Minor spoilers ahead.
It's always a little bizarre when a long-gestating film project actually makes it to the big screen. Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" has been in the works since the 1980s. It was always characterized as one of those ambitious epics with few box office prospects, something that didn't seem like it was ever going to escape development hell. However, Coppola self-financed "Megalopolis," his first film in over a decade, reportedly spending $120 million of his own money on the production. He had complete artistic freedom, and as a result has produced a film that totally defies convention.
I'm a little at a loss as to how to describe the plot. "Megalopolis" takes place in an alternate reality where the U.S. seems to have merged with Roman antiquity. The city of New Rome is controlled by several prominent families, notably those of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the rich banker Crassus (Jon Voight). Our protagonist is Crassus's brilliant architect nephew Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), who dreams of building a Megalopolis to inspire the people and unlock the city's true potential. However, he's a womanizer and alcoholic, who has never gotten over the death of his wife. Antagonists include Crassus's other nephew, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), and Cesar's TV presenter mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), both power-hungry and loathsome. On Cesar's side are Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who goes against her father to help create Megalopolis, and loyal driver Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fisburne), who is also our narrator.
My first instinct is to talk about Ayn Rand and "The Fountainhead," because of all the talk of architecture and utopias. Or we could talk about Robert Moses, the urban planner responsible for how New York City looks today. However, what's more interesting is how "Megalopolis" draws from early cinema history to tell this story. There's the use of lofty title cards with each new chapter, glitzy throwback fashions, and grandiose settings (mostly achieved with CGI), recalling the bygone epics of Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang. Suddenly there will be a kaleidoscopic effect or an optical illusion recalling Dziga Vertov. Split-screen triptychs are a recurring visual, straight out of the finale of Abel Gance's "Napoleon." One sequence was designed so a live actor would play an interviewer reciting lines to the screen, and Cesar Catalina would break the fourth wall and respond. I strongly suspect that "Megalopolis" would be a more effective film if you took out all the dialogue, which is often a lot of mumbled aphorisms and references to Roman history that don't seem to add up to much of a coherent story.
Most of "Megalopolis" was shot on green screens, placing the characters in these impossible fantasy cityscapes. If I can recommend "Megalopolis" for anything it's the old school spectacle. There are some really eye-catching visuals, mostly of New Rome and its inhabitants. I don't know enough about VFX to say how good the work is on a technical level, but Coppola isn't doing anything too complicated here, mostly staying in conventional frames. Some of the composition is so informed by Classical paintings and architecture, it felt like I was watching a Peter Greenaway film. The Roman aesthetics are filtered through Old Hollywood glamor, emphasizing opulence and hedonism. Shia LaBeouf's character is the most obvious example of this, who appears for a good chunk of the film in gilded period drag. I can't help but draw comparisons to "Caligula," which recently had a new edit and restoration. These are both gorgeous films that are overlong, wildly indulgent, and beat us over the head with their tales of powerful men trying to establish their legacies. "Caligula" has the upper hand, however, because it has the better performances.
That brings us to Adam Driver, who has been in an awful lot of these auteur passion projects lately. All of the characters are essentially ciphers in "Megalopolis," standing in for particular political or philosophical viewpoints. Driver rants and raves and professes his guilt and love and agony, but there's no verve behind it. That great physicality and urgency he had in his performances five years ago seems to have largely dissipated. It could be the role - Cesar Catalina spends most of his time moping about nobody understanding his vision and letting other people save him from his enemies. This is a character whose big move is making big speeches, and polished oratory isn't really Driver's strength. The only actors who come out okay are Aubrey Plaza - born to play the femme fatale - and Shia LaBeouf just because he delivers so much camp value.
In the end, it feels like Francis Ford Coppola made exactly the movie he meant to make - a big, shiny, personal statement about art and society and love that may not make sense to anyone except him. I find this tremendously admirable, despite finding the film itself almost totally incomprehensible. However you want to slice it, it's undeniably Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis," and I'm glad he decided to share it with us.
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