Jackson: Francis Ford Coppola, are you okay?
To say that I saw Megalopolis when I was abroad at the Cannes Film Festival is a fraction of the truth. What actually happened was that after an all–nighter waiting for another movie, my friends and I got in line at 4:00 a.m. for the 8:30 a.m. Megalopolis showing. Our efforts paid off; we were some of the first people in the theater from the last–minute line. I paid the price for my passion, though, when I fell asleep approximately five minutes into the movie, jolting awake at various times over the next two–plus hours to catch a random disjointment of scenes. The film seemed like a confusing, ridiculous mess.
Back in the US, my non–sleep–deprived review of the film in its entirety is about the same. Megalopolis is crammed so full of Western world cinematic and historical content that it appears on the verge of bursting at the seams, and Francis Ford Coppola’s illustrious budget is visually apparent everywhere you look.
Aden: I’m not sure Francis Ford Coppola has ever been “okay.” With this in mind, I think there are two important facts to point out when talking about him and his newly released epic, Megalopolis. The first is that Coppola has never been a subtle artist. Throughout his illustrious career, Coppola has made many types of films, but I wouldn’t argue that a single one of them is subtle. The second is that Coppola will always swing big. He’s not the type of artist to make something by half–measure.
A lot of the reviews of Megalopolis have noted how bizarre and unexpected it is. And while some moments of the film did leave me with my jaw on the floor, I was struck more by how in line this film is with Coppola’s work, especially his 21st century output, and with the wider history of the late career work of aging masters.
Megalopolis retains the self–reflective tone that has dominated Coppola’s work of the past two decades in films like Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt. It also feels right in line with a series of “great man” films Coppola has made like The Conversation, The Godfather trilogy, and Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Coppola’s effort even feels in conversation with the late career work of many of his New Hollywood peers; it has a similar melancholic, old–man–looking–back–on–his–life quality as many of Martin Scorsese’s and Steven Spielberg’s late career films like The Irishman, Silence, and The Fabelmans, while looking and sounding a lot like George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels.
Jackson: But what is Megalopolis actually about? The film’s murky plot follows Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) through his rivalry with Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and discouraged romance with the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel, but the character might as well have been played by a cardboard cutout) as he attempts to use time–control powers to create a new world. Almost none of the characters are compelling to watch, nor do they undergo any genuine development; the few notable women are hypersexualized and male–dependent, barely scraping meaningfully by the Bechdel test and exist without an ounce of retrospective self–awareness in regards to the strides for on–screen representation taken in the industry since the days of The Godfather.
New Rome, the setting of the film, is the Roman Empire’s and New York City’s lovechild, complete with the phenotypes of only the most politically useless components of each—gladiator fights, skyscrapers, and misattributed, unimpactful homages to pivotal—plus the ostentation of the Capitol from The Hunger Games with none of that series’ social commentary. And what’s significantly different about the “progressive utopia” that Cesar is attempting to build? Well, it has a lot of shiny golden leaves and the magical equivalent of those airport moving sidewalks. In regards to progress, that’s about all we get.
Aden: I think you’re selling Coppola a little short here. Coppola’s work has always been deeply indebted to his predecessors and Megalopolis is no different. It has the amorphous, post–cinema quality that a lot of later period Jean–Luc Godard films have. It has the nakedly earnest, stream of consciousness feeling that Akira Kurosawa achieved in films like Ran and Dreams. It combines Coppola’s love for German Expressionism with his passion for Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius. It’s the product of 40 years worth of thinking and craft.
Megalopolis is by no means a tight film with a clear logic or a single point to make; it’s an old man looking back on his career and life wondering why it hasn’t amounted to more and fearing for the next generation. Coppola stated that his biggest regret is his generation not leaving the film industry in a better place than they found it. I couldn’t stop thinking about that quote while watching Megalopolis.
Jackson: Sure, but considering that Coppola has observed the evolution of both the film industry and the world at large over the course of his life, there was a major missed opportunity to provide genuinely interesting and specific social commentary. Instead, despite being packed with so much all at once, Megalopolis incorporates almost nothing of substance, barely tells a story, and doesn't say a single novel thing about modern society or Western history. Yes, the dazzling spectacle, lavish sets, and sparkling effects are fun, but they get old very quickly because cinematic devices should mean something at the end of the day, whether they’re narrative, thematic, or political. At best, Megalopolis is trite and boring.
