Megalopolis

It’s impossible not to feel a variety of emotions towards Megalopolis, writer-director-producer Francis Ford Coppola’s risky, self-financed epic fable. There is tremendous intrigue in the man who made four of the greatest films of all time returning to the director’s chair at 85 years old to give us his first new film in decades. That he does so with an ambitious, original, off-the-wall $120 million production heightens that intrigue. As does the large cast that includes accomplished legends, esteemed family members, and a mix of “cancelled” and in-demand actors. And as if all that wasn’t enough to pique your curiosity, there is the fact that Coppola spent his own $120 million to make this, a substantial fraction of his winery wealth born out of The Godfather royalties that began pouring in more than half a century ago.

Compromise has never been part of Coppola’s vocabulary. His work in the 1970s — in which he directed the first two Godfather movies, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now — forever cemented his legend. And yet, this year, studios were reluctant to distribute his costly independent Megalopolis, with only the struggling Lionsgate agreeing on a clear-cut distribution deal more than a month after the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. The commercial outlook for Megalopolis is bleak; predictions for the opening weekend are in the $5-8 million range and given the nature of the business, that performance seems certain to be front-loaded from the cineastes on whose radars this undertaking has been on for years.

Striking out commercially probably won’t impact Coppola’s standing or make him question his decision to make this grand film so late in life. Far more interesting here are the big swings that he takes. This is an artist committed to his craft and willing to spend more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes to see his vision through. There is much to admire about that passion, even if the film itself as a whole surely does not rank among Coppola’s more dramatically fulfilling efforts.

Megalopolis fuses present-day America with the machinations of the ancient Roman Empire. New York City is “New Rome” and its people are divided by the traditional leanings of its mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the utopian visions of influential architect and Design Authority chairman Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver). Their public posturing takes a turn when Cicero’s socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) pays Cesar a visit and her interest in his visions for the city develop into romance.

Meanwhile, Cesar’s jilted former mistress, financial journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), marries Cesar’s wealthy, aging bank chairman uncle (Jon Voight). The flamboyant rabble-rouser Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), harbors hatred and vows revenge against his cousin, Cesar.

On a narrative level, Megalopolis is more straightforward than expected. Those who would normally expect to be lulled to sleep by ancient Roman politics should find them salient and relevant as applied to something resembling the present day. Coppola, whose only acknowledged writing contributor is his son, Wes Anderson collaborator Roman Coppola, juggles a cast of big, bold personalities with ease, even if you’re unlikely to identify with or truly take to any of them. The characters may not be realistic, but they at least have some compelling layers that the movie explores.

Bigger than the characters and the plot are the ideas and the grandiose imagery. Megalopolis can only be the work of someone with great knowledge and appreciation for human achievement in the arts and sciences. Art, architecture, and fashion all feature prominently throughout. There is a sense of everything and everyone being connected in the advancement of the human race. You might be reminded of New Age philosophies or The Secret or Cloud Atlas. Nothing in Coppola’s filmography, which slowed in the 1980s and never again reached the lofty heights of his ’70s output, suggested such a film or even such a worldview. In some ways, Megalopolis seems to have more in common with Coppola’s low-budget, largely unknown 2007 indie Youth Without Youth than the sprawling opuses for which he is known. Nonetheless, this film, more than twice as expensive as any past Coppola movie (ignoring inflation, anyway), is sprawling in its own way, a Shakespearean drama with surprising amount of optimism and hope.

There are few movies to which Megalopolis invites comparison. You can see a bit of The Hunger Games in some of the pageantry. There is a sequence in which a teenaged Taylor Swift-like musical icon sings of purity, while her virginity is somehow monetized, a rousing performance which the nefarious Clodio derails with a flash drive and a few of the big bills he hands out throughout the film. The film is easier to appreciate as a cautionary crystal ball than as a mirror held up to society.

The thing it reminded me most of was the play within Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, an elaborate and ambitious production that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perfectionist protagonist dedicates his entire life to fine-tuning. Megalopolis feels like that for Coppola, who conceived the film’s idea back in 1977 and began developing it in 1983. That he lived to see it come to fruition is easily as interesting as any arc in his screenplay here.

In a film full of accomplished performers, including Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, her son Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne (still reuniting with Coppola, nearly fifty years after filming Apocalypse Now) and the legendary Dustin Hoffman, much of the screentime and focus goes to Driver, Emmanuel, Esposito, Plaza, and LaBeouf. It’s a weird assembly of talent from very different circles, but all of the cast is up to the challenge and thrill of getting to collaborate with one of the greatest living filmmakers of all time. Driver does a lot to hold this film together, a steady performance to which these divergent narrative threads can all be traced back.

Monday night’s IMAX advance screening of the film opened with some overloud theater music and then a live-streamed New York Film Festival Q & A panel featuring Coppola and his fellow New York-based filmmakers Robert De Niro and Spike Lee. While De Niro predictably and hilariously hijacked some of the conversation to trash Donald Trump, the panel nonetheless provided welcome context to the film we were about to watch. Megalopolis perhaps requires that context to be appreciated as what it is. Taken at face value, it may strike the unresearched moviegoer as a big, messy disaster akin to the early 2010s Atlas Shrugged films. That understandable reading perhaps removes any possibility of commercial success and will explain some of the negative reviews this is bound to get. But for most of those gathered on Monday night, having to choose between this or a conflicting screening of DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot, there was the sense of getting to witness history in the making: a legendary and uncompromising filmmaker swinging for the fences with his first passion project in decades and his first directorial effort of any kind since 2011’s unfortunate Twixt.

If vindication for Coppola’s steadfast creative convinctions on Megalopolis is to come, it is not going to come anytime soon. Back in the late 1970s, Apocalypse Now was met with widespread doubt and divided reactions. Those faded and today everyone recognizes that Vietnam War odyssey as one of the greatest ever made. Coppola is too much of a cultural historian and student of life not to have anticipated Megalopolis facing and overcoming the same hurdles. However, this is not the late ’70s and Megalopolis is not Apocalypse Now. The negativity that greets this film will not dissipate quickly and it’s tough to imagine this movie generating profits anytime soon. Some will dwell on this reception for clicks and take delight when Megalopolis is not considered for anything but possibly technical awards at the Oscars. But Coppola didn’t make this movie for awards or box office gold; he experienced both of those things a half-century ago. Clearly, he made this film because he loves making films and he wanted to do that again on a grand scale with creative liberties virtually no one else could (or would) enjoy.

The time that Coppola has spent out of the filmmaking game — he hasn’t even produced one of his daughter Sofia’s movies since The Bling Ring (2013) — does seem to have impacted him. Whereas his contemporaries Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg continue to put out great films every few years that rival and quite often exceed the output of younger, hungrier filmmakers, Coppola has seemingly been chilling at his vineyards and cherishing family time as anyone living to their eighties might hope to do. He could have continued doing that, and no one would have thought any less of him, but instead he put his reputation and personal wealth on the line to make this movie he has long wanted to. It may not be a feat of commerce, but you’ve got to admire the art.