It’s easy to take a film like this at its own myth, and much of the marketing in the run up to the release has encouraged you to do so. The now-infamous trailer consisting of machine-apocryphal negative quotes about Coppola’s earlier films, the much-vaunted selling of Coppola’s vineyard to fund the budget, the tactically-leaked tales of late improvisational nights smoking weed in the production trailer with the cast. It all contributes to an image of this film as something special, something which has taken an above-and-beyond effort to see realised — something which has loftier goals than the average flick. It’s always going to be hard to sit in the cinema and see that collapsed into an actual film.
Does Megalopolis crumble under the weight of expectation? Not quite. True, it’s not that weird and the giddy fervour with which critics have spent the last month damning it to hell as an incoherent mess (46% on Rotten Tomatoes, for anyone whose soul is withered enough to care) seems really a bit of a put-on; no-one is risking their cushy access to Oscar screeners or whatever by dunking on this ‘independent’ film. It’s a well-made film with some judacious if budget-bound visual effects. It has a mercurial cast of talented and famous actors who are well-suited to their roles. It’s not particularly radical in structure — there’s a nod to formalism with the occasional act-breaking title card but mostly it follows a classic Hollywood plot structure with a few break-outs into something weirder (Protagonist Cesar’s drug-fuelled breakdown; the final Megalopolis montage) and a few things that are ostentatiously typical — the scene where Cesar sees old flame Wow Platinum at the park and offers her his coat is sublimely executed, but could have come from Love, Actually.
What’s actually weird in Megalopolis? There’s two main aspects, and both bear comparison to some other controversial directors. The acting in Megalopolis is not at all naturalistic — it has an element of the Shakespearean. In fact many scenes feel like they have come from an adaptation of some unknown discovered Shakespeare: the way in which we follow around the members of one or two families as they explain the popular politics to us through their encounters recalls Romeo and Juliet; the plot itself of course is filled with references to antiquity and to Julius Caesar. The good nephew who hides his virtue in controversy and the bad son who wages war on his own King is a twist on personal favourite Henry IV Part 1. And so the acting is grandiose, prone to monologue, and allows the actors reign to interpret the dialogue as they will. Adam Driver’s delivery of “You think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?” is not something you will see emulated in any other movie this year. George Lucas, of course, filled his Star Wars prequels with similarly stylised performances and dialogue and was pilloried for it — Coppola perhaps had some of the Tom Stoppard-inflected monologues from Revenge of the Sith in mind when scripting Megalopolis, with its odes to a dying republic and portraits of the people who let it become so.
The other aspect is the earnestness, with Megalopolis being a distinctly funny film — again aping Shakespeare, every indulgent moment of drama is defused with a little following slapstick — that is nonetheless bereft of the cynical humour that has become the mode for big Hollywood presentations. What does this mean? Well there’s several dick jokes and no “well that happened” moments. Alongside this cheeky humour, the actual meat of the film is similarly direct: Driver’s Cesar wants to build his dream project, the titular Megalopolis. The film wants you to want him to build it. There’s no interrogation of the merits of doing so — indeed other reviews have noted the lack of any class perspective whatsoever. It’s about the pure power of creating, the inherent worth in having the will to see something done. Naturally this recalls the cod-Nietzschean energy of Ayn Rand’s infamous The Fountainhead, another epic about a man who wants to build a thing. But Megalopolis is not Randian except in the most broad of strokes. Cesar’s high goals set him above the other characters but not in terms of rational self-interest, or in a way that is permissive of him to be cruel. Rather, the other characters are simply fallen, craven, too beholden to this existing world to open their eyes and see the next one approaching fast.
This next world admittedly seems to involve a lot of petal-like buildings that flap around a bit. In the film’s driving metaphor, Cesar is able — by some virtue of his artistry or his engineering or his connection to the wonder-material Megalon — to stop time. But we never see him use it for any deliberate purpose. It’s only used for the artistic ends it’s already a metaphor for. Similarly, the shorthand for the Megalopolis project and it’s world of boons ends up being a sort of space-travelator; it’s a city that’s literally going to help you get to where you want to go. America like Rome is a dying Empire, so in this America Madison Square Gardens is literally a circus. Cesar at one point misses his dead wife while suffering from a hole in the head. It’s an exceptionally literal film in many ways.
