By Garry Maddox
MEGALOPOLIS ★★★
(Unclassified), 138 minutes
When the director of the Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, invests $180 million of his own money into a passion project, you have to take notice.
Adam Driver plays a visionary Nobel Prize winning architect in Megalopolis.
But when Francis Ford Coppola’s output in the past 25 years is made up of the little-seen Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt and Distant Vision, you’re right to be sceptical. Does the legendary American director, at the age of 85, have any more great films in him?
The answer turns out to be, well, maybe. But he didn’t have to put them all in this one.
Megalopolis, which had its Australian premiere at a sold-out IMAX screening at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday night after respectful but largely unflattering reviews in Cannes last month, is a monumentally ambitious sci-fi drama. It centres on a Nobel Prize winning architect, Cesar (Adam Driver), who works to rebuild a version of New York called New Rome as a sustainable utopia, with opposition from a city official, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).
Complicating matters is that Cesar falls for Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a medical school drop-out who is the only New Rome resident who sees that he has the power to pause time.
As all those Roman references suggest Megalopolis is an allegory about the collapse of the United States as an empire, with references to social upheaval, financial inequality, Donald Trump’s hollow posturing, 9/11 and the storming of the Capitol.
But it’s also a Shakespearean drama about the nature of power, complete with dialogue from the Bard’s plays and profound-sounding declarations from ancient philosophers. Less neatly, although it’s an elusive film to understand, it’s a metaphorical autobiography about a visionary artist whose art can stop time but who is flawed by his manias and obsessions.
Megalopolis isn’t so much a film as multiple films that swap in and swap out over 138 minutes.
It’s a sci-fi story about what we are leaving behind for the next generation, with imaginative touches like Cesar’s vision of a city where everyone has their own private garden and can get places on a moving walkway that’s like a river.
Adam Driver and Francis Ford Coppola on the Megalopolis red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival last month.Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
There are also moments when Megalopolis seems to be a superhero film with Cesar wearing a cape, doing that time pausing thing and cheating death. More consistently, it’s a film about film, with Coppola constantly shifting perspectives and filmmaking techniques, experimenting with split screens and animation at times and relishing its ‘shot on a sound stage’ look.
For a memorable couple of minutes, the screen goes black and an usher in the audience takes over.
Adam Driver as Cesar.
For all the imagination, lofty ideas and experimental boldness in Megalopolis, it’s an uneven film. Driver holds it together but there is too much screen time for minor less-appealing characters, notably Shia LaBeouf as the treacherous Clodio, Aubrey Plaza as the gold-digging Wow Platinum and Jon Voight as the mega wealthy banker Crassus.
It’s no surprise that Coppola financed it himself. Megalopolis is such a swirling bundle of ideas in search of a unifying principle that no-one else would have put up the money. But maybe just this once, the art of cinema can be as important as the box office.
Is it worth watching? As an artistic statement from a legendary filmmaker, a qualified yes. But bear in mind that Coppola makes Baz Luhrmann seem like a shy introvert who makes modest domestic dramas.