Megalopolis is Not Weird Enough
Coppola's film about the importance of new ideas seems to offer none of its own.
How do you solve a problem like Megalopolis?
Some critics would have you say it’s a symphonic masterpiece of absurdist camp. Some critics would call it one of the dumbest, most incoherent film ever made, the byproduct of the last dying neurons flaring up in the decaying mind of Francis Ford Coppola. Most (including me) probably fall somewhere in them middle or possibly both at once. This is a film that defies notions of “good” or “bad”, in a way. It’s certainly not trying to be liked.
Let’s get this out of the way— yes, Megalopolis is weird, for sure. This is a movie about an architect whose profound skill is demonstrated by making his employees do little cheerleader pyramids and throwing a basketball around his office. Said architect also recites the entirety of Hamlet’s to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy to a totally gripped crowd of onlookers. He imagines a utopia that is pretty much characterized as a normal world but all the buildings look like leaves and it has those moving airport walkways everywhere and they’re magic. He gets high at a party and everything just starts spinning around. Aubrey Plaza’s pussy has (actual, real) hypnotic powers and her name is Wow Platinum. One of the protagonists is shot in the face by a 12-year-old boy. Another is interviewed about her bisexuality. Adam Driver is making choices that have never been made by anyone else, ever. There’s a scene where Jason Schwartzman, seemingly undirected, starts playing the drums (likely thing for Jason Schwartzman to do). A Vestal virgin pop star is incriminated in a deepfaked porn scandal and proceeds to have a Reputation era. The entire movie is set up around a vital debate for the future… and there is no debate about the future. (Is a big speech to a massed crowd of vaguely defined “immigrants” supposed to count as a debate?) The interstitial title cards look like they were made in Microsoft Word. Line deliveries are so stilted and strange they seem to transcend any idea of intentional stylization. It’s so stupid. It’s so stupid!
But the weirdness is a feature, not a bug. There’s an active joy to the craziness here. The film sings through its craziness, its absurdly pontificating characters, its in-your-face symbolism and Roman names and allegory, its unrelenting gonzo style. Even its incomprehensibility has a charm. Oodles of lines here are clearly meant to be funny. C’mon, it’s not like he named Wow Platinum that accidentally. And its fairytale (sorry, fable-esque) imagery is often striking and beautiful. A dream of a hand ripping the moon from the sky. A defunct Soviet satellite crashing to the earth, blowing up huge shadows of its victims across the skyscrapers of New Rome. A dance across the beams of a building under construction. My favourite part was when the narrator (Laurence Fishburne) who waxes philosophical over the entire film with a crackling grandeur is revealed to be Catalina’s humble assistant and driver, chronicling the rise of an empire from the shadows and the side of the frame. The protagonists have an unexplained ability to stop time— it has no plot relevance other than, uh, “it looks cool”. The final shot of the film is a that’s-all-folks style closing circle on the face of a baby, then a rationalist rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance.
But the worst choices in this movie are not wacky or ambitious— they’re boring. So much of Megalopolis falls prey to the rote structural standbys of the most formulaic and creatively bankrupt cinema.
There’s a biting satirical humour to the way the political elites of New Rome ignore the falling Soviet satellite until it’s visible from their windows (an obvious climate change metaphor). It craters a city block. But this is given no resonance in the film, which moves on briskly, as if it’s bored of its own plot points. No one cares! There is no conflict, and no resolution of it— the crater is just a device to give Catalina some space to start building. This will prove to be representative of many of the film’s problems.
Its portrayal of the political masses, on the other hand, is downright insulting. The “masses” seem to be mostly made up of hand-wavey crowds of immigrants, who are easily swayed to Clodio Pulcher’s fascist uprising. The political allegory is blatant— Pulcher is Trump, and his boys get Nazi tattoos and wave around Confederate flags and carve tree stumps into swastikas. A vulgar populist capitalizing on the misery of the working class with empty promises and fistfuls of cash— boy, this feels so cutting and relevant! They even wear red hats! And if you’re really stupid, don’t worry, he drops in some archival footage of Adolf Hitler, just to really grind it in. But Coppola, just like the right-wingers he’s attempting to parody, can’t help but imagine immigrants as a seething mass, devoid of original thought, so poor and spineless they’ll switch their allegiance to whoever wants them as a base. Why did he even bother? He loves to drop in shots of the Statue of Liberty, yet he has no interest in portraying immigrants as human beings. He genuinely might as well have filmed them as cockroaches.
