Megalopolis: a grand, grotesque and wonderful folly

• Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. 

A person could lose their mind in Megalopolis. It sure seems like Francis Ford Coppola did, though ‘lose’ is maybe the wrong word, implying inadvertent mental misplacement. Actually his gargantuan, grotesque, wonderful folly of a movie is a long-gestating project to which Coppola has deliberately donated his mind (along with $120m of his vineyard money), emptying it out like a carpetbag containing the detritus of over four decades of larger-than-life life. Amid that pile there are more than a few dead moths and lint-fuzzed biscuit crumbs. But there are gleaming gold coins and skeins of silken thought too, alongside weighty tomes of Roman history and Shakespearean tragedy and some bootleg DVDs of boondoggles like Southland Tales (2006) and Cloud Atlas (2012) and the filmmaker’s own Youth Without Youth (2007). It’s all up there, and Coppola’s apparent inability to tell the treasure from the trash is one of the film’s frustrating, oddly poignant charms. 

The megalopolis is New Rome, which is really fantasy New York, which is really a Georgia greenscreen soundstage, set beneath artificial apricot skies. Often garishly ugly but sometimes dreamily beautiful, like when a drowned body becomes one with the stones of the river bed, this world exists in hard social stratifications. Wealthy revellers sporting gilded laurels enjoy nightly bacchanals, while the poor gather to protest the demolition of yet another tenement. Meanwhile, far above street level, an ideological war is underway, between pragmatic Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the visionary head of the municipal Design Authority, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who can stop time. They are, respectively, Politics and Art, while Commerce is repped by Crassus (Jon Voight), Cesar’s libidinous, rich-as-Croesus patron whose heir apparent, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), is an odious creep who morphs from incestuous party-boy into – what else? – a rabble-rousing populist intent on a cynical shortcut to power. 

There are women in New Rome too, and not just the nameless ones attached to the film’s many jiggling bosoms. Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a slinky media star, is Cesar’s girlfriend before gold digging her way into Crassus’s clammy embrace. And there’s a more fragrantly wholesome femininity in Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) Cicero’s radiant, clever daughter. She and Cesar get together, and the redemptive power of her love is made all the more affecting by an end-title dedication to Eleanor Coppola, the director’s late wife and collaborator. 

Neatly filing these characters – or this movie – under ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is largely futile. In Coppola’s worldview, there is no good or bad, there is only great or piffling and Megalopolis may not be great, but it certainly isn’t piffling. It hardly could be, having the thematic ambition to persuade us that art is both civilisation’s redemption and the route it must take to get there, quickly, before pettifogging bureaucrats brick up the exits and condemn us to die from terminal lack of imagination, in the decaying edifices of a corrupt republic. And since there is no nutshell capacious enough for a summary of all its spaghettified, incomplete plotlines, let’s keep it cursory: Cesar has a vision for a utopian New Rome built from a semi-miraculous substance called Megalon. Cicero is blocking the initiative mostly because he fears Cesar is “a reckless dreamer who will destroy the world sooner than we can build a better one.” Crassus just wants to get laid. 

“What do you think of this boner I got?” he crows to Wow. She repays his ardour by plotting with Clodio to snaffle hubby’s outrageous fortune – speaking of Hamlet, which we weren’t but then neither was Cesar when he recited the whole “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The dialogue is stilted: gibberish and god’s-honest Latin colliding with banal profanities and lofty allusions. But some words do carry weight. Julia partly heals the rift between her father and her lover by deploying apposite Marcus Aurelius quotes – a witty scene, though a shame that the only way any woman can get the conversational upper hand is by parroting the words of a man who’s been dead for 1800-odd years. 

But critiquing the antiquated view of women (not to mention the queer-coding of the depraved Clodio) is also futile. What makes Megalopolis such a fascinatingly lovable mess – even before the Brechtian twist of a live actor emerging to interact with the film – is that for a futurist fantasy, it is almost heroically dated. A kitschy carving insists this is the 21st century, but almost every historical era is present except now: there are the togas of antiquity and 1940s fedoras, the Art Deco Chrysler Building and the neoclassical City Hall. There is The Tempest and Edward Gibbon, Emerson, Vertigo and Petrarch. And the deranged sidebar about singing sensation Vesta (Grace VanderWaal) seems pulled from that weird late-90s moment when tabloids publicly speculated on the virginity of young celebs.

The world that Coppola fears will end in Megalopolis actually ended a while ago, while he was busy with his vineyards or whatever. Culture, serpent that it is, has mostly sloughed off Coppola’s New Hollywood era of Great American Men making Mighty American Art-Operas and slithered away in a new generational skin. That’s not to say Megalopolis is some old man shouting at clouds; it’s an 85-year-old giant bellowing at the heavens, using every resource and every ounce of creative energy to fight a battle that was lost a long time ago. The beautiful uselessness of that endeavour is less Caesar or Hamlet than Don Quixote, and transforms this flabbergastingly sincere act of overreach into a moving testament to the deranged nobility of Coppola, the knight-errant, saddling up and donning his armour one more time to tilt at the windmills of his megalopolitan mind.