Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to genius collapses under a host of empty promises.
Megalopolis (subtitled “A Fable”) offers a grand vision of America juxtaposed against the decadence of ancient Rome just before Caesar Augustus came to power. This is an alternate-universe version of the United States: New York City is New Rome, businessmen wear suits draped like togas, and the powerful recline on plush couches next to the circus while digital ads in Latin scroll around the edges of the arena. Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded vision—his passion project for many decades—is decadently self-indulgent.
On one hand, his approach fits: a story about an empire on the edge of collapsing under its own weight deserves to be told with a flourish. On the other hand, the flourishes in Megalopolis are all empty gestures toward a paternalistic picture of male genius. The film gives us no reason to believe in the vision of its protagonist. We’re expected to root for him purely because he is the protagonist, just as Coppola expects his audience to root for his movie simply because it’s a passion project. The result is an arrogant ode to empty maximalism, a fable without a point.
The film’s maximalism begins with the plot. Cesar (Adam Driver) is the director of New Rome’s Design Authority and is at war with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) over their different visions of how the city should be designed and managed. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) finds herself torn between her familial love for her father and her romantic love for Cesar. At first, Cesar regards Julia as nothing more than a party girl, but he himself has a reputation for debauchery all his own. As the film spins from one bacchanal to another, warring factions struggle for control: a power-hungry celebrity reporter named Platinum Wow (Aubrey Plaza) claws her way up the social ladder; Cesar’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) tries stoking populist fires in his own attempt to gain elected office. All the while, Cesar is consumed from the outside by rumors that he might have murdered his late wife and from the inside by his ambition to build new parts of the city using a mysterious substance he calls “megalon.” As if that isn't enough, Cesar gains, then loses, the ability to stop time with a single word.
The howling fury of the film’s plot is all meant to prop up a mythic level of genius in Cesar, a man against the world who only wants what’s best for the people in his city, though he’ll destroy whole blocks of buildings to get what he wants. But the characterization feels underbaked, bringing to mind unflattering comparisons with another recent movie about a self-destructive genius played by Adam Driver: Michael Mann’s Ferrari. Mann’s movie is honed to a precision point, demonstrating the forces that move Driver’s character without needing to explain them explicitly. In Megalopolis, Driver portrays his character with his typical physical grace: when Cesar is in control of time itself, he modulates his movements minutely, but when he’s in the throes of a bender, he moves like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Coppola’s script and direction leave Driver rudderless, forced to feel his own way into a character that only seems coherent because he’s a mythic kind of superman. No matter the situation, Cesar walks a knife’s edge, forever testing the bounds of what’s possible.
The film is at its best when it’s gesturing toward its grand ideas without feeling the need to explain itself. These moments come only in brief flashes, but they do exist: Cesar dragging Julia through a crowd of partygoers via an invisible rope, red lights projecting massive human shadows against the sides of skyscrapers as New Rome’s citizens await a coming disaster. The symbolism is heavy-handed but effective; more frequently, Coppola feels the need to explain his symbolism directly to the audience. Megalopolis suggests that society has pushed itself to the point that everything seems permissible; the citizens live and make their fortunes by debauchery. The massive statues of Justice and Minerva in the city literally stumble under the weight of the city’s injustice. Julia narrates the injustices she sees and explains Cesar’s motivations to herself and the audience in bored voiceover: a female character whose only function is to shore up the myth of the man at the center of the story.
Among Megalopolis’s most striking misfires—and there are many—is the film’s treatment of women, a form of old-school misogyny so total that it’s unaware of itself. Like Cesar’s late wife before her, Julia exists to be a blank-slate interlocutor for Cesar’s ideas. Other women in the story are relegated to the respective roles of matron, conniving gold-digger, or party girl, their characterization as empty as the script that drives them. When confronted about her love for Cesar, Julia asks, “Could I love someone evil?” By the movie’s logic, Julia is a good person because she loves Cesar, and at the same time Cesar can’t be a bad person purely because Julia loves him: an assertion of his worthiness as a hero that is never earned, only stated. The arc of the story is that genius will save civilization from destruction, and that only the brilliant can recognize genius and interpret it: an outsider story told by someone who became an elder statesman of cinema a long time ago. Time to stop telling us about this supposed genius. Megalopolis is all talk with nothing substantial to say.
★☆☆☆
Megalopolis is in theaters nationwide now.