Francis Ford Coppola - Megalopolis is a Glorious Failure
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TLDR: Megalopolis isn't good. You should see it anyway.
Megalopolis
Director, screenwriter: Francis Ford Coppola Distributor: Lionsgate Year: 2024
Have you ever seen a movie that defies conventional descriptors like "good" and "bad"?
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-in-the-making passion project is stunningly ambitious, endlessly weird, and frequently hilarious — though not always intentionally. After dividing audiences at Cannes and sending cinephiles into a flurry of anticipation, the sci-fi whatsit finally opened in theaters last weekend. The reaction was definitive: more mixed reviews, $4 million at the box office, and a D+ CinemaScore. Given the fact that it cost $120 million to produce and Coppola financed it himself, Megalopolis would appear to be dead on arrival.
And yet it probably isn’t. Megalopolis seems destined to live on as a cult classic of sorts, one whose defenders will be few in number but ardent in their enthusiasm. Some of this will be ironic — the film has already spawned a number of memes for its theatrical dialogue and off-kilter line delivery — but more of it will be sincere. That the film was made at a time when sincerity is valued less than ever and irony rules the day is part of its tragedy.
In a sentence, the plot is about the conflict between an architect (Adam Driver) who wants to build a utopian city-within-a-city with a physics-defying material called megalon and the corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) who opposes him for…reasons. The film’s subtitle is "A Fable," but for what? Why, the fall of Rome, of course, which is why the New York–like metropolis is called New Rome and characters have names like Cesar Catilina, Hamilton Crassus III, and Franklyn Cicero (except for the ones with names like Wow Platinum). There’s even a Colosseum with professional wrestling and bids to fund a young woman’s pledge to remain a virgin (said bids are funded via auction paddles emblazoned with QR codes, because why not).
The reason why Cesar (the architect) and Cicero (the mayor) are so fiercely opposed to one another is never entirely clear, nor is it ever explained how Driver’s character has the ability to stop time — an objectively amazing ability he almost never uses. There’s also an interactive element at some screenings in which an audience member can ask Cesar a question and receive a response, a fourth-wall-breaking flourish that doesn’t fundamentally alter the experience but does show how much thought Coppola has put into the project since first envisioning it as a four-night experience in the late ‘70s.
For a while, the incoherence doesn’t seem to matter. The first hour or so of Megalopolis is so joyfully strange, so capital-c Cinematic, that the fact that none of it makes any sense initially seems like a footnote in the one-of-a-kind story Coppola is telling. There are grandiose intertitles that look like they were etched into the base of ancient Roman statues, scheming that brings to mind the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar, and off-the-cuff line readings that will make you laugh out loud. Megalopolis is chaotic, but it initially feels as though Coppola is in control of it.
And then, not unlike a certain empire the filmmaker is obsessed with, cracks start to form and the center can no longer hold. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when this happens, but in hindsight the decline feels inevitable. This is, if nothing else, apropos of the subject matter: "When does an empire die?" asks the narrator played by Laurence Fishburne. "Does it collapse in one terrible moment? No, no. But there comes a time when its people no longer believe in it." Coppola himself believes in Megalopolis so strongly that we can’t help believing in it as well — or wanting to, at least.
For a while, the incoherence doesn't seem to matter.
Coppola is among the most important directors in the history of film, so it’s hard not to respond with a simple "good for him" when he decides to leverage his wine business to make the film that Hollywood wouldn’t. Any number of would-be blockbusters that cost twice as much have failed just as spectacularly in the last couple years, but that doesn’t mean the assembly line at Marvel is going to stop anytime soon. If a $100 million movie is going to bomb at the box office, better it be the singular vision of a legendary auteur than yet another superhero movie.
So while Megalopolis might not be good in the conventional sense of the word, the fact that it exists is. "There’s still so much to accomplish," Cesar declares in one pivotal scene, "but is there time?" Coppola seems to think so, and who are we to disagree?
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