Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Oh, how one wants to love “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s grand folly of a grand finale. How one marvels at the cast of hundreds, the glittering CGI backdrops, the Pynchon-esque character names (Wow Platinum! Hamilton Crassus III! Vesta Sweetwater!). How one aches to be won over by the sheer, nutty chutzpah of the thing: a $120 million, wine-financed epic of ancient Rome in the modern age and a New York story lorded over by a Caesar who’s half Robert Moses and half the archangel Gabriel.
But, oh, what a mess this movie is – a glorious mess, an undeniable mess, a mess of too much ambition, too many ideas, too many characters and not enough discipline. Coppola still knows how to make a movie, but he’s forgotten how to structure a scene, and a majority of “Megalopolis” consists of talented actors spritzing improvisationally at one another on gargantuan sets, milling about and bumping into things. It’s a packed subway car of a film, reminiscent of another of the director’s fiascoes of love, “One From the Heart” (1982), but with that film’s glories dimmed and its problems cubed.
That said, is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.
The aforementioned Caesar is actually named Cesar Catilina, and he’s played by Adam Driver with a bowl cut that’s one of many visual touches bridging the ancient Roman Empire and Coppola’s New Rome. Cesar is himself a visionary with an office aerie in the spire of the Chrysler Building, onto whose ledge he steps early in “Megalopolis” and with a snap of his fingers stops time. Neat trick, but not an especially useful tool for urban planners, who generally want to reverse time or fast-forward into the future.
Against the hero’s plan for a new New Rome, renamed Megalopolis and built of a shape-shifting substance called Megalon, is the entire bureaucracy of the city, led by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and a rogues’ gallery worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych: Dustin Hoffman as a ratlike fixer, Jason Schwartzman and Balthazar Getty as factotums, and so on down the line of ward heelers and sub-sub-aldermen. Jon Voight plays Hamilton Crassus III, New Rome’s richest citizen, and Shia LaBeouf plays his son Clodio, who’s a cross between Shakespeare’s Puck and Tolkien’s Gollum and who functions as the tale’s evil trickster. (LaBeouf is also one of the few cast members who looks like he’s genuinely having fun.)
Several figures wander between these two warring factions, making their choice for venality or virtue: the vapid celebrity journalist Wow Platinum, who’s Cesar’s barely tolerated mistress and is played by Aubrey Plaza with gimlet-eyed enthusiasm; a Taylor Swift-alike public virgin named Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal); Cesar’s right-hand man and the film’s stentorian narrator Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne); and, most crucially for the advancement of the plot (such as it is), Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter, to whom Nathalie Emmanuel imparts a great deal of grace as the character is drawn away from her hedonistic circle of disco playgirls and into Cesar’s rarefied orbit.
Emmanuel was the slave-turned-handmaiden Missandei on “Game of Thrones,” and “Megalopolis” could be seen, if you look at it sideways, as “Game of Thrones” played simultaneously as parody and perfectly straight. It includes such diversions as Driver’s Cesar declaiming Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy for no apparent reason, a ribbon-cutting fracas with the entire cast balancing precariously on a catwalk, set-piece sequences in nightclubs that aim for and achieve an epic vulgarity. The costumes by Milena Canonero are Romanesque togas by way of the Met Gala, and the cinematography by Mihai Malaimare Jr. casts everything in a beautifully diseased golden glow, as if the film were unfolding in a snow globe whose liquid has tarnished with time and shame. Osvaldo Golijov’s score is old-school orchestral movie music with strange sunbeams shining through it.
“Megalopolis” is a movie unstuck not only in historical time – Coppola has for decades been fascinated by the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 B.C., from which he has drawn the characters of Cesar and Cicero – but in cinema history and its maker’s personal saga as well. The film is a toy chest of movie techniques upended on the playroom floor: iris-outs and split-screens, a live reporter onstage during a news conference scene (which sadly will not be in the general-release version). It’s as if Coppola were cramming 120 years of film into 138 minutes, from Méliès to modern CGI.
So, too, does “Megalopolis” reflect and refract the man who made it. The Francis Ford Coppola who stunned moviegoers with the craft and cynicism of “The Godfather” (1972), “The Conversation” and “The Godfather Part II” (both 1974); who almost destroyed himself making “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and went bankrupt directing “One From the Heart”; who became a journeyman filmmaker and a hugely successful celebrity vintner – that Francis Ford Coppola has mellowed like a fine merlot, and the corruption that once swamped his heroes as a fact of life in America/New Rome is now vanquished in the idealism of Cesar Catilina’s shining digital city on a hill.
“Megalopolis” is a mess, in other words, but so is this country, this world and this life. So sayeth an 85-year-old Caesar who had it all, lost it all and somehow ended up convinced that hope, determination and the creative muse are the only ways forward. Coppola has made the movie he wanted. If it’s not the movie we wanted, on some level it may still be the movie we need.
– – –
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
– – –
Two stars. Rated R. At area theatres. Contains sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence. 138 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.