All That Glitters — Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a film that, by its very existence, leaves your average cinephile in something of a catch-22. On the one hand, Coppola has given the world some of the greatest achievements of the artform, to the point that he can easily be given the odd mulligan if he puts out a project that feels a bit off. The movie industry owes him a debt of gratitude that can never truly be repaid. On the other hand, this passion project was pretty clearly telegraphed as being distinctly weird at best and a catastrophic train wreck at worst.

The production itself was fraught with controversy. Rumors spread of Coppola being extremely mercurial on set with his creative choices, constantly changing things on the fly. There were also allegations of unprofessional and even sexual misconduct when it came to his involvement with nude and scantily clad background actors. When the film was screened for distributors, it looked like this 50-year investment would never see the light of day, or at least never see the light of an auditorium, as a proposed marketing budget of $80-$100 million was scoffed at by those who saw a bomb in the making (its $7 million opening weekend gross seemingly proves this out; more like MegaFLOPolis, amirite?). When it finally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, the critical response was mixed to negative, which led to a highly aggressive ad campaign that used fake, AI-generated pull quotes from critics regarding his masterworks, essentially saying that Coppola was a genius not to be questioned, and that his naysayers have historically been proven wrong. To put a fine point on it, one of the greatest auteurs in film history reduced the possibility of anyone not liking this picture to a dismissive, “haters gonna hate.”

So what’s a viewer to do if they take the gamble and fork over their cash to see this almost real-time disaster unfold, especially if they shell out the extra money for the “intended” experience of watching it in IMAX? For me, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to just laugh. Every so often you encounter a film so bad, so insanely misfired, that your intellectual and emotional systems simply shut down, and all you’re left with is the capacity for laughter. You laugh because crying would hurt too much, and the sheer absurdity of what you’re witnessing offers no other biological recourse. It is, in its own way, fascinating to see something that fails on pretty much every conceivable level, especially when it comes from a source as respected and beloved as Coppola. How could this have happened? Well, the answer lies in the premise of the picture itself, with Coppola unintentionally damning himself with his own messaging, pointing one finger at the world and four more back at himself.

To the attentive audience member, you are at least given permission very early on to take the proceedings as a feature-length joke if you so choose. From the moment the picture comes up, when nonsense philosophy is carved onto marble stone as a form of text slate and Laurence Fishburne narrates even more rhetorical idiocy, we are being told that this cannot be taken seriously. This first scene concludes with our lead character, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) climbing out of the window of a New York — sorry, New Rome — skyscraper, walking to the ledge, leaning over as if ready to jump a hundred stories to his death, and then shouting “TIME STOP!” to literally make the world halt in place around him. All the cars below freeze, as do the clouds in the sky, and somehow, he’s able to pull himself back from the brink. We’re but a minute into the movie, and its core conceit has already collapsed under the weight of reality. I’m not talking about this weird superpower that has no real bearing on the actual plot. You can chalk that up to suspension of disbelief. What you can’t wave off is the fact that Driver was already in the act of falling when he stopped time, and yet we see that he can still move. Therefore, the laws of motion and physics still apply to him. As such, he still should have fallen and immediately died, movie over, roll credits. Instead, we just cut to a shot where he’s no longer in danger and stepping backwards from this metal cliff.

I’m sorry, I’m already done. Two minutes in, and I already know nothing matters. If anything about the remaining 138 minutes is to be even entertained, Driver has to go splat onto the roof of a motionless taxi. Or better yet, just don’t put him in an obviously lethal position to demonstrate this power. Most of its instances for the rest of the runtime just involve stopping mundane objects in midair, so why do we have to go so overly dramatic with its introduction? It’s not like Catilina ever finds himself in another suicidal position or exhibits self-destructive behavior apart from a bender at the end of the first act, so what are we even doing? The answer is that Coppola felt we in the auditorium wouldn’t be able to connect with the main character without a shocking visual, and to a certain extent, he was right, because Catilina is a distinctly uninteresting character. He’s pompous, condescending, entitled, and apart from this ability, has no discernable talent. Everything about him is exposited by others or presented in over-the-top oratory from Driver himself hamming it up to the nth degree, including reciting the famous third act soliloquy from Hamlet and attempting to “mansplain” string theory.

