There’s a scene midway through Francis Ford Coppola’s exhilarating, crazily ambitious “Megalopolis” during which an architect and city planner played by Adam Driver is giving a press conference to an unseen room of reporters. At the advance IMAX screening I attended earlier this week, it was at this point that the house lights came up and an actor hired by the production walked out in front of the screen to ask a question. The character in the movie answered the actor in the room with us, then the lights went back down and the film resumed as before.
What a wonderful gimmick! Half Brechtian and half William Castle, the stunt explodes the boundaries between the audience and the film we’re watching. I have no idea how it can possibly be replicated at daily screenings in hundreds of multiplexes across the country, and I’m not sure Coppola does either. The point is that he went ahead and did it anyway, damn the torpedoes. The whole movie is bursting at the seams with that spirit of reckless experimentation. “Megalopolis” is a grandiose, go-for-broke folly, the last gamble of an 85-year-old legend pushing all his chips into the middle of the table.
It feels like I’ve been reading about “Megalopolis” for as long as I’ve been reading about movies. Coppola started writing the script in 1983, and after four decades of false starts and development delays, he finally sold off his wine empire and financed the film himself. This mad, sprawling magnum opus is the work of an artist answering to nobody other than his own muse.
To say “Megalopolis” is a mess would be an understatement. The movie staggers around discordant tones from stark solemnity to crass sex farce to romantic exaltation. Characters and storylines are lost track of or abandoned altogether while the visual effects whiplash from breathtaking to chintzy. The film’s flaws are obvious, plentiful and did not bother me in the slightest. An hour after it ended I was still smiling.
Coppola’s maximalist treatise on the state of the republic is an old-school Roman epic decked out in digital media-drenched retro-future. Set in an alternate universe New York City called New Rome — where the Coliseum is inside Madison Square Garden and they have toga parties at Studio 54 — the film follows Driver’s tortured genius Cesar Catalina, a blueblood architect and inventor who dreams of rebuilding New Rome as a utopia equitable for all. He butts heads with the city’s pragmatic Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and earns the ire of his nefarious banker uncle Crassus (Jon Voight), a priapic creature of capitalism who is basically all appetite. A blonde-wigged Dustin Hoffman is also on hand doing lord knows what as a perverted political fixer.
Cesar’s other enemies include his jealous cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) — a druggy club kid who becomes the unlikely leader of a Trumpian populist uprising — and his ex-lover Wow Platinum, a tabloid reporter played by Aubrey Plaza in one of the movie’s most amusingly unhinged performances, which is saying something. (Wow, indeed.) Cesar finds himself falling for his nemesis Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who he had pegged as an airhead socialite but it turns out she can cite scientific arcana and Stoic philosophers with the best of them. These two realize they’re made for each other when they discover that they both share a supernatural ability to stop time, something that figures less prominently in the plotting than you’d probably expect.
“Live your philosophy,” Julia tells her father during one of their conversations that becomes a Marcus Aurelius quoting contest — sometimes it feels like the movie should come with footnotes — and “Megalopolis” can never be accused of not practicing what it preaches. The film is structured as a 138-minute argument against conventional wisdom, endlessly extolling innovation and the freedom of working without a net. (In case you didn’t catch that, in one sequence we literally watch circus performers removing a safety net while Driver discusses what it means to be free.)
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“Megalopolis” really lives its philosophy. Every scene shows you something you’ve never seen before in a way you’ve never seen it, following through on seemingly any crazy idea that occurred to the artistic company at the moment. One scene is shot gazing up at characters from beneath their feet, as if the camera lens were the floor. Another begins with Driver reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in its entirety. Because why not?
The movie is bound by no rules of screenwriting nor any parameters of good taste, and judging from the snickers and heavy sighs I had to listen to in the press row, that’s going to tick a lot of people off. Some will call it undisciplined. I found it enthralling. The movie is so earnest and achingly sincere that I’m inclined to feel protective of it. You can call “Megalopolis” a lot of things, but there’s not a cynical frame in the film.
Wonderous images abound, like the mourning statues that come to life and lean despondently against buildings when characters are sad, or the 9/11-esque cataclysm seen entirely as an animated shadow play on the sides of skyscrapers. The movie also contains some of the goofiest sights you’ve ever seen — Driver’s architect holding a T-square like a lightsaber comes to mind — and boner jokes that wouldn’t be out of place in a frat house comedy. Bawdy and bonkers, there’s a bizarre subplot involving a teen pop star auctioning off her virginity, and the movie’s convoluted explanation of a complex banking scheme is delivered by Plaza while she’s sitting on LaBeouf’s face. Yet at the same time, the first mile-high, time-stopping kiss between Cesar and Julia is one of the most swooningly romantic movie moments in years. “Megalopolis” is gaudy. It’s gauche. It’s glorious.
As always, Coppola has filled out the cast with family members and longtime collaborators. The first voice you hear is that of his “Apocalypse Now” teen actor Laurence Fishburne, lending his pipes as the film’s narrator and Cesar’s loyal valet. There’s the director’s nephew Jason Schwartzman as a nitwit court jester, and sister Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, whose dementia has not dimmed her vindictiveness. Blink and you’ll miss his granddaughter Romy Mars in a quick cameo as a reporter from The Dingbat Times, which Coppola historians know was a newspaper published by his daughter Sofia chronicling shenanigans on the set of his 1981 “One From the Heart.”
The film is dedicated to Eleanor Coppola, the director’s wife of 61 years who died in April. Her presence is very much felt in the film, with Cesar making nightly visits to weep alongside a high-tech hologram of his own dead wife, who the mercurial architect fears he drove to suicide with his mania and mood swings.
The character of Cesar Catalina is an obvious authorial stand-in for Francis Ford Coppola, a larger-than-life dreamer who has spent his 60-odd-year career in bitter battles with small-minded money men and usually losing. (It’s a telling coincidence that one subplot involves the architect being smeared in the tabloids with a phony sex tape, while Coppola is currently suing Variety for libel over a story about misconduct on the “Megalopolis” set.)
The passage of time has been a recurring focus of Coppla’s work since the looming clocks and whizzing clouds of 1983’s “Rumble Fish,” up through the wistful reverse-aging fantasy of his 2007 “Youth Without Youth.” Cesar’s ability to manipulate temporality is one of the director’s most powerful projections. After all, what is filmmaking but an attempt to control time, to slow down and speed up the minutes while preserving individual moments forever?
There comes a point in a lot of aging directors’ careers when they stop trying to be sneaky about their central preoccupations and just straight out say what they mean. “Megalopolis” might be the ultimate example of this, as the movie is constantly in conversation with and about itself. It’s the closing argument of a man in his ninth decade who still has faith in the future, pouring his fortune into a deeply personal passion project designed as a proof-of-concept that we can build a better world for our children if we’re willing to put aside the old, entrenched ways and take big swings like this together. I don’t share Coppola’s optimism, but I envy it.
“Megalopolis” is now in theaters.