Megalopolis is bored of its women, too. Do you want a mother (good/evil version), a wife, or a whore? Oh, what about Dead Blue Wife? How, exactly, is this subversive? How is this weird? The female lead, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel, who is trying very hard to have exactly half of a New Yorker accent) starts out strong, basically a plucky detective trying to snoop out Cesar Catalina’s Whole Deal. That’s fun! I promise! It all drains out as soon as she and Cesar begin a romantic relationship— now she is just there for him to bounce ideas off, parroting his beliefs exactly, mothering his child, simpering off to the side. Oh, and don’t think Cesar doesn’t have a fridged ghost wife hovering around for manpain reasons! Because he does! Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza is having such an unimaginable amount of fun you basically forget that her whole character is based on Coppola reading Cleopatra’s Wikipedia page one-handed. (She’s innocent. He is not. We love you Wow Platinum!!!) And, of course, Catalina’s mother is an evil witch who doesn’t love him enough and has to learn to forgive his existence by the end. Solid stuff there, Francis.
Its own imagined utopia is dull and empty. What is Catalina’s small-M megalopolis? What makes it better, other than… it moves? What does that actually mean? What is his better world? The newly minted building material “megalon” (amazing name) can be floaty or transparent or, uh, heal wounds? I guess? Inserts of Giger-esque architectural drawings of wavy plantlike structures can’t do much to paper over the actual CG megalopolis, which to be frank looks like dogshit. It’s so vague and blurry it almost feels like it’s intentionally blank of features, but it makes sure to include some horizontal glowing people-movers and floating fronds to give off the aesthetic idea of “future”, ripped from Disney’s Tomorrowland. How is this new life better, how does it justify the destruction of the old? Having big ideas is Important, it insists, while offering none of its own.
The film festival impressions of Megalopolis made me think, at the very least, it might be radical. Maybe it just subverted the audience’s expectations? Painfully, it fails at even that. It’s the massive dissonance between its unique stylizations and its basic, trite messaging that makes it feel so incomprehensible, so at odds with itself. Its structure is disarmingly simple! Everything fixes itself easily at the end. One Big Speech is enough to fix the whole world, even when it’s not actually about anything. It’s sappy and saccharine, like a studio note. Which really says something, doesn’t it? Every conflict resolves neatly, the good guys get their happy ending, the bad guys get strung up. The whore is punished violently, the unloving mother repents, the wife has a baby. Cesar is implicated in the previously mentioned porn scandal, but it turns out it was faked, and the girl wasn’t a minor anyway! He never killed his wife, either, it was all a setup! That is all the depth this movie wants to offer— a great man is falsely accused of having flaws, and he proves everyone wrong and is granted all his wishes because he’s such a perfect genius. There is no reflection, no tragic flaw, no clever subversion, barely even an attempt at an obstacle.
It’s not even offensive, really. It’s just fucking boring.
Which is sad, because Megalopolis managed to fill me with so much glee. It has audacity! It’s trying things! It names a baby Sunny Hope! It’s frequently inventive, with a scrappy vibe, eschewing so much of the desaturated shot-for-iPhone-watchers visual features of modern filmmaking. There’s fun here, really.
But no matter how desperately it tries, it suffers from a fundamental, crippling lack of imagination. Its protagonists are imagineers, geniuses, but we never actually get to see their genius realized. Its characters and plots are painfully reductive, shells empty of any conflict or depth. It’s the idea of an idea, nothing more. Wouldn’t it be nice to create a better world? Yeah, Francis, it would. But how will you do it? How will you build it? A magic new metal? A Marcus Aurelius aphorism? A movie called Megalopolis, which spouts speeches about speech, ideas about having ideas, venerating creators of radical vagueries, dreaming featureless futures, which are better somehow, at some point? Coppola cannot imagine his utopia, no matter how much he gestures at it.
I guess he just didn’t have it in the budget.