Film Review: "Megalopolis"

Despite its grand ambitions, Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling epic is a top-heavy boondoggle of a film that confounds far more than it inspires.

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I have to be honest. I was very much on the fence about going to see Megalopolis. I mean, it’s hard to avoid the negative publicity surrounding director Francis Ford Coppola’s latest (and last?) project, one that has already shown signs of being an enormous bomb at the box office. Normally I’m not one to let public or critical opinion sway my desire to see a film, but the trailers didn’t do it any favors, either. I seriously started to wonder whether there were better ways to spend my time. 

However, you know that I can’t resist a movie that dabbles in epic, still less one that draws on the fall of Rome to tell its story, and so it is that I found myself watching Megalopolis this weekend and…I’m not sure whether it was a good use of my time, to be honest. To be sure there are some very big ideas in Coppola’s sprawling, lumbering, top-heavy boondoggle of a film, but they are all so mangled up and smothered by the spectacle and the utterly disjointed narrative that none of them have any real payoff.

Before I go any further, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give you a bit of plot summary. Set in alternative America in which New Rome is the capital (though it looks and feels a lot like New York City), much of its conflict revolves around Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina, a rich member of the upper-class who wishes to design a new city comprised of the new material Megalon. He’s opposed by Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero, whose daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) begins an affair with Cesar. Lots of other characters flit in and out of the drama, including Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum (a TV presenter who is as ruthless as she is beautiful), Jon Voight’s Hamilton Crassus III (Cesar’s uncle and the wealthiest man in New Rome), and Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher (Cesar’s cousin who resents him and will stop at nothing to destroy him).

The real problem, I think, is that the film feels pulled in too many directions to ever really cohere, either as a narrative film or even as some sort of rumination on the nature of power and the decline of empires. On the one hand there are all of the grandiloquent speeches, many of which are lifted straight out of Shakespeare and are delivered with conviction and true screen power by the characters. Then there’s the spectacle and the scenes of orgiastic revelry, many of which feel like they could have been drawn right out of the later works of Ridley Scott (particularly Gladiator). And then there’s the treacly family melodrama which, thanks to some poor writing and a choppy narrative, ends up feeling forced and not particularly moving. Oh, and I almost forgot…there’s also a sci-fi element, but that is so inconsistently used that one wonders what it’s doing there in the first place. 

I probably could have tolerated it if Megalopolis had just two of the aforementioned elements, but Coppola–who wrote, produced, and directed it–clearly doesn’t have that kind of discipline at this stage in his career. He seems to have just thrown everything he could into the mix and hoped (futilely, as it turns out) that the magic of the movies and his own undeniable genius and skills as a director would make it all into something halfway coherent. For me, it just didn’t work, and I don’t even think the film is particularly strong as some sort of fever-dream or directorial musing. Sometimes a film is just kind of bad, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so. 

So much for all of the things that didn’t work. Were there any things that did? Well, yes and no. The performances were a bit all over the place, much like the rest of the film. At his best–I’m thinking of his work in both the Star Wars sequel trilogy and Girls and Marriage Story–Adam Driver exudes a sort of Byronic vitality, one that sits uneasily with his vulnerability, and he makes maximum use of his odd mixture. There’s some of that in Megalopolis, to be sure, but it tends to get lost in the many things that he’s asked to do as his character. Cesar is, sad to say, as ill-defined as the rest of the movie, and even an actor of Driver’s talents can’t rescue it. 

The other members of the cast fare somewhat better. Aubrey Plaza is sublime as Wow Platinum, and I would have liked to see a film all about her and her efforts to seize control of Crassus’s fortune. Esposito is delightfully sinister as always, and I even found myself enjoying Voight (whom I normally can’t stand). Laurence Fishburne is also quite skilled at delivering heavy philosophical lines in his mellifluous, rich tones. 

As far as the Rome stuff goes, I actually found myself intrigued by the many elements of Republican history that Coppola managed to bring into his story. Savvy viewers will recognize Shia LaBeouf’s Clodia Pulcher as a loose analogue of Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was indeed infamous for his antics (and was sometimes accused of incest with his sisters) and who was quite the rabble-rouser, just as they’ll see various other historical links, including Cicero (obviously), Caesar and Catalina (both of whom were known for their genius and their charisma and for their desire to seize power for themselves), and there’s more than a little of Julila the Elder in Emmanuel’s Julia.

Again, though, while I found the Rome stuff fascinating and fun to watch–particularly when the actors are really leaning into the madness of it all–I struggled to really figure out what it was all there for. Like the sci-fi element, it all just seems to be surface with no depth. After all, it’s not as if Coppola is the first to suggest that America is going the way of Rome. For that matter, it’s not as if this whole storyline is explored with anything even approaching narrative coherence, with plot threads built up and then just…abandoned. If you’re going to make some compelling point about the fall of Rome and the fall of America, the least you can do is create some story that dramatizes said fall or coherently explains why it doesn’t happen. 

All in all, I found Megalopolis was a testament to one filmmaker’s hubris and the disastrous film that was the result.