At worst, it insults its audience by assuming that the ceiling of their intelligence is essentially a flashing sign that says "REMEMBER ROME?" (also, characters randomly quoting Aurelius and Shakespeare does not necessarily make it a high–brow, intellectual flick. To me, it feels more like the blockbuster cinema equivalent of using a citation in an essay without attempting to creatively contextualize its relevance.)
Aden: This is where I think we disagree most. To me, Megalopolis is brimming with ideas to the point that Coppola is forced to condense most of his thoughts into fragments or pieces. He creates a world on the brink of ruin, where statues literally crumble within his imagined city of New Rome. Caesar Catalina, operating obviously as a stand–in for Coppola, dreams of creating his utopia called Megalopolis.
Coppola isn’t subtle about this messaging, but what surprised me was how ultimately self–critical he is. I don’t think you can watch the film and come away thinking Driver’s character is supposed to be seen as a hero. He’s an egotistical, alcoholic, sexist, ultimately pathetic man. Megalopolis is not Coppola casting himself as some savior of humanity—it's him trying to come to terms with the fact that he isn’t.
This is all on top of the craft of the film that I’d argue is superb. Few films these days are as ambitious visually. Coppola employs a similar effects–heavy, expressionistic style he used in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now aided by the development of computer effects. Megalopolis is also funny in a way almost all Coppola films are. A lot of reviews have put this down to being unintentionally funny, but I think they’re missing the point. Jon Voight hiding his bow and arrow as a boner under his covers is funny. Naming Aubrey Plaza’s character Wow Platinum is funny. The entire gag of Shia LaBeouf starting a string of men throwing their hats down for the man behind them to pick up is funny. Coppola’s films have always combined ridiculous sight gags with ultra–serious tonal shifts and Megalopolis is no different.
Jackson: I do admit that I laughed at some of the moments that you mention, but I would still consider the film’s humor largely unintended: more juxtaposed stupidity than cleverly written jokes. It works well enough with the overall style of the film, but if Coppola is aiming for comedy, I want to hold him and his masterpiece to a higher standard.
I will say, however, that Plaza’s contribution of comic relief is by far the best part of the film—her gold–digging, seductress–girlboss Wow Platinum might be one piece of an overall horrible treatment of female characters, but Plaza is extremely entertaining to watch and steals the show as the only performer who looks as though she’s actually having fun. Otherwise, the film feels overwhelmingly glum and humorless. If Coppola had the foresight (or any firsthand knowledge of what’s actually “cool” right now), he could have rescued his long–awaited project with some biting satire.
Megalopolis is not a Roman epic nor an anthropological fable. It is the out–of–touch fever dream of an old, rich, white man, who will never be able to meaningfully critique systems of government and wealth and class and power because he has benefited from them more than most people his whole life. Coppola, clearly ignorant to youth–powered movements of social change, displays the illusion of progressive change through Cesar, with very little active thought given to specifically how a new world would benefit the people within it. I doubt anything failed along the way in the production process—the movie likely turned out to be exactly what he’d envisioned it to be, and it’s a complete waste of time.
Aden: It’s this kind of reaction, the outright dismissals of Megalopolis, that I think ultimately reflects negatively on our film culture as a whole. If people see a movie that doesn’t look or sound like either a Marvel movie or a classic Oscar–bait prestige film, they have no idea what to do with it and dismiss it as “bad.”
I don’t think Megalopolis is a great film. I’m not sure exactly what I’d call it. But I do know that it’s the freshest, most original, most fearless film I’ve seen in some time. Do all its plot threads and messaging come together? Of course not. But the film has more ideas at play than any other movie released this year. Combining the self–reflection of an old man with his fear and dismay at the future of our society makes for a film that I could never take my eyes off of. The outright dismissal of Megalopolis has made me scared for the future of filmgoing and film culture as a whole. If we can’t make space for a master making his life's work, what can we make room for?
