Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a lot of things, but “commercially viable” isn’t one. It’s strange to think that a movie with this pedigree but these thunderously anachronistic and iconoclastic choices inside it will get a platform release from Lionsgate within a month. I’m not complaining – it’s a miracle that Coppola’s vineyards were so successful that he was able to finance the film himself, and even more, that he was able to find distribution for it – but those who walk into the IMAX theater during its week-long stint on screen need to realize is that the Coppola isn’t the same person who made their favorite films. The man who made The Godfather films, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and so on stopped giving a damn about what audiences thought about him and his work decades ago; and it’s only been within this century that he stopped pretending that he did. Since the turn of the century, Coppola’s output has been strange, with Twixt and Tetro barely making an impact despite coming from one of the great directors of the latter half of the 20th. If you were hoping that Megalopolis would see him abandon those art-first interests and styles in favor of a last-ditch attempt to reassert his legacy, you might likely join in the chorus of folks who will make fun of what is a deeply earnest, personal, beautiful and often cringe-worthy film that accumulates a near half-century of perspective on cinema into a scant two hours. If that ain’t ambitious, I don’t know what is.
Megalopolis has long been a passion project of Coppola’s – you could call it his white whale if you were inclined to go Melville with it – and you can feel the wait this has had to make it to the screen in the final product. This is especially obvious in the first hour, which feels as if it were genuinely unaltered from the first drafts he penned in the ‘70s. The dialogue, the framing, and the dripping-with-cynical-sincerity analysis of American culture: When combined, they evoke Thompson’s high-water mark of the ‘60s counterculture receding into Nixon’s second term, which Coppola feels is directly applicable to our situation today. The story is about a struggle for the future in a fictionalized New York called “New Rome,” where Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an architect working for the federal government and the city, comes into conflict with the Mayor, a long-time bureaucrat named Cicero (Giancarlo Stanton), over his plan to create the city of the future. This is the Megalopolis of the title, which uses a new metal that Catalina synthesized to grow and change for the needs of its population and environment. Cicero resents him because he’s a threat to his power, and he knows what he believes to be the “real” Cesar: When he was district attorney, he prosecuted the architect for the murder of his spouse. Yet the actual conflict is ideological: he also has a different vision of the future than the architect does: His city is perfect as it is, and the new metal only stands to transform the place into something that he no longer recognizes. But Cesar has his eyes on the future — and the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who he romances haltingly as he’s still processing his wife’s mysterious death.
Age has softened Coppola to a degree, and what I imagine as the original conflict between these dueling futures resolves itself surprisingly quickly, taking a backseat to palace intrigue in a prominent banking family. They are Cesar’s relatives, with his uncle Hamilton (Jon Voight) attempting to steer his son Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) from hedonism towards adulthood. Clodio hates his cousin because he’s brilliant, of course, and he eventually partners with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a gold-digging TV host and a former lover of Cesar’s, to take control of his father’s empire and smother Cesar’s golden age in the crib. If Megalopolis has a villain, it’s Plaza, who schemes to ensure her survival, using her proximity to the famous and powerful to advance her selfish interests. Her performance gives the film its edge, especially as it moves into more abstract territory. Her marriage to Hamilton – a lecherous old man with a bizarre heart of gold – is the film’s centerpiece, taking place at the modern-day Coliseum, Madison Square Garden (even if it’s a fictional city, Coppola doesn’t care about fully separating this world from ours). There are chariot races, wrestling matches, high-wire trapeze artists, and clowns, all while Cesar is going through a drunken nightmare in the bowels of the arena. It’s here when Clodio and Wow’s plots collide, and the nature of their opposition to Cesar solidifies. They’ll take him down by any means – even if it means destroying the reputation of a vestigial virgin (Grace Vanderwaal, playing, in essence, a togaed pop star) in the process. All seems doomed, and then disaster strikes the city, allowing all players to advance their interests unexpectedly. Will Julia and Cesar prevail, or will New Rome suffer the same fate as its predecessor?
