In Motion #66 - Megalopolis

Beyond good and bad, beyond success and failure...

This past Spring, I had the opportunity to visit the Broad musuem in Los Angeles. Its own work of art in both design and structure, the building is home to an impressive, diverse array of contemporary pieces. Among the paintings and sculptures and prints that were on display at the time, the work of three artists stand out in my memory. Famous ones, of course: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons. I was shocked by how un-shocked Warhol’s work left me: it felt like an old, old man’s idea of what once was radical. I recall very little color; time seems to have drained everything “pop” and “modern” from the soup cans and the prints of Elizabeth Taylor’s face. The Lichtensteins were gorgeous; I found myself practically falling into those primary colors, as if they’d just been painted yesterday. One of the works reminded me so much of somebody I know that I took a picture to show it to them, Lichtenstein’s impossibly sharp angles creating a gorgeous face gripped in confusion (the person in question saw no resemblance). Then, there was Jeff Koons. Koons is a controversial artist, his work praised and reviled in just about equal measure. I admit, I could hardly look away from the gold-plated train sets and his infamous “Bubbles” sculpture. To have an unvarnished look into another person’s soul, even that of a over-praised hack who paints race cars and churns out stainless-steel balloon dogs, is a very special thing.

The story of Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s first theatrically released film in over a decade, is the story of Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Emphasized on both the poster and the title card as “A Fable”, the film is set in an alternate version of the United States where the Roman Empire never really died; while New York is now cast as “New Rome”, its corruption and inequality remains intact. As the head of the city’s “Design Authority”, Cesar is determined to use his invention “megalon”, a magical bullshit substance that can support buildings, revolutionize clothing and heal broken bones in record speed, to reshape the city into a utopia. Standing directly in his way is Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a professional buzzkill who rejects the architect’s dreams as wastes of both time and money, often by standing in front of a microphone and literally calling them wastes of time and money. Also conspiring against Cesar is his snickering cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf, giving a typically normal performance) and the subtly named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), both of whom desire to strip his enormously weathly uncle Crassus (Jon Voight) for spare parts. On Cesar’s side is love interest Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), daughter to Franklin, whose primary functions are to support her man, make babies, and drop the occasional Marcus Aurelius quote.

Oh, and a Soviet satillite’s going to crash into Earth any minute now.

Oh, and Dustin Hoffman plays a guy named “Nush Berman”.

Oh, and there’s a Taylor Swift-like pop star named Vesta (Grace VanderWaal), whose virginity is so famous that a bunch of rich old geezers openly pledge millions of dollars to her celibate cause.

Oh, and Cesar has the ability to stop time itself.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure LaBeouf’s character is schtupping his sisters.

Both the best and worst thing about Megalopolis is how fucking weird it is. For the past twenty some-odd years, Mr. Coppola has spent his time making a ton of wine money, directing a trio of odd, digitally-shot passion projects (Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt), and gently receeding into the canvas of cinematic history. And then, post-pandemic, Coppola suddenly announced that he’d sold most of his wine business and would use the money to fund Megalopolis, a magnum opus he’d spent decades trying to make. As such, the final film has the energy of a man, long bored with conventional cinematic language, trying to squeeze every visual and thematic idea into the same box before death arrives (the man turned 85 in April). And you’d be hard pressed to find something this expensive that also happens to be this experimental: cross-fades upon cross-fades, montages upon montages, dream-like images of blooming flowers and sinking corpses sitting side-by-side with the film’s main narrative, the characters’s own thoughts often bleeding into the film they occupy. At one point the film’s scenary literally breaks apart, revealing itself to be painted costumes worn by actors; at another, the screen goes dark and (in certain IMAX screenings) a paid actor will walk in front of the screen and appear to ask Cesar a question at a news conference.

But for every flight of fancy within Coppola’s film, there is an equally dramatic fall, usually ending in a loud, squelching splat. Megalopolis’s surreal, bewildering style leads to a story where specifics are never made clear, where scenes lurch and heave into themselves like careening train carriages. The actors are often occupying different genres; LaBeouf, Plaza and Voight are basically just guffawing cartoons, whereas Driver and Emmanuel admirably trudge their way through a melodramatic dirge. And try as he might to spin digital straw into digital gold, in the end it’s still a bunch of ones and zeros; Coppola’s visual ambition frequently frays the edges of the alleged $120 million+ he spent on the film, with unconvincing green screens and muddy dream sequences cluttering his frames. When the city of New Rome isn’t consisting of thin crowds shuffling through barely-disguised Atlanta alleyways, it exists as crummy computerized composites, the people who Cesar apparently lives and dies for depicted as tiny, paper-thin CGI cutouts. Maybe he shouldn’t have fired his entire VFX team.

