NATHAN WEINBENDER:
For most of his career, Francis Ford Coppola has been dreaming about Megalopolis, a cerebral fantasy epic about an architect who has himself dreamt up an immense vision that seems almost impossible. Coppola, now 85, self-financed the production for $120 million, and following a lukewarm response at the Cannes Film Festival and troubling stories from the set, Megalopolis finally arrives in theaters as damaged goods.
That Coppola’s decades-long passion project would be met not with fanfare but a chorus of raspberries is mercifully on-brand. His post-’70s career is littered with weird experiments and critical flops, many of which have been reevaluated and reedited by Coppola himself. Megalopolis is, if you squint hard enough, a story about the delusion it requires to make something bigger than yourself, and an achingly personal movie about a creator who can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s running out of time.
There’s a lot going on in Megalopolis, but it basically boils down to this. There’s a sprawling city called New Rome, which looks suspiciously like New York but with more ionic columns, togas and laurel crowns.
Our hero is a John Galt type named Cesar Catillina (Adam Driver), who has won the Nobel Prize for developing a miracle biomaterial called "Megalon." It will figure into his plans for the dream city of Megalopolis, where everyone is equal, all the buildings resemble plants, and the sidewalks look like those people movers in the airport. Cesar is in a near-constant battle with New Rome’s mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), a former prosecutor who once led an investigation into the mysterious death of Cesar’s wife. Meanwhile, the mayor’s daughter falls in love with Cesar, Cesar’s mistress marries his doddering financier uncle, and Cesar’s cousin has aspirations of political extremism.
That complicated web of vice and corruption serves as a counterpoint to the purity of Cesar’s vision. He’s a brilliant creative mind, but he’s also a drunk and a womanizer. He’s running from grief. He’s high off a recent success but can’t get focused enough to finish the even bigger follow-up. He’s disappearing into old memories and playing them back, tweaking them so that they better fit his current needs. It’s a wonder Coppola didn’t simply cast himself.
Look, there’s no getting around the fact that Megalopolis is an unfocused mess. It has way too much going on, and yet it feels like big chunks of it are missing. It can’t simply let its many ideas and themes land gracefully but must speak them aloud in extremely obvious, underlined dialogue. Some reviews have called it the worst film of Coppola’s career, or simply one of the worst films of any career.
But this movie is too bold and too singular to be written off so blithely. I sat there in awe of its sheer ungainly immensity, misguided though it may be. I’m less fascinated by what it’s doing than what it represents, both within Coppola’s body of work and the current state of auteur-driven filmmaking (both of which are extremely fraught). It has the brash, unruly energy of a young rebellious director with a million ideas and a blank check, but it’s also weighed down by the feeling that an old man is putting his final will and testament on film.
The world has passed Francis Ford Coppola by, no matter how much money he spends to make it stop for him, and this movie’s pleas for ingenuity and progress feel like a bellwether that came way, way too late. An intriguing, confounding, bewildering thing it is.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
