Francis Ford Coppola presents an experimental vision of the future which already feels strangely old-fashioned. Hereās our Megalopolis review.
If you’ve seen any of the whispers coming out of Megalopolis screenings since its first screenings in March, you’d be forgiven for describing reactions as “mixed”.
Something of “emperors” and “new clothes” comes to mind. Coppola, after all, is responsible for at least three films universally considered to be cornerstones of American cinema. In the titanic hold he and his New Hollywood colleagues have on the medium’s past and present, it’s hard to find anyone held in such awe. He is, in a contrived, journalists-bloody-love-a-good-synonym kind of way, a bit like the Roman empire (please, for the love of God, don’t think about this too hard).
At the same time, Coppola hasn’t directed a film since 2011’s Twixt, and he himself admits he “sort of retired” from the business following his last big screen hit – 1997’s The Rainmaker. Spielberg and Scorsese have never been out of the filmmaking game long enough to let audiences forget how good they are at their jobs. As Megalopolis’ botched critic-bashing trailer demonstrated, the director behind Apocalypse Now is somehow approaching his latest epic with something to prove.
Probably the best thing that can be said about Megalopolis is that it isn’t playing things safe. The city of New Rome takes its name at face value: a chariot-laden colosseum brushes against the Statue of Liberty and the Chrysler Building. Here, unadorned 21st century police vehicles brush against 70s sports cars. The disenfranchised masses wear modern clothes while the pampered elites dress like children let loose in a dressing up box. Journalists wield flashbulbs larger than their heads, while Aubrey Plaza’s controversial news anchor, Wow Platinum, beckons her camera operator forward like an influencer on the red carpet.
In this modern American playground, Adam Driver’s charismatic architect, Cesar, has a vision of the future. His inner-city development (Megalopolis) leaps straight from the sci-fi imaginings of the 1950s, all elegant spirals and impractical curves twisting into a gold-plated utopia. Against him stands New Rome’s conservative mayor, Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, and the pair face-off in a battle for their city’s soul.
This is Coppola’s white whale. First conceived in 1977 and officially entering production more than 40 years ago, Megalopolis has been on quite the journey. It’s impossible to say whether the film now in cinemas at all resembles the one first committed to paper, but it certainly doesn’t seem touched by the intervening years, technically or socially. Its main artistic influences seem to be a combination of Fritz Lang, sixties historical epics and ancient Greek theatre. Every woman in the film is defined almost exclusively as love interest, mother or sister to a great man; bottoms are spanked and sex proffered like a bizarre, sexist fusion of opera and Carry On Columbus.
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The use of CGI – prevalent throughout – is (deliberately?) naff. A generous viewer could see this as drawing attention to its own artifice like a Greek tragedy in an amphitheatre. A less generous one would say Coppola has never used a green screen before, and it shows.
Most of the film’s actors seem to be approaching the material like a piece of experimental theatre. Shia LaBeouf, as Cesar’s cousin, Clodio, enters rooms dancing, snapping his fingers, twirling, doing anything to stretch out the two or three complete sentences the scene demands from him. Aubrey Plaza, probably the actor who most entertainingly captures the film’s mad, seductive tone, has the time of her life playing the most femme of all femmes fatales.
This doesn’t matter so much as it might sound, because Megalopolis is wholly uninterested in things like “character development” or “plot”. The broad strokes of the story can more or less be pieced together from the start, but the voyage to get there feels somewhat… alien. It’s a film so unutterably bizarre in such a different way to the weirdest, most experimental corners of modern cinema that it’s hard to take your eyes off it. The fact it exists at all feels like the laws of logic and reason took a day off.
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Because Megalopolis is, at the end of the day, art. Whether it’s good art or bad, painfully out of touch or searingly of-the-moment, it almost doesn’t matter. In what may well prove the final knock of his hammer and chisel, Coppola has made something so lacking from the mainstream cinema space that its arrival feels like whiplash. More than any blockbuster in recent memory, this feels like one person’s artistic vision writ on the largest canvas, with the most expensive tools available to him.
It’s loud. It’s messy. It might even be indefensible garbage. But you can’t say Megalopolis isn’t human; what higher praise can we give than that?
Megalopolis is out in UK cinemas on the 27th September 2024