Review: Megalopolis (2024)
Spectacle is the main thing in this labor of love by an honored filmmaker
Megalopolis (2024)
Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Like “La Flor,” a 14 hour long film I recently wrote about, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” demands humility on the part of a viewer and reviewer alike. Both films were at least ten years in the making, both attempt to cover an enormous scope. In the case of “La Flor,” it’s over a hundred years of Argentine history and cinema. With “Megalopolis,” it’s a more fanciful epic about rebuilding New York City — called here New Rome — as an echo of the building and governance of Rome more than 2000 years ago.
As everyone whose parents age beyond 75 or 80 has noticed, one of the great advantages of getting old is that you can do whatever the hell you please. Short of interventions by your putative heirs, you can train and attempt to climb Everest, become a skydiver, or go on a 60th anniversary tour with your college rock band. Or you can, as Coppola did, mortgage everything you own to finance one last great gesamtkunstwerk. The mere attempt is admirable; the fact that the work has been finished and released at all — if not completed according to the maestro’s vision — is a crowning achievement. Attention, and respect, must be paid.
Thus the question “Is it good?” is partially beside the point. No art lover or critic would ask that about the paintings in the Rothko Chapel, or of the Sagrada Familia, or the last films of Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman. When considering the work of a master1 artist, sometimes you just have to pay respect — whether or not you pronounce “respect” like an Italian-American.
Earlier this year I watched “Hearts of Darkness,” the behind-the scenes documentary by Eleanor Coppola about the making of “Apocalypse Now.” The massively overbudget and life-threatening attempt to sum up the only recently-ended Vietnam War nearly killed Martin Sheen and nearly drove Coppola mad. Even more than “Apocalypse Now” itself, the documentary about its formation raised Coppola into the pantheon of directors like Werner Herzog2 who are willing and somehow able to defy nature and the laws of physics to bring their visions to fruition. Coppola’s Vietnam War epic was the first time he (and the genius editor Lisa Fruchtman, whose next project was the similarly unwieldy “Heaven’s Gate” and who later was called upon to salvage “The Godfather Part 3”) had to wrestle miles of film into shape. No doubt he drew from that experience to complete “Megalopolis.”
In saying all this, I’m not trying to lower the bar in any way or make excuses for what Coppola has wrought. I’m trying to make it clear that there are reasons to show respect for Coppola regardless of whether “Megalopolis” pleases or entertains you.
Today a San Francisco writer took a hatchet to “Megalopolis,” using every
”I’m mad I wasted my time on this” reviewer cliché in the book. Maybe reading this screed lowered my expectations for the film — and often when that happens before you see a movie, it’s a good thing. Yes, “Megalopolis” is a narrative mess. But so are “The Blue Dahlia” and any number of much-loved movies where it’s possible for the viewer to be hopelessly lost and still enjoy the experience, just as one does when one finds oneself lost on a country road.
I tried above to describe what “Megalopolis” was about, but let me try harder. In an alternate timeline, NYC is called New Rome, and while it’s falling apart, the rich delight themselves with elaborate parties, banquets, and literal circuses. In fact, the way the film treats these spectacles is a good example of how the film balances its modern-day reality — more magical realism than reality — with its homages to imperial Rome. The vast entertainment held in Madison Square Garden features trapeze artists and clowns, as well as a chariot race and sword-fighting gladiators. And yes, the male characters wear Ceasar haircuts and occasionally togas, and have Latin/Roman names like Claudius, Cicero, and Crassus, while the women also wear tunics and long toga-like dress, their hair arranged in chignons. These references to imperial Rome, or at least the clichéd image of ancient Rome in the modern mind, infuse the entire movie.
The reason I brought all that up when trying to describe “what the movie is about” is that these collisions of style actually are much of what the movie contains. Yes, there is a conflict between “mad scientist” and magic architect Cesar (played by Adam Driver), who wants to build a fantastically beautiful and ornamented city, and Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to feed and house people but doesn’t have the governing chops to do it. There are subplots featuring an aggressively ambitious TV journalist named — and even the haters have to admit this character name is a masterstroke — Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and the mayor’s daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel). There is also a fascist claque dressed in red baseball caps (!!) and, just like today, the cops beat the shit out of people with little or no provocation.
The film is much in sympathy with the magic-realist architect Cesar, played by Driver. This is so easy to understand as Coppola valorizing the creative guy whose ideas are vast and crazy-sounding, instead of the public servant who’s just trying to govern, that it seems like a suspiciously reductive way to look at the movie, but the film does lack subtlety. Any negative impacts that result from Cesar’s schemes — at one point he empties and blows up an apartment building — are treated as mere carping. It’s like if the architect in “The Fountainhead” had, as Cesar has in the film, his own formidable security squads that at times overrule the police. Coppola must also have had in mind Robert Moses, the imperious public works czar of New York City from the 1940s to the beginning of the 70s who was more powerful than the mayor.3
Personally, I found the mayor’s position more sympathetic. He has in mind the welfare of the city’s increasingly tenuous populace, while Cesar is trying to build a utopia. This aspect of the conflict between them is more interesting than the one where the mayor doesn’t want his daughter to marry Cesar. It’s also more convincing; between Driver and Emmanuel there’s little chemistry.
So we have all this spectacle, these characters, and a sort of incipient plot. Is that enough? It was enough for “La Dolce Vita,” which “Megalopolis” resembles in parts. In 1960 these elements were enough for English-language reviewers to judge “La Dolce Vita” — if you believe the trailer4 — as a “masterpiece” and “the greatest movie ever made.” I don’t see why Coppola’s film can’t be accorded the same reverence. I saw the Fellini film as an undergrad and was totally lost; I enjoyed “Megalopolis” much more.
I regret that I have to use the term, which is problematic for several reasons, but I can’t think of a good alternative. There probably is one I don’t know about, and when I find out what it is, I’ll write about it in the Notes feature.
“Apocalypse Now” has so much in common with two Herzog films set on South American rivers, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo,” that one wonders what Coppola would have wrought with Klaus Kinski playing Col. Kurtz rather than Marlon Brando.
As seen on the IMDB page for “La Dolce Vita.” Perhaps with this in mind, an early trailer for “Megalopolis” was released with similarly bombastic quotes. The trailer was pulled after someone tried to verify these quotes and found them all to be fake, the product of someone’s AI prompt, according to this story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/25/24228003/megalopolis-trailer-fake-quotes-ai-generated-eddie-egan-dropped-lionsgate But having seen the “La Dolce Vita” trailer, I wonder if the “Megalopolis” trailer could actually have been an homage.