, I’d be hard-pressed to argue with them. And yet, within all its absurdities and flaws, is something just a little bit magnificent, one of cinema’s all-time greats giving us something shiny, grand, and touchingly optimistic.
Set in a futuristic, golden-hued version of New York called New Rome, Coppola melds real historical Roman conspiracies with the general end-of-days vibe of 21st Century America (and an unmistakable air of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) for this story of a utopian architect battling against the entrenched forces of mediocrity. This architect is Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an arrogant but genuinely superhumanly talented man, the inventor of a miraculous new building substance and able to stop time and bend the laws of physics to achieve his visions.
Opposing him is the deeply unpopular Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who sees Cesar’s optimism as naïve, hating him for ignoring New Rome’s immediate financial and infrastructural problems. It’s a rivalry only deepened when Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) starts to work for, and fall in love with, Cesar. With the Crassus banking family also picking fights in this feud, it’s a very busy story, but the overall plot here is mostly very hard to care about and matters far, far less than just living in this strange yet familiar world that Coppola has built.
As a sucker for anything Roman, I loved spending time in New Rome, from its colosseum full of chariot races and wrestling matches to the weirdly aggro newscasters reporting on high-society drama, the standout of whom is the splendidly named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a financial reporter who has a habit of bedding the city’s most powerful men. With most shots drowning in a golden, champagne-esque colour grade, there’s a decadent immersiveness to everything, even though some of the more VFX-heavy shots can veer towards the outright ugly.
This sense of unreality also extends to the dialogue, which is much less successful than the atmosphere. A lot of conversations are just kind of gibberish, with plenty of the cast looking a bit lost – Emmanuel, with her ever-shifting accent, is the most notable casualty, but even Driver and Esposito have a bit of trouble. Nailing the tone, though, are Plaza, who just commits full-bore to Wow’s sleazy machinations, and Jon Voight, who is actually really great as the ageing, ailing head of the Crassus family, wringing laughs and pathos out of a script that most of his co-stars fail to get a real handle on.
It’s undeniable that Megalopolis is a huge mess, particularly in its third act, which has two of the silliest scenes of the entire year, but I also found it hard to resist, an opulent ode to the notion that we deserve, and can achieve, better worlds than the ones we’ve built for ourselves. You’ve never seen anything quite like this and, if this does end up being the 85-year-old Coppola’s final film, it’s a movingly hopeful and powerfully original note to go out on.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 