Anyway, the story is presented as a “fable” about the fall of an empire, with ancient Roman imagery infused with modern day New York. Catilina, an architect who heads up the “Design Authority” in New Rome, has discovered a new building material that he calls Megalon, but you might as well call it orange sludge, as it’s just a magic doodad that can conform to any shape, heal wounds, and be totally indestructible. No one knows how he found it, how it’s made, or why it even exists, but somehow Catilina won the Nobel Prize for it. Sure. Glowing like the contents of the Pulp Fiction briefcase but looking like a cheap CGI piece of goo made from human vomit, this material allows Catilina to pursue his ultimate ambition, which is to build the titular utopian city as a self-sustaining WORLD OF TOMORROW!

Cesar’s goals are opposed by the unpopular utilitarian mayor of New Rome, Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Cicero is focused on providing for the public welfare by building schools and hospitals, funding infrastructure, and engaging with the community, so naturally he’s a piece of shit who everybody hates. Bridging the gap between them is Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III, played by Jon Voight. Crassus is a wealthy banker, and his very presence only further confuses the power dynamic in this city-state. Cicero is the mayor, but apparently he doesn’t have the right to interfere with the Design Authority, even though as the head of government he should at least have executive privilege. Meanwhile, Crassus, who waffles between calling New Rome a city and a country while also talking about the American ideal, which muddies the geopolitical structure even more, can apparently settle disputes with his checkbook as the head of the area’s largest bank.

None of this makes a lick of sense, and things only get worse when we introduce the sexual and romantic interests. Aubrey Plaza plays a sensationalist news reporter named, and I’m not making this up, Wow Platinum, who begins the film as Catilina’s mistress. When I saw the name fonted on one of her reports, I thought that was the title of her show, like Inside Edition or Access Hollywood. Once it became clear that this was her actual name, my jaw hit the floor. And yet, it’s not the dumbest name you’ll hear in this flick. Cesar’s wife died some years before under suspicious circumstances, and Cicero, then the District Attorney, prosecuted him for murder. When Cesar was acquitted, he began engaging in a hedonistic lifestyle, which includes Wow, who wants to marry him, but he refuses. She then marries Crassus in an attempt to be closer to power and money. Meanwhile, Crassus’ grandson and Cesar’s cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) leads his own life of sybaritic excess as a scion of the bank, along with his three sisters, Clodia, Claudine, and Claudette (Chloe Fineman, Isabelle Kusman, and Madeleine Gardella, respectively; still not the dumbest names), and it’s widely rumored that they have incestuous relations. They are also friends with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who eventually gives up her partying lifestyle when she starts working with Cesar and shows an acumen for the time-stop ability herself, eventually becoming his wife (so he can be Julia’s Cesar, GET IT?!) and giving birth to their daughter, Sunny Hope. There’s the dumbest name! The fact that Emmanuel says it with a straight face is the best acting she pulls off in the entire affair.

Anyway, to the plot, for whatever that’s worth. As head of the Design Authority, Cesar has, well, seized on several disused and dilapidated properties, leveling them to make room for Megalopolis, a project for which he has neither the permission nor funding to create. However, his vision has impressed Crassus enough to donate, and his baffling legal ability to overrule the mayor somehow gets him the clearance to start building. He employs an office full of school age imaginers who help him map out this boondoggle, which seriously just looks like an abandoned Epcot Center attraction doused in Fanta.

