Whether you hate it or love it, Coppola goes all out

Naive, decadent, languid, dazzling, touchingly sincere in its belief that “a vital conversation” about the state of our nation can save us even when the barbarians are at our gates, “Megalopolis” has something to excite everyone. Francis Ford Coppola's new film is a philosophical argument for the place of the artist in society, disguised as a film that doesn't care what you want or think you need.

It's a grandiose, $120 million fable about America's impending doom that follows the script of ancient Rome, and a cinematic smash that only Coppola can see.

Should you go? I won't tell you whether or not to go. I will tell you that a day after I saw it, I was shaking my head and smiling at my own frustration and occasional bewilderment at the whole mess. It's a final statement of principle. And it's not like any previous Coppola film, either in terms of cultural touchstone (the first two Godfather epics), or in the category of quiet, haunting masterpieces (“The Dialogue”), or in comparison to his recent self-described low-budget “student films” (“Tetro,” “Youth Without Youth”).

On the other hand, like most male film directors before him who made lavish spectacles about decadent empires, Coppola takes every opportunity to throw in vestal virgins and the like. In this project, there is a semi-embarrassing adolescent spirit alongside the self-reflection of a stunted octogenarian at work and at play. In terms of risk and reward, it probably comes closest to Coppola's One From the Heart (1982), a hermetic, seductive film about the difficulties of love.

“Megalopolis” is a film about loving difficulties and about the challenge a filmmaker faces in trying to put his feelings, words and images of despair and hope into a form that is usable by the public.

About as stressed out as Gary Cooper struggled with Ayn Rand's dialogue in the film adaptation of The Fountainhead, Adam Driver plays visionary architect and physics-despising inventor Cesar Catilina. The genius's discovery of the wonder metal Megalon is key to an urban renewal project for the great, battered city of New Rome (Manhattan, with ancient Roman flourishes). Presumably for health insurance, Catilina is on the city's payroll as head of the Design Authority under the skeptical gaze of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a puppet in the hands of the plutocrats who put him in office. Jon Voigt, alternately lost and perceptive, is the city's richest Pluto. Shia LaBeouf meanders here and there as an incestuous schemer with the skills and ambitions to take back our country.

Parts of Coppola's narrative are super-simple or super-simplistic. Catilina's occasional lover, the despicable star journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), embodies media corruption, while Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor's daughter and socialite, feels her heart grow three sizes as soon as she enters Catilina's environment and bedroom. There are some questions that the audience can pick up: Did Catilina murder his wife years ago, even though he was acquitted of all charges? Can New Rome fulfill Catilina's dream of a new The new Rome with freedom and justice for all?

Coppola is clearly not interested in the momentum of the story or in convention, and since the film itself regularly quotes whole chunks of Catullus and William Shakespeare (Driver busts out a big chunk of To Be or Not To Be at one moronic point), it's fair to say that Megalopolis is a spiritual cousin of Shakespeare's mad, half-mad late-period romances. Sometimes it's its own worst enemy, as in the early scene where Catiline shows off a model of his utopian wonderland. It's staged and edited in such a way that there's an odd amount of confusion and muddle. Elsewhere, Coppola and his first-rate cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., find a nice flow, slipping into conversation in Catiline's design studio in the Chrysler Building.

That's what the film is like – stilted one minute, a reminder of Coppola's mastery the next.

He loves the split-screen triptych imagery in Megalopolis, an homage to Abel Gance's silent Napoleon. I wish the script's words expressed more ideas than Coppola's attempts at high-flown rhetoric. At the end, when Coppola dares to rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance for a Brave New World, this half-messed-up dream leaves you in a state of gloom because it Is one.

It's something of an inside joke, albeit a sobering one, that the most surprising moment in “Megalopolis” is a quietly staged act of violence that wouldn't be out of place in the Corleone saga. Its impact stands out amid the film's wanderings. I haven't even mentioned that Catiline has the ability to stop and restart time. Why? How? Wrong questions, the film says. “It is required that you awaken your faith,” Shakespeare reminded us in “The Winter's Tale.” Coppola is right, even if his film isn't quite right in the head: Catiline's mantra – “In leaping into the unknown, we prove we are free” – speaks as much to obsessive individualists with T-square rulers as to entire nations whose futures, if they can create one at all, must be shaped out of a troubled and troubling present.

“Megalopolis” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA Rating: R (for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence)

Length: 2:18

How to watch the film: Cinema premiere on September 27th

Michael Phillips is a critic for the Tribune.

Originally published: September 24, 2024 at 3:40 p.m.