“MEGALOPOLIS” - MEGAREVIEW

Francis Ford Coppola is nothing if not ambitious. His latest film MEGALOPOLIS, 40 years in the dreaming (and almost made in the 1990s), should be studied in film schools… because it often feels like the longest and most expensive student film ever made.

And that’s not entirely a bad thing. Not entirely.

Where to begin? MEGALOPOLIS is set in the not-too-distant future in the city of New Rome (imagine a futuristic New York City with pre-fall-of-Rome decadence and haircuts, as early Baz Luhrmann might do). It chronicles the battle between those who are trying to build a better future, and those who want to maintain the status quo. There are those dreamers like Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina—an architect who lives in the top of the Chrysler Building, has figured out a way to make time stop, and has discovered an incredibly adaptive future-making material called Megalon—and those few lucky enough to be in his orbit. And then there are those like New Rome’s Capulet-like Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who clearly states that people “don’t need dreams; they need teachers, sanitation workers,” and all those things to keep a city running uninspired, while the top 1% can live it up, and everyone else fights each other for crumbs (paradoxically, despite being a champion for dreamers, Cesar also lives pretty large and has a long list of enemies). Things get further complicated when the mayor’s party girl daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) has a crisis of conscience, and falls in love with Cesar. Much like Romeo and Juliet, is this an opportunity to bring the two sides together, or drive them further apart? That’s the movie’s clothesline on which a great many strange, gaudy, opulent things and big, heady, free-flowing ideas are haphazardly hung in a tangle, and while that line is not taut enough to support everything, it doesn’t entirely hit the ground.

Sometimes MEGALOPOLIS feels like a glimpse into truths about humanity that we know down to the bone, told lovingly by a man who has truly lived and loved and risked and lost and triumphed time after time after time, with the knowledge and wisdom of an old master but with the curiosity and dexterity of someone much younger, excited by the possibilities of life and of his chosen artistic medium. And just as often, MEGALOPOLIS comes across like being trapped at a crowded party by an intellectual who has finally found (or cornered) an audience, waxing poetic and philosophic like he’s getting paid by the word, but he’s drunk, and so are you, and you are both being observed by illustrators trying to translate those semi-coherent ramblings into concept art.

With its Shakespeare/film noir trappings, wrapped in a (very gold) robe of futuristic sci-fi, its sprawling intellect expressed in dialogue that is both esoteric and on-the-nose, and with an ending that’s one all-cast dance party short of being a true early-Dreamworks animated film, MEGALOPOLIS is as confounding to watch as its title is to say. BUT. For much of this self-financed, self-proclaimed fable’s 138 minute runtime, I was never bored (well, almost never)!

For a film called MEGALOPOLIS, I was hoping for the film itself to be a little more mega. Despite the IMAX presentation that I experienced, it at times feels safe and small, suffering too much under the weight of gravitas to go full-out bonkers. It’s a constant clash of ideas and styles, and the filmmaking itself is both dazzling and confounding. Stunning costumes by the great Milena Canonero clash with inconsistent cinematography by Mihai Malaimare Jr. There are big setpieces, but not enough bodies to fill the space to give it the epic feel it is striving for. The editing choices are innovative, to be sure, and could offer a lot to budding filmmakers as a means of just trying things. For most viewers, the most trying thing about it might be patience.

How about the performances? Like a student film, everyone onscreen (except for Jon Voight, having fun as a Trumpian figure who does absolutely nothing to dispel the actor’s own personal Trump-aligned views) seems too old or too young for the parts they are playing. Apart from Voight, as well as Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf (both making a meal as high-society low-lifes straight out of 40s film noir), everyone feels slightly miscast. This could be the fault of the undefined writing, by not giving much definition to the main players, who largely portray archetypes rather than flesh-and-blood characters. In keeping with his last several performances, Driver remains mostly stoic and aloof, save for a couple fun choices, as if the only pleasure he seems to take is adding another legendary director to his impressive resume. The only time he seems to really come to life is when he delivers—yes—full Shakespearean monologues, beautifully, apropos of nothing. Emmanuel is fine. SNL’s Chloe Fineman is in it. Laurence Fishburne (whose debut was APOCALYPSE NOW) looms over the film both as Driver’s, well, driver, and as his confidant and the film’s narrator. Others appear lost, like the usually Giancarlo Esposito, mostly grimacing here. Some for better or worse make the most of their limited screen time, like Talia Shire (exquisite) and her real life son, Jason Schwartzman (unusually cartoonish). Some true greats like Dustin Hoffman and Kathryn Hunter (POOR THINGS) are entirely wasted… but who wouldn’t want to say that they got to work with Francis Ford Coppola?

And of course, there’s the matter of this is a passion project. Throughout film history, there are those passion projects which take years to crack, either from the resources needed to make the film, or the maturation of the filmmaker to understand their story and subject properly, and to realize it to its fullest expression. One of the best examples would be Stanley Kubrick’s dreamlike final film EYES WIDE SHUT, which had a very long gestation period (followed by a Guinness record-setting 400 production days). A middling example would be GANGS OF NEW YORK, which Martin Scorsese announced in the 1970s and finally made in 2002. I call this a middling example because I don’t believe the final film is the fullest expression of his vision, particularly in terms of casting and scope. Commercially speaking, AVATAR came to James Cameron in a dream as a teenager, and he had to pursue the development of the technology to be able to realize it only more recently (and despite what you think of the AVATAR films, they are exquisitely realized). Coppola is considered one of the American Masters, and has done a lot, just like his contemporary George Lucas, to push the medium into new economical and innovative directions. His four undisputed masterpieces—THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART II, THE CONVERSATION, and APOCALYPSE NOW—are masterpieces for a reason. Of his 23 feature films, there are some good ones, a lot of experiments, and several that he directed for hire to pay back financiers for his disastrous ONE FROM THE HEART (actually one of my favorite Coppolas), which helps explain JACK. He is also a prolific producer and champion of up-and-coming filmmakers, including all of his children, with the most successful of them being director Sofia Coppola. From a legacy standpoint, it is understandable that Coppola ws not content to live with “the one that got away,” and that MEGALOPOLIS was something deep within him that he needed to express, but to who apart from avid cinephiles?

It would be tempting to label this MEGA-SLOP-OLIS, but… I kind of enjoyed it? I’m kind of happy that it exists? I kind of see it as an artistic risk worth taking? I’m aware that I’m ending these declarative statements with question marks. It’s a very question-mark-y film. While a bit stale and vague in its story goals, this vision of the future is refreshingly optimistic. I know Coppola himself has expressed regret for not leaving future generations much of a film Industry, and we are certainly seeing the growing pains of that right now, but he made a film that people may talk about (if they see it), that feels like a mixtape of everything he has left to say. Despite Coppola himself being 85 years old, MEGALOPOLIS doesn’t feel like a final film, but more like a final bow before an encore. We shall see. But Coppola is always a filmmaker worth celebrating. If it’s experimentation and risk you seek, and you are OK with connecting with the film based solely on those terms, then take a trip to MEGALOPOLIS. You’ll likely never forget it, and at the end of the day, art, and all that that implies, wins.

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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/