Respect to Adam Driver, who in recent years has become the casting equivalent of Viagra, helping ageing directors to finally get their long-dormant passion projects off the ground. After helping Terry Gilliam complete The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) and Michael Mann make Ferrari (2023), the reliably intense Driver is now the leading man in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a monumental ego trip a mere four decades in gestation. Whether this grand folly was worth the wait, however, is debatable. Reactions at the film’s Cannes world premiere have been very mixed, with booing at some screenings.
Set in a retro-futuristic version of contemporary New York City, here called New Rome, Megalopolis borrows much of its plot and key characters from the Catiline conspiracy of 63BC, a criminal scheme to burn down Rome and kill various leaders, essentially with the aim of cancelling some heavy debts. But Coppola only uses this as a loose framework to ruminate on the nature of power, the purpose of government, utopian urban living, the value of art, the power of love, the future of the American empire, and other high-minded themes.
Back after a 13-year hiatus, the semi-retired Coppola is shooting for something grandiose and profound with Megalopolis. This is one from the heart, his final Big Personal Statement, funded with his own winery fortune. The 85-year-old director of the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now (1979) has a glorious back catalogue of masterpieces and left-field gems, so it gives me no pleasure to report that he fails resoundingly here. Drunk on its own noble aims and rich ingredients, Megalopolis is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas. At times, it hits the unwittingly hilarious camp levels of Showgirls (1996), but without the redeeming fun factor. Wearing multiple hats as director, writer, producer and self-financier, Coppola clearly had nobody to curb his more pretentious excesses.
In fairness, Megalopolis boasts a stellar cast and some impressively imaginative visuals. Already widely shared in teaser trailers, the opening scene features visionary playboy architect Cesar Catilina (Driver) stepping out of his penthouse office on the pointed silver peak of the Chrysler Building (or the New Rome equivalent), teetering over a plunging drop, then magically stopping time and saving his own life. This is Coppola doing Christopher Nolan, essentially, but it’s a gripping hook and an intriguing opening gambit. Tell me more.
But this fairy-tale plot device is never fully explained, sadly. Instead, Coppola plunges us into a testosterone-drenched power play between rival alpha-male figures with clashing visions of New Rome’s future. Driver’s Cesar is the Nobel prize-winning town planner who has discovered a magical new material, and dreams of using it to regenerate the metropolis into a gleaming palace of wisdom, culture and beauty. If that means demolishing ugly old apartment blocks and angering the populous, then such is progress. Standing firmly in Cesar’s way are his immensely wealthy banker uncle Crassus (Jon Voight) and the city’s suave mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), both of whom favour a more vulgar approach to urban development, notably gaudy casinos and slum housing. Any resemblance to Donald Trump here is probably not accidental.
Aubrey Plaza brings vampy cartoonish energy as Wow Platinum (yes really), an ambitious TV reporter who is Cesar’s secret mistress, even as she plans her bacchanalian blow-out wedding to Crassus and his sugar-daddy millions. Consumed by his architectural project, and still deeply wounded by the death of his late wife, Cesar initially seems coolly arrogant and incapable of love. But Cicero’s socialite daughter Julia (a fatally bland Nathalie Emmanuel, channelling Meghan Markle) defies her father’s will to work for Cesar, slowly breaking down his defences until romance blossoms.
Coppola’s pungent fusion of contemporary political drama, philosophical fable and quasi-Shakespearean soap opera initially seems thrillingly ambitious. With a little more finesse and focus, he might have made Megalopolis work the way Baz Luhrmann did with Romeo+Juliet (1996) or Spike Lee with Chi-Raq (2015). Instead, his undisciplined jumble of plots becomes a crashing bore early in the film’s marathon runtime, and never gets back on track. There are chariot races, druggy parties, assassination attempts, financial betrayals, failed coups, a dying Soviet satellite falling to earth, and an Elvis Presley impersonator. There is also lofty debate about evolutionary biology and manifest destiny, allusions to Fritz Lang and Ayn Rand, all spiced with quotes from Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch. But what does it all add up to? Less than Coppola intends.
Megalopolis is also clogged with superfluous subplots and extraneous characters galore. Dustin Hoffman is wasted in a slender supporting role, then clumsily killed off in a throwaway flashback. Shia Laboeuf is pure boiled ham as a cross-dressing populist rabble-rouser. A virginal teenage Taylor Swift-style pop star is vilified for being neither a teenager nor a virgin, but she has zero bearing on the main narrative, so frankly my dear, who gives a damn?
As a sensory experience, Megalopolis is an enjoyably wild ride. The production design is certainly a rich feast of old-school craft and digital elements. Coppola’s conception of New Rome/Manhattan is full of pleasing homages to New York City’s grungy late 1970s, around the time he conceived this story. There are winking allusions to the legendary Studio 54 nightclub, and an infamous 1975 tabloid headline about President Gerald Ford telling a bankrupt NYC to “drop dead”. Nice details.
Meanwhile, Cicero’s futuristic new citadel has a flowing, glowing, biomorphic character, echoing the work of “starchitects” like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid. At various point the screen splits into triple panels, and characters refract into multiple doppelgangers, for no clear reason. The Cannes screenings have even featured brief interventions by a live actor, interacting with Driver on screen, a bold but ultimately pointless stunt which clearly will not be repeated for wider cinema release.
In fairness, seeing Coppola veterans like Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne and Jason Schwartzman pop up in the huge Wes Anderson-sized cast is a pleasingly personal touch. And the director’s final tender dedication to his wife Eleanor, who died last month, is very moving. But ultimately these small, sweet flourishes are not enough to salvage a monumentally pompous vanity project from imploding. By the time Voight’s Crassus sinks the whole film into risible farce by pretending a crossbow is his erect penis, Megalopolis has long lost any claim on our attention. Confusing and challenging an audience can be the hallmark of a great auteur director, but boring us to tears with shallow, half-baked gibberish is not. More disaster movie than rousing farewell, this is a sad swansong from a cinematic legend.
Director, screenwriter: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman
Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Editing: Cam McLauchlin, Glen Scantlebury
Music: Osvaldo Golijov
Producers: Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Bederman, Barry Hirsch, Fred Roos
Production company: American Zoetrope (US)
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In English
138 minutes