“Megalopolis” opens with a tantalizing image of a man standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, almost plunging to his death before crying out “TIME — STOP.” Indeed, time does stop, saving him from destruction.
This particular image could very well be read as a mission statement for writer-director Francis Ford Coppola’s work, across a career that has now lasted over half a century. Standing on the ledge of his own talent is basically Coppola’s raison d’être. One has to admire his willingness to take big swings, to jump off the edge of the building, and try to build a parachute on his way down.
Coppola is most renowned for the four masterpieces he made back to back in the 1970s — “The Godfather,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now.” Then came the financial disaster of his 1982 musical “One from the Heart,” and the failure of his dream studio Zoetrope, after which Coppola would spend most of the ’80s and ’90s as a director-for-hire, working his way back out of debt.
Throughout all those years, one great whale loomed: “Megalopolis,” a project Coppola had first conceived of in the late 1970s and begun writing in earnest in the early 1980s.
“Megalopolis” is part classical epic and part futuristic drama, set in a city called “New Rome” (New York with cosmetic changes) and focused on the rivalry between two different visions of the future.
Adam Driver’s Caesar Catalina is an architect who dreams of a better city, a Utopian ideal. Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), his conservative opposite number, believes that the current, flawed system is better and safer than Caesar’s irresponsible dreams.
An additional wedge is driven between the two men when Caesar begins a romance with the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Suddenly their battle for the soul of “New Rome” is not just ideological — it’s personal.
The opening title card of “Megalopolis” describes the story as “A Fable,” but “A Metaphor” might’ve been just as apt, because virtually every element of Coppola’s drama is meant to function on multiple levels, both literal and symbolic.
“New Rome” is a mixture of ancient and contemporary references: the bored, arrogant elite of the city attend modern fashion shows, but also go to the Colosseum, where chariot races and wrestlers entertain them.
In one particularly arresting sequence, Caesar drives through the city at night, and sees statues come to life: Lady Justice, exhausted by her burden, collapses against a building. The message isn’t subtle: America is entering an era of decadence and decline.
Normally it would be the filmmaker’s job to bring all these elements together into a united whole, but Coppola’s approach on “Megalopolis” is that of an eager amateur. Every scene in “Megalopolis” feels like an experiment, a trust fall on the part of Coppola and his actors.
The results of these experiments vary from scene to scene, sometimes from moment to moment. Some gambits just don’t pay off: I’d say it’s no small flaw that “Megalopolis,” the city itself, often looks like an ugly screensaver, all its visual ideas cliches rendered in tepid CGI.
Other visual tricks are arresting: I loved the sequences employing three panel split screens (ala Abel Gance’s silent epic “Napoleon”), a device that is aesthetically overwhelming without collapsing into visual noise.
I realize that by this point in the review, you’re probably rubbing your temples in irritation and muttering, “Yeah, but is it good or bad?” The answer to both those questions is “yes.”
“Megalopolis” is the rare movie where I can say that almost everything that’s been written about it — good or bad, good and bad — is true. It’s deeply naïve; it’s achingly sincere; it’s bloated; it’s ambitious; it’s clunky, even amateurish; it’s sometimes breathtaking.
At times I thought it was captivating, at times I thought it was deeply silly; I was never bored, always engaged, sometimes irritated, sometimes enthralled.
Good, bad — what “Megalopolis” is above all is earnest. This is a movie by a great grandfather who honestly believes that the human species is a miracle, that the children are our future, that we can all just get along — all those pie-in-the-sky cliches here occasionally have the ring of real profundity, because Coppola believes them, and he desperately wants us to believe them as well.
“Megalopolis” ends with a final text screen — a “Pledge of Allegiance” to “Our Human Family” — that is so corny that it made me involuntarily guffaw. And then I choked up a little. The human being is a miracle, and the things we create have value beyond the monetary. Our dreams matter. “Megalopolis” affirms that.
C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.
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