[Better to read this after seeing the film but the spoilers are mild.]
It’s public knowledge that Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis made. He told Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican that he “must have gone through 300 rewrites”. He sold off a good portion of his vineyard to finance it. There were numerous logistic and political problems. Imagine the determination. It’s a bit like Terry Gilliam’s passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a film that cost Terry Gilliam so much to make, and which ultimately is not resonating with critics or the film-going public. (Curiously, Adam Driver stars in both.) Megalopolis will probably have a niche or a micro-niche audience.
Is it bad or good? I think both—or neither.
There’s a doggedness to it. Coppola's desire to draw parallels between the fall of Rome and the future of the United States by setting the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy in modern New York City (New Rome!) hardly makes for a startling comparison. More like, it’s a cliche, and okay, cliches are everywhere—and they are fair game. I would say points go to the artist who can take something trite and turn it on its head, but I’m not sure that’s happening here. The film doesn’t add anything to the old chestnut of the declining Pax Americana, rather, it embellishes it. The film codes artistic daring by casting Shia LaBeouf and authorial command by casting Adam Driver. Yet, for all its pretensions of grandeur and gravitas, the movie has a lack of depth.
What Megalopolis has in spades is the visual sheen of a dreamy AI filter. In the sets and especially the lighting, gold is the predominant color, the way red and green are the predominant colors of Amélie, and blue is the predominant color of Poor Things. It does not have the mastery of visual symbolism of a David Lynch film, or hyperbole as we’ve seen from Yorgos Lanthimos, even with its cursory foray into surrealistic imagery. For me, perhaps it’s that the characters clash with the film’s world building because they’re so literal.
Coppola subtitled his film, ‘A Fable’. It might have been his way of justifying the flatness of his characters, and of course, there is a moral. In fact, many morals. Quite by accident, I found Coppola’s Letterboxd account, where he posted these as the films that influenced the making of Megalopolis.
I’m going to focus on the stand out among them, the blueprint-like resemblance to King Vidal’s The Fountainhead (1949) because there are already many reviews of Megalopolis out there, a few which mention this film, but that don’t go into much detail. I’m going to do a compare/contrast of the two.
If you haven’t seen it, The Fountainhead is a film about another visionary architect (Gary Cooper), who struggles to maintain his integrity and individualism despite personal, professional and economic pressures to conform to popular standards. It’s also a vehicle for the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Lucky for us, although Coppola also lays on a thick layer of dicta, he switches her out for Marcus Aurelius, who we hear verbatim through Julia Cicero, (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter.
There’s a lot of didactic dialogue here. Megalopolis breaks up the narrative with plaques bearing sage thoughts in all caps, quotes that serve not to enrich the plot in any way, but as some kind of finger-wagging exercise, the literally chiseled-in-stone writing on the wall. Megalopolis pontificates.
CAN WE PRESERVE OUR PAST AND ALL ITS WONDROUS HERITAGE, OR WILL WE TOO FALL VICTIM LIKE OLD ROME TO THE INSATIABLE APPETITE FOR POWER OF A FEW MEN (no question mark)
One can only hope ‘wondrous heritage’ refers to things like democracy and iambic pentameter, and not slavery or imperialism. In any case, this is similar to The Fountainhead. It’s a lot of telling, and it happens all through both films.
In The Fountainhead, when Howard Roark blows up his own Cortlandt Homes, destined to be low-income housing, it’s because the terms of his agreement to follow instructions to the letter have been breached. Cesar Catalina blows up a building which also housed the poor, in order to make way for his megalopolis. It could have been Cortlandt Homes sixty years on. Howard Roark is vilified, along with the Murdoch-like newspaper which supports him. When Roark is arrested and stands on trial, the dialogue is steeped in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.
“Throughout the centuries, there were men who took the first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors, stood alone against the men of their time. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. No creator was prompted by a desire to please his brothers. His brothers hated the gifts he offered. The truth was his only motive, his work his only goal. He lives for himself, and only in living for himself was he able to achieve things, which is the glory of mankind.”1
Like Cesar Catilina, Howard Roark refuses to compromise on his vision, and perhaps these are stand-ins for Coppola and Vidal. That’s understandable, but to my mind, any time an author takes advantage of fictional characters to spout their own biases, it’s to the detriment of the film or literary work. That kind of artificiality can work, but it takes an even more stylized filmic approach. The only film director I can think of who has pulled it off convincingly, is Peter Greenaway in The Pillow Book.
The plaques and sonorous voice overs might not work for everybody, but they are offset by the high jinx. Where Megalopolis diverges from The Fountainhead would be in its humorous moments. If you don’t like Shia LeBeouf, you might enjoy watching him get shot in the butt, twice.
This is the culmination of the busy subplots that revolve around the machinations of Cesar’s cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Clodio’s aunt/lover, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), to thwart Cesar’s magnificent plans for the city, which involve Megalon, the nobel-prized material he’s invented. Great ensemble acting. None of it makes much sense, but it’s the fun part of this film, and it does call back to Ayn Rand’s words about the contempt people feel for true creators, people who disrupt the status quo.
As for romance, there’s another borrowed idea from the very last scene of The Fountainhead. Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) goes up in a construction elevator to the top of the tallest building in the world, and Howard Roark, who stands at the very top. Recently married to him, the beatific look on her face is meant to signal that she’s ready to ditch her previously vehement desire to live as an independent woman. In Megalopolis, we get pregnant Julia Cicero perilously climbing the girders towards her lover, Cesar with that same face. Their romance is also melodramatic and ridiculously hetero-normative.
In its annoying finale, Megalopolis affirms the nuclear family in the same presumptuous way this year’s Hitman does, although, it turns out Cesar has also lived the life of a bad husband, not unlike Driver’s Henry McHenry, in Annette (2018).
As a side note, Adam Driver can do menace very well, and Coppola might have leaned into that more, instead of making him impervious to bullets to the face, which I think is the weaker play.
Megalopolis is not about architecture, or future technology, or even a better future for all, as much as our ability to see—with the help of all Laurence Fishburne’s voice over badgering—a future in which the United States has lost its standing on the world stage. The message seems to be that we better stop scrolling and do something about it, but the last scene also qualifies all this by tacking on a further message of hope. It returns to Cesar stopping time as in the opening scene of the film. He tells Julia that when an artist makes something truly good, it stops time, and in the last minutes of the film, the only one who doesn’t freeze is their baby.
Traditionally speaking, architecture aspires to being eternal, outside of time altogether, and even though Coppola is more interested in baring the cultural decadence of New Rome, he ends the film suggesting that Cesar’s daughter, the next generation, will carry on, having inherited his ability to function in stopped time, even as he has lost it.
Has Coppola lost it?
Megalopolis asks questions we need to think about, so in this sense, even if the execution was not perfect, it’s still worth seeing, and even if you judge this film to be a failure, I say it forms part of the oeuvre of one of our great living directors, one who has never shied away from risk-taking.
That, I think, deserves respect.
Dialogue fro the courtroom scene where Howard Roark defends himself. I’ve shortened it for conciseness.