Megalopolis: What’s The Big Idea? Francis Ford Coppola Has Many, And They All Live Here

By Chris Knight

Rating: C

When Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making Megalopolis had its world premiere at the Cannes film festival, the reaction was, as the trade papers like to say, “mixed.” Some critics deemed it woolly and unfocused; others, a career-topping masterpiece.

About the only thing anyone could agree on was that it was big and brash and had a scene in which a live actor in the cinema addressed Adam Driver up on the screen, and his character spoke back. What sorcery was this?

I caught up with it at the Toronto International Film Festival, and quickly fell in with the “woolly and unfocused” crowd. And I never fell out with them again over the film’s two hours and 18 minutes.

To begin with, Megalopolis is set in “New Rome,” recognizably New York (the opening scene takes place at the top of the Chrysler Building) but everyone wears togas. The time period is, according to the on-screen credits, the 21st century — but also the 3rd millennium, in case you weren’t sure when the 21st century was.

But it’s a century of newspapers, flashbulbs and tickertape, neither a cellphone nor social media account in sight. It’s almost as if the writer-director were a child of the ’40s (second millennium.)

The plot involves a power struggle with Shakespearean overtones, and dialogue to match. Driver plays Cesar Catilina, an arrogant architect who has just invented a miracle material called megalon, and who wants to use it to remake New Rome in his own image. Standing in his way is Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), deeply unpopular and hoping to hold onto power with more bread, more circuses.

Then there’s Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, who is sent to ferret information out of Cesar and winds up falling for him instead. Watching from the sidelines (and delivering some of the movie’s more bizarre line readings) are Jon Voight as millionaire Hamilton Crassus III, and Shia LaBeouf as his conniving grandson Clodio. Oh, and Aubrey Plaza, having a ball playing TV personality Wow Platinum, also known as The Money Bunny. Picture Fox News’ answer to Dave Ramsey.

There are a lot of other faces, including barely there performances by Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman, and also Laurence Fishburne, pulling double duty as Cesar’s chauffeur and the film’s narrator. That’s his voice you hear at the beginning intoning: “Our American Republic is not all that different from Old Rome.”

And that, dear moviegoer, is just one of the Big Ideas that’s been shoehorned into Megalopolis, which feels like a closet stuffed full of every errant thought its maker has had these past 40-odd years: Urban decay and its Robert Mosesian antithesis, planning; the quest for power, sex and money; violence both random and institutional; leaving a legacy.

Also, controlling the vicissitudes of entropy, something Cesar does very literally in the opening scene, where he seems about to plunge to his death from a misplaced step atop a skyscraper before bellowing “Time, stop!” And unlike King Canute, he is successful.

And yet... nothing feels real or weighty. Characters make vague pronouncements about power and corruption, quote Marcus Aurelius, deliver Shakespearean soliloquies and yes, talk to the real-life actor in the theatre. But to what end?

And what is megalon? I know more about adamantium, vibranium and unobtainium than I do this groovy new polymer, which shimmers and shifts and is clearly wonderful. But the film is maddeningly vague about what it is or can do, and if it’s a metaphor for something in the real world, it escaped me.

So, not a fan. But I’m going to leave you with the same advice given me by some of the underwhelmed critics from Cannes. See it. Yes, it’s shambolic, technically uneven (some of the computer-generated sets look like they’re from the last millennium), with odd philosophical and plot digressions and no clear tone. But it’s a beautiful mess, a successful failure, a vox paradox.

And I’m not suggesting it’s hate-watch material. (That would be Little Italy.) Rather, it’s the best stew Coppola could make out of a pantry’s worth of ingredients, many of them past their best-before dates.

Had he constructed Megalopolis in the 1980s, with nothing but practical effects and against the backdrop of New York in serious decline, he might have crafted a classic. The cast could have included Gregory Hines, Diane Lane, Robert Duvall, Matt Dillon, maybe Nic Cage!

But New Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we don’t always get the film we want. I doubt even Coppola did with this one. Megalopolis is what it is. You probably wouldn’t want to move there. But it’s worth visiting as a tourist, if only to gape at the locals.

Megalopolis. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Nathalie Emmanuel. In theatres September 27.