Where Megalopolis disappoints is in its handling of gender, the classical trappings being something of a lure to encourage you away from noticing that Cesar lives in a world where there are only three women: grasping climbers, frigid mothers and beautiful perennial muses. The climbers appear in the twin figures of Wow Platinum, the TV gossip host whose role is elevated significantly by Aubrey Plaza’s performance, and Taylor Swift-alike Vesta, the virginial singer who makes a brief but significant appearance at the halfway point of the film. Platinum is a perfect foil for Jon Voight’s slightly hateful, slightly loveable wealthy banker Crassus. Unlike the feckless Clodio (who has the classic Disney villain cross-dressing trait) and his two sisters, Platinum has the drive and the ability to outmaneuver old Crassus, who she marries after dumping a disinterested Cesar — so it’s a shame that of all the characters in the story, a violent death is reserved for her.
Similarly, there’s an odd edge to the reveal that Vesta — the subject of a ludicrous and deeply satirical auction for her virtue — is in fact not a virgin, or a teenager, or American. Do those things count against her? Should we be good Kantians and hold the subject of this horrid circus to account for lying, even in these circumstances?
Cesar’s mother is perfectly unloveable and a non-entity beyond that, perhaps to drive home his need for unconditional love from Natalie Emmannuel’s Julia. Much of the film is spent in discussion of Cesar’s previous muse Sunny Hope, who was driven to despair by his mercurial nature — and his cheating. Modern replacement Emmannuel’s Julia has the most difficult job in the cast, keeping any kind of edge on a character written as permanently doe-eyed and bowled over by the great creative virtues of the man she is muse to. Her big moment is getting to say “stop time… for me!” Furiosa this is not. It’s a huge missed opportunity for this ostensible vision of the future to be so hide-bound in its women characters.
As mentioned above, the film plays with being political, with having something specific about politics to say. Where it settles is not exactly deep however, and it’s more than a little reactionary. Rich dilettantes playing with the emotions of the mob are dangerous. Indulging fascism will bring some truly stupid people to power. Rioting is bad. It’s not much to sink your teeth into and even the ostensibly political framing of the corrupt old-world mayor who serves corporate interests is quickly rinsed out and replaced with an interpersonal conflict about Cesar marrying his daughter. The climax of the film has Cesar address the audience directly (okay, it’s somehow the second-most-direct address to the audience in this film) to beg them to dream big and shoot for the stars and so on. I couldn’t decide whether the slightly bathetic nature of this was intentional or not; I think it wasn’t. It’s a Mishima speech, one given by a character too detached from the world of regular people to have any purchase or impact. He’s hollering from that balcony but the noise from the planes is just too loud to hear what’s being said. It’s enough to wrap up the plot, but I didn’t feel inspired much at all.
Which I think is the ultimate problem for Megalopolis — Coppola wants to inspire us to debate, to think, to create society anew — but he doesn’t actually have any idea how. Taking a single rich family as a microcosm of society as a whole is useful for telling a story, but it’s a difficult way to offer something tangible. How To Blow Up a Pipeline could at least suggest blowing up a pipeline. Becoming Barron Trump is simply inaccessible for most people. There are plenty in the world who remember that the world was made by people, made by their choices. Rediscovering that is important, but it’s not even a first step. For me, Megalopolis can’t even claim to be reigniting that flame — the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything made a much more compelling case for the inadequency of our politics to our ever-changing nature.
Is it perhaps unfair to expect a film to reinvent politics. But it’s only even a notion because this is Francis Ford Coppola’s Film That Reinvents Politics (and Art, and Love, and Everything) which is maybe a silly thing to aspire for a film to be. I wouldn’t change it though. And as a mere film, it has unique moments, spectacular visuals and a beating heart. That’s enough, I think.
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