Both Cicero and Clodio work in their own ways to discredit and destroy Cesar’s work. The former engages in smear campaigns and tries to weaponize Cesar’s wife’s death, exposing his own narrowminded corruption in the process. Clodio, on the other hand, uses much more devious methods. At Crassus and Platinum’s wedding, itself a celebration of decadence, the crowd is serenaded by a teenage virginal pop singer called Vesta (former America’s Got Talent winner Grace VanderWaal), who sings a song about remaining chaste until marriage. During her performance at this literal circus, Clodio bribes one of the producers broadcasting it to upload a sex tape of her and Cesar in an attempt to get Cesar imprisoned for statutory rape. After he’s cleared (the video is determined to be a deepfake and Vesta is revealed to be in her 20s, and thus of legal age), the singer goes full rebel, changing into a dominatrix outfit and releasing new, sexually charged music, basically making her Miley Cyrus. Seriously, are we satirizing Rome or Disney here? When that plan fails, Clodio begins inciting populist unrest among the citizenry, riling them up into riots by pretending he cares about their suffering while Megalopolis is being built, but really all he cares about is getting a larger share of Crassus’ inheritance than Cesar, so he eventually schemes with Wow (through sex of course) to initiate a hostile takeover of the bank and freeze Cesar’s assets.

All of these asinine developments might be worthwhile if they went anywhere, said anything of value, or were competently made, but literally nothing lands. We have no idea what Megalopolis is supposed to be in order to make it a better place for people to live, and its design is just a bunch of meaningless curves and flower-shaped funnels. When you see it, it ends up being a microcosm of the entire film. It’s form without function, style without substance, passion without practicality, purely aesthetic. The only working feature we ever see is a moving walkway that glows. You can smuggle spray paint into any airport or mall to get the same experience. It’s just a giant golden eyesore that serves no purpose other than to prop up Cesar’s ego.

Going further, the script is all over the place, with several plot threads that just stop arbitrarily without any resolution or callback. That whole incident with Vesta is one such diversion. As soon as we see her “fuck you, I like dick now” video, we never hear from her again. There’s an old Russian satellite that threatens to crash into New Rome, and once it does, that’s it. Some buildings are destroyed, clearing the way for Cesar to have more Megalopolis space, and it’s never brought up again. Cesar loses his time-stopping power after his arrest, and then it comes back again, without any insight or exploration into how it works or why. He just gets depressed for a second, Julia kisses him, and it’s back. Even the numerous references to ancient Rome (the “invading” satellite is named “Carthage,” in case you need to bash your head against something) are just fancy name drops without contextual relevance. As far as actual story is concerned, all we know is that Cesar wants to build Megalopolis, Cicero doesn’t want him to, Wow wants money and fame, Clodio wants Crassus’ money, and Crassus wants to sleep with beautiful women until he dies. Can you find 2.5 hours of content in that? Coppola sure as hell couldn’t.

The performances are just awful as well. Driver bounces off the wall like he’s been infused with flubber until the time comes for him to wax philosophical, at which point he is subdued and barely speaks above a whisper, rendering anything he says almost inaudible. Voight stumbles through his scenes as if the only reason he agreed to play the part in the first place was that Coppola convinced him he’d be playing Donald Trump the way he would want him portrayed, like a hero. Meanwhile, LaBeouf plays Clodio like the Trump we all see at his rallies. Plaza delivers the coda to her devilish scheme with the sarcastic, “One, two, three, yippee yee,” and it’s the most salient line of the entire film. Emmanuel’s entire performance reads like she was taking special direction from Tommy Wiseau (it’s somewhat fitting that I’m wearing my, “Oh hi, Mark” shirt as I write this). Great actors like Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire, and Dustin Hoffman are wasted in do-nothing roles, and yet we’re supposed to feel something when one of them gets killed. Fishburne himself vacillates between the ham-fisted narration and trying to sound insightful when he’s just acting as Cesar’s chauffeur. There isn’t a single redeemable performance to be had here.

Even from a technical and artistic standpoint this falls completely flat. Aside from the yellowish, malformed ectoplasm that is Megalopolis, nearly every scene is bathed in this gold-tinged gradient that looks like Coppola urinated on the camera lens. The visual effects are also truly terrible. constantly looking like poorly-rendered animation without any sense of realism. Every digital asset you can tell is digital. The toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? looked more like natural parts of the scenery. The only effect that works is Vesta’s dress at the wedding, which is made from Megalon and can change based on her whims. This allows her to plug her albums, make sparkles, or turn invisible. It’s the only thing that looks remotely convincing, and by the time we get to yet another shot of Cesar and Julia standing on a giant cartoon immobile clock, you’ve already all but forgotten it. Further, the sound mix has no discipline, the camera can’t stay in place for longer than a second, the editing cuts back and forth through the story with no sense of direction or logic, the stone title slates become increasingly moronic as they go, Cesar sees giant statues walk and crumble and we have no indication if they’re meant to be real, metaphorical, or imaginary, and Cicero has a dream about a cloud turning into a hand to grab the Moon out of the sky, because reasons. The worst production element of all is one I won’t spoil because it’s part of one of the few major plot points, but it’s too stupid to believe even when you see it. For a movie that demanded you watch in a large format, all that extra resolution does is show you how shoddy this all is.

