Imagine proposing a movie so dramatic, so opulent and grand, that it destroys your credibility and bankrupts you. It’s something straight out of Poe – or, if you work in Hollywood, a typical pitch meeting. Jodorowsky’s Dune, Tarantino’s Star Trek, Sacha Baron Coen’s Freddy Mercury biopic, any Guillermo del Toro project – the producers shot it down, the suits hated it, the director moved on. But one man did not let his dream die. A madman who directed awful movies and sold award-winning wine to self-fund his passion project. Francis Ford Coppola.
In Megalopolis, Coppola realizes his dreams. I’ve never watched anything like it. The movie follows Adam Driver as Cesar, a radical architect with a risky plan to develop a new, forward-thinking city in place of the decaying New Rome. He comes into conflict with Cicero, (Giancarlo Esposito) the corrupt and unpopular mayor who thinks his plan dangerous, and finds an unlikely ally in Cicero’s daughter, Julia, (Natalie Emmanuel) a socialite enamored by Cesar’s new way of thinking. Cesar also encounters his old flame Wow Platinum, a vain financial reporter, his uncle, the banking tycoon Crassus, and Crassus’ son Clodio, an incestuous nepo baby with a vendetta against Cesar.
With how flat the movie’s cinematography can be, some scenes feel more like dreamlike football commercials than moments from an actual movie. Most of these moments hold no real substance and serve as more of a theatrical backdrop for Coppola’s tangential musings. Their clunky, overlong dialogue reads like porn. For a movie about the New York (sorry, Rome) of the future, the sets look like downtown Cleveland and the special effects are so laughable they remind you of YouTube music video parodies. The design of Cesar’s utopian Megalopolis project looks as if Coppola added gold accents to the first image result for “utopia” on Google Images. You start to wonder where the movie’s $120 million budget went if the end result looks like a Benadryl commercial directed by Tim and Eric.
For example: in roughly the middle of the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Coppola inserts an offputting segment where Cesar gets snared in a sex scandal involving a teen pop singer with an image all about innocence – who Julia exposes as 23 and, bafflingly, from Indonesia. The film then cuts to the singer, now in a punk-rock era where she dresses like a Mad Max extra’s Halloween costume. She’s pissed off, she shouts, and no longer the innocent singer she was made out to be. This lasts for about thirty seconds, with editing that resembles a 2012 Smosh skit.
But despite the incoherent plot and all the baffling camerawork, you can’t look away. Coppola enthralls you with his sheer gall in how he writes and shoots Megalopolis. “I know this is ridiculous,” you can almost hear him saying to the audience, “but this is my movie, and I don’t care.” He subverts anything you might be expecting – not for this movie, but all movies.
Once you realize the sheer scope of Coppola’s vision, and how stubborn he really is (I mean, he did write the whole thing and self-fund it as a middle finger to all the Hollywood execs who rejected him) it gets much easier to embrace the absurdity, and take the movie as it comes: a wild ride through one of his boldest dreams
Let’s return to the movie’s title: MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE. The “fable” aspect of the title explains some of the “stylistic” choices with the dialogue, acting, and cinematography. When Cesar’s chauffeur/historian (who sometimes narrates the movie to hilarious effect) drives him around to show off Cesar’s misunderstood genius, they travel through a dark, gloomy district of New Rome, accompanied by downbeat music. Giant Roman statues of law and justice animate and crumble to pieces around him, as if the movie itself wants to scream “Look at how they’re treating Cesar – it’s not right!” at the viewer.
When I think of a fable, I think of a tall tale: irrational, hyperbolic, sometimes stubborn, but always charming. To me, this explains Megalopolis. It’s a literal tall tale. A fable. A dramatic play.
I find it a fitting postmodern work of art in the vein of Metal Gear Solid 2 or Slaughterhouse-Five. Does this make Megalopolis a masterpiece? No. While the movie’s absurd flights can entertain, the feeling that you’re watching Coppola’s trip reports prevents it from reaching any real heights. The sole writing credit being Coppola’s helps clarify these irrationalities – maybe it’s like The Fountainhead? All I can say is: just keep watching.
One of my favorite moments comes when Julia mentions Cesar to Cicero at a mayoral parade. Cicero shouts, as if performing a soliloquy to the audience: “I can’t stand that guy! He’s the bane of my existence!” I also treasured the scene where Cesar autographs a kid’s book. The dialogue drags on and on, and when Megalopolis unveils its next confusing twist you’ve seen it from a mile away. When an injured Cesar – his sutures made from the golden super-substance Megalon – shows up at Crassus’s house, the music sounds almost one-to-one like a sand level in New Super Mario Bros. When Megalopolis “works”, it feels like an Eric Andre sketch – and it rules.
As much as I’m bashing this movie, I enjoyed watching it. Megalopolis has more character than most, and swims in hilarious moments. It knows what it wants to do, and it sticks to Coppola’s wild dreams in the most dramatic way possible. Once you embrace the fact that the movie has no limits, you won’t be able to take your eyes away from the next unbelievable twist.
Coppola made Megalopolis to show the world his vision, with a devil-may-care attitude towards profits and criticism. In a time when all studios are more preoccupied with profits over art and the regurgitation of IPs to entice audiences’ nostalgia, you have to tip your hat to Coppola for his new ideas and his stance on creating art for art’s sake. People will remember MEGALOPOLIS for its boldness, stubbornness, and sheer creativity, but they’ll also remember it for its baffling plot, incomprehensible characters, and bad cinematography.
6/10. Shoutout to Aubrey Plaza, who gives the best performance and the best line of the movie – “You’re so anal Cesar…. and I’m so oral.”
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