By Robert Moran
MEGALOPOLIS ★★★
138 mins
By now, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has overworked its lore. The 40-year battle to realise its vision; the $US120 million used to self-finance it; the studio indifference that greeted its first screening in March, where it failed to land a buyer; the early festival reviews extolling its oddness. Like the film, it’s a bit much.
Adam Driver as renowned architect Cesar Catilina and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia in Megalopolis.
If his late wife Eleanor Coppola were alive to make Megalopolis’ Hearts of Darkness equivalent, we might yet have a film that could get beyond the hype. But, now 85, Coppola’s first new film since 2011’s art-horror Twixt is a neo-noir caught in its own baggage.
Megalopolis is a film about the fall of the US empire, told as a modern Roman fable. You’ll get this straight away, due to the opening title cards setting the locale as “New Rome 3AD” and a subtitle labelling the film: “A Fable”. Also, because everyone in this film has a Caesar haircut.
Even in sci-fi, Coppola’s interests skew more bureaucratic than esoteric. Defined by its future-retro aesthetic – it’s a place where journalists wear press tickets in their hats and everything looks like the Chrysler Building – New Rome is a city in trouble.
Battling for its soul is Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, an architect-visionary with grief and a drinking problem.
Catilina has stumbled on “megalon”, a building resource that brings his utopian vision for a new city, where no one’s more than five minutes away from a park, closer to reality. He can also stop time with his hands.
None of this ingratiates Catilina to his establishment rival Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the city’s conservative mayor who’s keen to maintain its status quo. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), however, has fallen for Cesar’s vision, lending a Shakespearean pall to the families’ fates.
Loitering on the periphery are ambitious types: a fabulously saucy Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, a ruthless news reporter – and Cesar’s old flame – with designs on power. If TMZ had existed in Roman times, Wow would’ve been its Harvey Levin.
Shia LaBeouf (right) as Clodio Pulcher in Megalopolis.Credit: Phil Caruso/Lionsgate
I said everyone in this film has a Caesar haircut. Not so Shia LaBeouf playing Clodio Pulcher, Catilina’s jealous cousin, who with his ratty Roman mullet and obnoxious, puckish energy, is the film’s other skeezy delight.
If you read even a fraction of the pre-release publicity, you’ll know Megalopolis is not an intimate Coppola film a la Rumblefish (1983) or Tetro (2009), those tight, black-and-white paeans to his brother. This is epic Coppola, ideas packed to bursting.
Across the film’s suffocating press blitz, he outlined endless references for the studious cineaste, a pre-screening syllabus of sorts: the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 BC; H.G. Wells’ Shape of Things to Come; Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Those are useful guides because there are more tangents in this film than in an old man’s anecdote. There’s a scene where Driver does the entire “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet; there’s a musical number from the city’s virginal daughter Vesta Streetwater (Grace VanderWaal) that becomes a Reputation-style pop scandal; there’s Soviet space junk threatening to fall to earth, an onscreen disaster alluding to the pandemic.
The all-everything maximalism feels closer to Baz Luhrmann than Coppola, or the Wachowski madness of Jupiter Ascending. The now infamous scene where Driver’s Catilina talks to a real person in the audience didn’t happen at my screening; it seems reserved for premieres and festival screenings, which is a shame but logistically understandable.
Intriguingly for a film whose ideas first generated in 1977, Coppola’s eyes seem locked on the present election cycle. This is a city where sex crimes are twisted into political gotchas and deep fakes fuel reputational sabotage; there are assassination attempts and January 6-style insurrectionists everywhere bearing placards saying, “Make Rome great again”.
For a film whose coda makes a claim for leaders who are artists, and implores the rich to be philanthropists and benefactors to art and beauty, the focus on all this mess feels misjudged. That Coppola doesn’t – or can’t – picture the world we should have, just the one we should be leaving behind, seems a failure of his sci-fi vision. We were promised something bonkers, after all.
Megalopolis is released in cinemas on September 26.
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