A Folly, Not a Failure - “Megalopolis”

It’s become a cliche, of sorts, to say that at a certain point, this or that artist can do whatever they want. Francis Ford Coppola is certainly at that point and has pretty much been doing whatever he wants for the past couple of decades, with variable results. None of his recent works (Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt, for example) are the works of a novice or even of someone who’s aged out of the game. Each has merits, each has flaws and some outweigh the other in each film. None are masterpieces, but then, I don’t think Coppola even believed they were going to be; they’re just stories he wanted to tell.

For forty years, he’s been kicking around the idea of Megalopolis, what would be his magnum opus. Not a small film, but epic in scope and ideas. In large measure, he’s succeeded in bringing that to the screen and there is something marvelous about it.

It is, indeed, a massive work. It is visually remarkable; now glorious, now garish, but never not opulent and engaging. The film explodes with every trick in the cinematic book and not a frame of it doesn’t look shot on a soundstage or CGI enhanced (or formed out of whole CG cloth). And that’s part of the charm; Coppola seems to be employing all these tricks to serve a vast philosophical rumination on the current historical moment and using cinema as an expansive canvas upon which to project these ideas.

What of those ideas? Coppola obviously feels we are at a pivotal moment in history, of wretched excess, bread and circuses that distract from very real existential threats to the Republic, and the place of individuals in grand course of history. However, as he grapples with these issues, the epistemological underpinnings he seems to want to explore are garbled and jumbled both by the script and its odd tensions with the images. 

The film announces itself as a fable and as such, should deliver a moral and as it stands, the moral seems to be love thy neighbor and don’t be scheming, murdering shit. Before we get to that, we’ve had everyone from Shakespeare to Marcus Aurelius called on for dialog, which to be fair, that’s fine; they’re good writers. But Coppola’s dialog? Oh, dear. It’s mostly pretty dire.

But there’s a but in this; in the mouths of his considerable cast, there’s a kind of winking knowingness about just how leaden some passages are. Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Nathalie Emmanuel have a field day with chewing on and spitting out the purplest of prose. No one, though, no one comes close to Aubrey Plaza’s turn as Wow Platinum, TV pundit and gold-digger extraordinaire. 

You know those scenes early in her career on Parks and Rec where her character April Ludgate would go into weird, over-the-top shows of eccentricity? Yeah? Well, imagine if those moments were retooled, relocated, and recontextualized in an over two-hour long epic film that draws parallels with the late stages of the Roman Empire? Plaza, more than anyone else, is clearly having a ball and can go from zero to a hundred in under a second. 

Believe it or not, even Shia Leboef shines as a little scheming creep. In other words, the actors are having a field day. They’re doing the best they can, swimming upstream in a surging story of scientific, utopian technology that will save us all and triumph over out petty, short-sighted desires for power and the status quo. 

How this works best is by taking the film as a farce. Not a satire, an all-out farce. That way, any philosophical inquiry doesn’t have to be too exact or demanding because the story cannot and does not support that attack.

Megalopolis works best as a large Sunday funny from the thirties; it has a kind of Republic serial optimism that all’s going to be okay in the end. This is swell for the thirties with “prosperity just around the corner”; but the 21st century is a darker place and Coppola understands that but can’t quite give it the resonance it so deeply requires. 

The play in brief centers around Driver’s Cesar Catalina, a wunderkind billionaire Renaissance man who’s discovered a new and miraculous building material he dubs Megalon. New York City is reimagined as New Rome and while strict codes of behavior are imposed on the lower classes, the patricians have a ball screwing around with each other an in general, acting as dissolute as their counterparts/inspirations from two thousand years ago.

Cesar promotes his vision of Megalopolis as a city of harmony and fulfillment for all. But Cesar has a couple of problems. He’s an alcoholic still pining for his wife who mysteriously vanished. He has spurned the affections of his lover Wow Platinum (who, of course, flies into the arms of his uncle, because, of course, she does - so juicy!) and finds himself at odds with Giancarlo Esposito’s Cicero, the mayor of New Rome. 

Complicating matters is Cicero’s daughter Julia (Emmanuel) who is the only person who can still move when Cesar stops time itself. Oh, sorry. I neglected to mention that Cesar Catalina can also stop time at which point, everyone and everything except him, stays frozen in place. Well, Julia can still move and proves to be a solid support over the course of the movie.

Wow marries Cesar’s uncle Hamilton Crassus the Third (a hilarious Jon Voight) who is increasingly feeble despite a huge dong (yes, seriously), and very much subject to the machinations of his other nephew, Clodio Pulcher (yes, these names, these names) and the two scheme so that she can get around the pre-nuptial agreement and become the richest woman in the world. It’s all very silly.

The problem is how difficult it is to determine what’s intentional and unintentional silliness. Among other elements, it’s the tonal shifts from deadpan to batshit crazy played straight that prove sometimes inseparable. And insufferable.

Comparisons have been made, based on similar visual styles to Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Lang’s Metropolis, and maybe you could throw in Chaplin’s Modern Times, but if anything, But the movie that it most called to mind for me was Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City.

Hear me out! Please! Not so much in theme (though they do share different takes on corruption), but in hyperkinetic uses of multiple techniques to tell the story. Coppola’s is more that of the assured craftsman, but he seems to be taking the same gleeful approach to the material that Rodriguez did with his.

It also reminds me of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, another filmed excess set in the transitional period from silent to sound film. It’s more a fiasco than a folly, but Chazelle’s film is filled to the brim with camera movement and clogged compositions. The characters are better written but at the end of it, you rather wonder what he’s getting at. Chazelle’s is not a subtle work, but I’ll grant that he’s in love with cinema as much as Coppola.

Sin City and Megalopolis also suffer from some misplaced earnestness, they are pretty fun to look at and both are replete with half-baked philosophy.

Even then and there, though, Coppola’s quoting of the Stoics isn’t just to show off what he knows; I believe he feels very much that Seneca, Aurelius, et al, offfer a clear-sighted path through our times. Their works were created to guide leaders (Aurelius, notably, wrote his Meditations for himself); consequently, I suspect this is one of the points that he wants to drive home throughout the movie, but it’s a real reach. 

There’s so much stuff going on in each frame, so much animated camera movement, and so much patently weird choices made narratively and stylistically, that the maximalist cinematic values we see fly in direct antiphone to Stoic philosophy. Then, at one point, Cesar pretty much goes full on hippy when he abjures people that love is the only way. Yes, Meglalopolis is a muddle.

Why don’t I rip on it as a failure? Because it really isn’t. It’s not a great film, nor should it be considered a late period masterpiece (though, who knows; in another generation,  it may go through a critical revision), but it is unlike anything else out there. It does demand you pay attention, it has a ton of heart and then some, but there is no getting around that it is a bit of a mess.

Coppola’s bigger films are very much like operas. The Godfather One and Two, Apocalypse Now, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, are all Big Movies that swing for the rafters. Three of them land, one of them comes close and this one, well, I think he hits a double.

I read a review that opined that Coppola was no Godard; he didn’t come up with any new ideas here and as a final film, if such as it is, it fails miserably. It’s ludicrous to compare the two; their approaches to cinema are diametrically and philosophically oppositional. But both loved cinema. I would argue, too, that both knew that some of their work would anger and befuddle and likely bore people. 

I don’t think I can say that Coppola’s work here is boring, though. Befuddling and bemusing, sure. Frustrating and incoherent, you bet. It’s not as thought-provoking as he’d like it to be or perhaps think it is, but it’s not without wit and it is in part, sometimes offers a kind of provocation. Trust me, though, it isn’t boring.