Movie disasters come in all shapes and sizes. The worst disasters are soulless cash grabs like Madame Web, where all artistic expression is sucked out of the movie and no one is happy to be there. But on the flip side, there are also fun disasters like Jupiter Ascending, brimming with creative ideas and an abomination of script execution. So I guess, thanks Francis Ford Coppola, for eliminating all corporate malfeasance so we can see your insane vision in full artistic Tommy Wiseau like glory. Ok, Megalopolis isn’t The Room…but it’s got way more in common with that ludicrous disaster than I was expecting from one of the greatest directors of all time. In the words of Ron Burgundy, that’s not a good start, but I’ll keep going.
Coppola posits New York City is New Rome. The two rival powers are Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a futuristic architect/Nobel Prize Winner, and Mayor Francis Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), distrusting of Cesar’s motives but driven towards power himself. Trapped in between those two are a host of folks, figuring out who to align with. The main one is party girl Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Francis’s daughter, who is drawn to Cesar’s creative abilities. There’s also Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a compromised news reporter who wants to be a part of a power couple. And finally, it’s Cesar’s extended family, including aging banker Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight) and Julia’s androgynous party playmate Clodio (Shia Laboeuf), the black sheep hoping to be back in Catalina good graces again.
Rumor has it Coppola (he denies this) was smoking pot before filming big sequences in this movie. That tracks, since Megalopolis feels like the 2AM dorm room musings of a history/art history major at an Ivy League School. The outpouring of ideas the movie has is ambitious: Coppola wants to say a lot about modern society, power and the quest for it, artistic expression and its influences, generational conflict. The directors sets up most those ideas well enough, but then gets distracted by one of those other ideas, and hops into that section of his tale without further analysis/execution of the idea he just left until later in the movie, when the audience forgot about it. There’s montages aplenty, meant to distract you from the fact that the movie is beautiful on the outside but hollow in the middle. The first montage was fine, the 9,497th, not so much. By the halfway point, most people will probably ask themselves “where is this movie going?” I’m very certain Coppola didn’t know himself, and just slowly stitched his movie musings together, hoping they would gel into something special. The real ending hammers that point, as it rushes another hour of material into 10 minutes to wrap up the movie and get people home.
Because Coppola was all over the place, so are his actors performances. Aubrey Plaza and Shia Laboeuf chose the the jaded satirical story, going over the top with their characters, blurring the line between what was intentional/unintentional. Nathalie Emmanuel and Giancarlo Esposito are in an operatic family drama, going big eyed and big hearted as their story demands they be. Laurence Fishburne is the narrator of a film noir of some kind. Jon Voight and Talia Shire (!!!) are blunt force acting, sidestepping any nuance of any kind. And poor Adam Driver is trapped in the middle of all of these stories, as well as his own descent into tortured artist hell. As such, we get Requiem for a Dream Driver, Screwball Comedy Driver, and Shakespearean (literally) prose Driver all rolled into Cesar Catalina, a tonal whiplash mish mesh of epic proportions. Driver is emblematic of Megalopolis himself, almost deserving an award for matching the tonal disaster of the movie he was in. Though I will be laughing at his line read of “go back to the club” for the rest of the year.
Not all of em can be first round draft picks unfortunately. Megalopolis really swings and really misses, but Francis Ford Coppola still is the guy who made Two Godfathers and the Conversation in a 4 year window, 3 of the greatest American movies ever made. We all get a little loopy as we get older, and Megalopolis is the loopy movie god version of mom asking you “where that place with the brown bear restaurant is we went to in 1983.” So drink some Coppola wine and have a drunk blast at Francis’s artistic lunacy with grandma and grandpa. You’ll love it for a little bit, and forget it ever happened 4 hours later.