If “memorability” was what Coppola was going for with Megalopolis, he succeeded with flying colors. There are almost no boring scenes within its 138 minute runtime. Famous people do funny voices. Boners are referenced, pubic hair is seen. At one point Cesar is shot in the face by a 12-year-old boy; after his megalon is used as a cure-all and the bandages are removed, Egyptian-like music plays to underscore his momentary resemblance to a mummy. LaBeouf holds several Proud Boy-like meetings, one of which climaxes with him screaming “SHUT THE FUCK UP” through a megaphone at an off-screen heckler. A shoddy deep-fake depicting Cesar having sex is briefly crucial to the plot. During a climatic riot, Giancarlo Esposito screams during a televised press conference while wearing a WWII helmet. Stock footage of both Adolf Hitler and 9/11 play during the film’s final montage. And it all feels genuine; Coppola truly loved this thing, for better or for worse. To watch Megalopolis is to watch something that was cared for, is full of meaning, is disinterested in convention and conformity. But none of that means Megalopolis actually works, either as a compelling piece of drama or as a socio-creative manifesto.

I’m going to repeat some names: Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight. Three male actors of dubious repute, all of whom Coppola claims he hired for the purpose of weaponizing their dubious reputes. LaBeouf is a notoriously difficult asshole whose been accused of physical abuse by his ex-girlfriend, musician FKA Twigs. Dustin Hoffman is a notoriously difficult asshole whose been accused by seven women of commiting acts of either sexual harrassment or sexual assault. Jon Voight is an idiot who likes to record videos where his sits in front of an American flag and talks about how great Donald Trump is. Coppola apparently wanted to dissuede viewers of the notion that Megalopolis would be “some woke Hollywood production”, and as such hired “cancelled” actors to craft something politically eclectic. I, for one, am suspicious about Coppola’s claims: if he really wanted to ascend above the culture war bullshit of America’s present and cast actors with both liberal and conservative beliefs, why is Voight the only “cancelled” actor here who actually identifies as a conservative? The other guys are just cruel to women. Perhaps Coppola didn’t care about any of that? Perhaps he knows, deep down, that there’s no actual throughline on display here? That all of this is just an excuse to go ham with some booze money?

If I’m to meet Megalopolis on its own terms, that being an intended social document that showcases the possible ways of life we could all lead, it’s not a very good one. It wants to depict the virtues of a diverse, utopic future while spending most of its energy proselytizing about a white, male, blue blood super genius. Cesar is a deep thinker who repeatedly monologues about wanting to “start a conversation”, albeit one that he both starts and finishes. There is no debate that he ever loses, no cause of his that isn’t righteous. His plan to evict an entire housing project, dynamite it into a parking lot and then replace it with bubble-shaped taxis and liquid autowalks, is depicted as the work of a maverick visionary. The huddled masses that pound and riot are somehow satiated by Cesar’s promise of a world that might be better if they just listen to him, the rich guy who blew up their homes. No matter how much time Coppola dedicates to eviscerating MAGA (LaBeouf’s character is decidedly Trump-like, Proud Boy-esque rioters occasionally wander onto the screen) and proclaiming the virtures of “utopia”, the hollow scent of neoconservatism is hard to miss. A lone man who knows better than the rest? A genius architect who speechifies to the unenlightened many? A direct correlation between the ones with money and the ones with vision? Why, Mr. Coppola…have you been reading Rand?

This is an interesting one. Interesting is good, especially when rendered with so much color and crafted with so much passion. But “good” is a useless word here. “Bad” is as well. There are times where Megalopolis feels like the first movie, the last movie, and perhaps the only movie. It doesn’t feel like it was made by the same filmmaker who made The Godfather, because it doesn’t seem it was made by a filmmaker at all. It feels like a dream that was beamed directly from the mind that bore it, a mind both fascinating and exhausting in equal measure. I suppose your enjoyment of this film will depend upon your enjoyment of the credited writer, director and producer. Because the story of Megalopolis is not just that of Cesar Catilina, but that of Francis Ford Coppola, of a self-proclaimed visionary whose capacity for brilliance is matched only by his capacity for bone-headed idiocy. This movie doesn’t offer us a glimpse into a possible present or future, it offers us a glimpse into the mind of a man who became so broke in the 80’s that he probably saw the gates of Hell open within his own bank account. I don’t wish more films resembled Coppola’s vision, but I do wish more of them resembled a vision. Like I said before: it’s a special thing to see into another person’s soul.

(Megalopolis is barely playing in theaters)