That’s why you have to just laugh at it all. It’s too much to take in with any degree of earnestness. From the moment he first conceived this, it took Coppola five decades to get it over the finish line, and this is what he came up with? How can you not find it unintentionally hilarious? It’s like his real goal was to crush you with sensory overload until you just acquiesce and embrace his genius, and instead he robbed us of our capacity to do anything but guffaw. When we finally got to the climax, the resolution of one of the major threads was just so uproariously dumb that I and several people in the theatre cackled uncontrollably for two minutes straight. I hadn’t laughed that hard in years. I was keeling over, holding the stitch in my side from my recent rib injury, because I couldn’t stop myself even when it literally caused me pain to keep laughing. I almost doubled over again when I left after the credits rolled and I overheard some hipster, likely a film student trying to sound like an intellectual, tell his friend, “No, but like, low key, this was like, modern-day Fellini, man.” The only thing that prevents this from being the worst movie of the year is this visceral reaction, ensuring that this is definitely enjoyable on a “so bad it’s good” level, because you can lose DAYS wondering what possessed Coppola to put this out.

The apparent moral of this fable is the need to expand our minds, get out of our societal patterns where powerful people on all sides of the political spectrum act in the same interest of personal gain, and have what Cesar calls “a great debate about the future,” lest our civilization crumble. But consider the source of that argument and the way it’s presented. What Cesar really means is that the conversation should be led by people like him: cultural elites, intellectuals, scientists, and artists. The common man has no place in this discussion, as he is an easily duped rube quickly manipulated into violence by so-called populists, so they can’t be trusted. That’s not democracy, that’s aristocratic oligarchy, and it’s part of the reason why Rome eventually fell. Julius Caesar was named dictator for life until his assassination, and his son Octavian declared himself Emperor after that and the Senate was rendered powerless. You do need the learned to help guide people forward, but you can’t force the issue. If the people refuse to go along, you have to keep trying, but you can’t demand. At best all you can do is work to weed out those who would deceive the masses for their own benefit, expose their lies, and trust the people to do what’s right.

That’s this film’s, and Coppola’s, ultimate failure here. Rather than trust the public to accept or reject his ideas, he attempted to lie, and then he declared by fiat that any detractors should be ignored and shunned, even when the evidence of his folly was laid bare for all. To quote, of all things, Family Guy in reference to The Godfather, this movie “insists upon itself,” demanding your fealty and praise without earning it. Coppola’s “utopia,” as presented in Megalopolis, is a world where only people who think like him get to decide what’s art, what’s quality, what has value, and it’s worth stopping the whole world dead in its tracks to make it happen. Don’t believe me? Consider our main romance itself. Julia comes to Cesar initially to spy on him for her father, and he instantly dismisses her because of her lavish party girl ways, saying he has no time for those who don’t have talent or intellect. He instantly comes around, however, when he learns that she too can stop time, or at the very least isn’t affected when he does it. So quite literally, he only deems her as having worth when he realizes that she sees the world as he does. The most incredible thing about this is that Coppola’s solution is that our collective pulpit must be reserved for an accomplished few, not left open to those with visions of their own. And when all else fails, marry well and leave everything to your daughter. It’s amazing they didn’t abandon all pretense and name the baby Sofia.

Guess what? Coppola may be one of cinema’s greatest auteurs, but in this particular case, the emperor has no clothes, and his empire looks like it’s covered in piss. Just bring on the Vandals already.

Grade: F

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Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on October 5, 2024.