Film of the Week: ‘Megalopolis’ – Coppola’s disastrously dull folly

The lead up to Megalopolis’ Cannes premiere this year was hardly smooth, with one controversy following another.

Coppola’s long-gestating and self-financed $120 million project came with reports of inappropriate on-set behaviour, and what happened after the mixed reviews were in wasn’t all that great either… ‘Blitheringly stupid’ feels like an accurate description, with the film’s trailer being pulled after using damning reviews of the filmmaker’s earlier movies – all of which turned out to be fake and AI-generated.

The director’s four-decade-long journey to bring Megalopolis to the screen has been a unwieldy mess, and that feels somewhat appropriate, as the film is also a total shambles. It starts its theatrical rollout after several festival appearances in Canada and the US, and whether you choose to see it or not depends on your masochism levels. And whether you believe the director’s not-at-all-biased assessment on Letterboxd, on which he recently gave Megalopolis a perfect score.

Attempting a meaningful synopsis of the film is a tough ask, as the barely coherent plot to this insane baroque fever dream, billed as a “Roman epic” and “A Fable”, defies all description.

Here’s a level-best attempt.

It takes place in a decadent metropolis called New Rome, formerly New York. How do we know it’s decadent? Because there’s a party with the presence of decadence incarnate for filmmakers wishing to show that the world is all topsy turvy: lesbians. Gasp!

The newly anointed Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is embroiled in a bitter rivalry with architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), the visionary head of the city’s Design Authority division. He’s a tortured soul and enjoys monologuing while Dustin Hoffman and James Remar stand in the background doing sweet fuck all.

Oh, and Catalina has the impressive (and unexplained) ability to stop time whenever he chooses.

Don’t ask.

Catalina has created a Nobel Prize-winning material called Megalon, with which he plans to revitalize New Rome’s infrastructure – much to the chagrin of Cicero. He’s having an affair with shock journo minx Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, giving it socks), who has also got her eye on Catalina’s banker uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Crassus’ grandson, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) fosters a grudge against his cousin and desires nothing more than to inherit his grandfather’s empire – and later embraces a Trumpian agenda to take over the city.

It then goes fully Montague-Capulet when Catalina falls for Cicero’s daughter Julia, played by a doe-eyed Nathalie Emmanuel, who tries her best with a barely dimensional character but can’t hold the screen as one of the many wooden female props in this film who are all cartoonish clichés in the orbit of * sound the trumpets * MALE GENIUS.

After this set up, it’s all a mad jumble of heteroclitic strands that defy basic storytelling and dramatic coherence. Think Cloud Atlas by way of Southland Tales. And even that sounds better than Megalopolis actually is.

There’s a Taylor Swift avatar named Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal) who performs a song about her pledge to remain virginal until marriage while wealthy crowds are asked to donate money to assist in her vow. Clodio doctors footage of Sweetwater sleeping with Catalina, which temporarily tanks the architect’s reputation. But that kerfuffle is conveniently resolved in mere minutes.

The action is sporadically narrated by Laurence Fishburne, doing what he can with some of Coppola’s pretentious dialogue, which quotes Shakespeare, Petrarch and Marcus Aurelius in its bid to be a modern re-imagining of a Roman tragedy about the fall of empires and the role of the visionary in a crumbling world. The leaden script spouts out some punishingly bland truisms on the elusive meaning of time and the danger of utopias – all with the earnest pomposity of a sixteen-year-old who’s just finished smoking a bad batch of the devil’s cabbage.

It’s… It’s exhausting.

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Like any dud, there are some highlights. Well, one.

Jon Voight’s Crassus at one point calls Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum a “Wall Street slut” before shooting an arrow at her heart while she’s wearing a very revealing Cleopatra outfit. That part is fun.

Aside from that, viewers are left with the muddled inclusion of a tree sculpted swastika, an out-of-bollock-nowhere montage featuring Hitler, Mussolini and 9/11, as well as the all-important plot point centred around a Soviet satellite that’s about to crash into New Rome. It’s mentioned. It’s briefly shown. It’s forgotten about and ends up of no consequence whatsoever.

And who could forget the Brechtian happening which occured during the film’s premiere in Cannes? A live actor came on stage with a microphone in order to interact with the film for less than 2 minutes.

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Seriously, don’t ask.

It was an unintentionally funny bit that served no purpose and hopefully audiences during the wide release of Megalopolis will be spared this pointless gimmick.

While this futurist fantasy sounds so insane it could border on genius, don’t delude yourselves into thinking that Megalopolis is one of those ahead-of-its-time / bless-this-mess future classics made by a filmmaker with nothing left to lose. Just because the veteran director behind such classics as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation decides to deliver his go-for-broke magnum opus, doesn’t make it any less of an indulgent folly that borders on nonsensical.

Coppola’s high-concept (and painfully obvious) allegory on Art in the future may claw back some good will in the sincerity of its intentions and in the way it chooses to push the envelope of an artistic medium that all-too-often relies on pre-existing IPs and the churning out of the latest superhero caper. However, the director shoots for the stars and misses every single one. The axed trailer for the film featuring fabricated quotes may inform us that genius is often misunderstood, but sometimes there are no misunderstandings. Sometimes, there are embarrassments of the highest order.

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“What’s a seven-letter word for God’s revenge on mankind?” asks Wow Platinum.

The answer’s “Pandora.”

Here’s another one for you: “What’s a 11-letter word that represents a 138-minute narrative overstuffed with loosely connected ideas that are never fully realized, dull visual exuberance, embarrassing performances, and an exhausting reminder that Coppola now adds his name to the list of an aging generation of self-involved directors incapable of distinguishing a good idea from a piss poor one, who apparently are destined to cap off their careers with hubristically misguided duds vying for cult status?”

You guessed it. It’s the title of the sanity-corroding film you’d do well to avoid lest your brain to mush.

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Megalopolis premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival and hits theatres across Europe next week.