The first 45-or-so minutes is where I imagine Coppola will lose some of his audience: It’s the most traditional segment of the film, yet also the most out-of-touch with current cinema and haltingly self-indulgent. There are garish intertitles that step on Lawrence Fishburne’s narration, the framing and the sound mix are at odds with each other (many of the early scenes are staged as if they were from the dramas that Coppola grew up with, while the sound mix is layered and busy – a still camera angle with a whole lot of noise which makes the rhythm hard to catch), and the metaphor hasn’t had time to catch on an image or sync up with filmmaking worth of Coppola’s ambition. Call it ring rust or the product of the script pages yellowing with age – either way, it’s rough and unflatteringly pretentious, with Driver’s recitation of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy encapsulating everything that’s wrong with it. It’s delivered well by Driver, who remains in top form throughout the entire film, but it’s an intellectual appeal delivered to the audience at precisely the wrong time. Even the film’s synopsis seems to rush over the hour of set-up we endure before the film’s true inciting incident comes along – the “tragedy,” as outlined above, doesn’t come into play until the middle of the second act. Yet, unlike some critics, I found the more outrageous elements of Megalopolis, such as its humor, to be a feature and not a bug, though it also takes some amount of time for them to truly get good (there’s a ridiculous gag near the end of the movie that is worth the cost of admission, and I sincerely hope you stick around long enough to see it).
Yet, much like Cesar’s plant-influenced architecture, it takes a bit for Coppola’s flowery imagery to open up and longer for us to soak in the sunshine alongside him. When it does, though, you’re reminded of how underrated he is as a visual stylist – the in-camera effects of Dracula are echoed, as well as the absurd beauty of One From the Heart – and Megalopolis becomes a sumptuous visual feast, utilizing modern technology to create some truly stunning and IMAX-worthy imagery. Some shots are heart-wrenchingly gorgeous: Driver, sitting alone atop a suspended steel beam, staring into the city, made possible by his use of the Volume, the LED screens that were developed for The Mandalorian that make it possible to simulate a digital environment behind an actor instead of using blue screen. Others are terrifyingly beautiful — during the tragedy I mentioned, we see glimpses of the shadows of soon-to-be annihilated people streaking up the sides of buildings, cast in blood-red flare light – and some hopeful, as Coppola’s vision of this future city essentially makes the landscape into a series of gold-covered laurels, peaceful perfection befitting a city on a hill. This is when Coppola fully realizes the visions that have tormented him for the better part of a century, and they were well worth the wait for the technology to become financially viable for an independent production such as this.
I’m always vaguely touched by the last hurrah of a master filmmaker, where they attempt to craft a thesis statement worthy of their prior endeavors and pursue those final thoughts and images wherever they may take them: It’s an ambitious way to punctuate a legacy, provided they’re able to keep working until then. In some ways, Coppola was damned by his early success – more so than any other director (aside from, perhaps, Dennis Hopper), he was synonymous with the New Hollywood and its peak and has the hardware to prove it – and the years that followed look, to the untrained eye, as if he spent decades trying to get back to that height. But his work always strived to break free from studio convention and the watchful eye of return-hungry producers and investors, and the man nearly bankrupted himself several times over trying to follow his vision where it took him. If Megalopolis means anything other than its platitudes about American democracy and the need for a “conversation” about our future, it is Coppola’s rebuttal to our cultural perception of him as a once-great filmmaker who retreated into abstraction as a way to circumvent outside control: He was always this director, even in his populist era, and the aspects of his skill that made him such a unique cinematic force have never really ebbed, even if you hold up Jack as something other than a quick cash-grab.
Coppola has always been an artist, and his true enemy has never been the audience member — it’s always been those in power who never understood what he was after, and that vision never considered what the people in the seats wanted anyway. Warts and all, Megalopolis is the work of a true visionary, and not in the sense that trailers often dub hyped-up one-hit wonders to be. Coppola has made an occasionally unbearable, frequently thrilling, and genuinely good-intentioned work whose scale, madness, and fidelity to a single vision are unlikely to be seen on an IMAX screen again anytime soon. That’s worth all of the uncorked wine bottles it took to get here, and it deserves a toast.