The standard Megalopolis (2024) review sounds like this: “you have to see this movie, not because it is so good, but because it is so bad.” Is the film enjoyable when judged with conventional movie-going standards? Probably not, but director Francis Ford Coppola is a director’s director, and the process of seeing his madness unfold is sometimes more interesting than the results that it actually produces.
On one hand, you have a film like Apocalypse Now (1979), which is the perfect synthesis of Coppola’s megalomaniacal ambitions under the pressure-cooker of Marlon Brando’s madonna, a ballooning budget and Coppola’s own insecurities in trying to follow up The Godfather I & II (1972 & 1974). On the other hand, you have Megalopolis, a film made up of a combined centuries-worth of cast and crew experience, but as creatively loose as a film student’s graduate project. While shooting Apocalypse Now — made evident by its backstage documentary Hearts of Darkness (1991) — Coppola struggled to get those around him to buy into his vision; besides his wife Eleanor, studio executives, starring actors and even nature itself never fully gave in to his whims, so he forced them to. Megalopolis is a full-circle moment in this regard; it is likely Coppola’s final product for his film studio (Zoetrope) that he founded following his Vietnam epic fiasco and is heartwarmingly dedicated to his #1 fan, his wife (who also directed Hearts of Darkness).
In 2024, there is not a single actor or actress who would not work with Coppola and fully entrench themselves in his manicness. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, chairman of New Rome’s Design Authority under the advisory of Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catalina is an absolute embodied ode to cinema: he acts with the spontaneity of German Expressionism, he cloaks himself in black, capes and all, like Count Dracula (another Coppola fascination) and he is a self-proclaimed intellectual who condescendingly tells off anybody conversing with him about something other than science and construction. In a film that feels personally inseparable from Coppola’s own career and goals, I found myself trying to figure out who his vicarious avatar is in the film. The parallels to Catalina are easy, but there is also Frank (Francis) Cicero, who is Coppola’s namesake but offers no apparent similarities to the director.
Regardless, you can feel Coppola’s hand directly puppeteering this entire contraption the same way that Catalina does with time. Time is of the literal essence in Megalopolis and it is something that Coppola himself always ran against, whether with filming Apocalypse Now or the fact that it took 40 years of establishing himself to then spend away his own fortune on a passion project, where he is his only supervisor. And this is where I see Cicero as an analogy; Coppola always had to internally compromise his values with production studios that have demands and will only provide funding if they are followed, akin to Cicero’s bureaucratic desire for a static environment. But just like Coppola has been accused of carelessness toward his audience and fans’ desires with abstract works like Rumble Fish (1983), Cicero’s yearning for the status quo rams up against Catalina’s neglect of his own constituencies and even the laws of physics for the sake of realizing his personal visions. And then there is another faction of Coppola’s thought process: his radical and reckless need for upheaval far beyond the selfishness of a Catalina, but for the sake of pressuring the rest of society to change. This is encapsulated by Clodio (Shia LeBeouf), a Shakespearean character gone extremely wrong toward the lane of fascism and neo-Nazism for no seemingly substantive reason beyond stirring the pot.
I could get into the plot but it does not really matter. For those complaining about the unhinged editing, go watch the aforementioned Rumble Fish. Coppola has been doing this. Instead, complain about the clear use of AI to construct Catalina’s utopian Megalopolis city because of how contradictory it is toward the whole film’s praise of invention for the purpose of flouting conventions. Do not complain about the absurdity of Wow Platinum’s (Aubrey Plaza) relentless mercenary schemes — or her name — but do criticize Coppola’s noncommittal approach to a narrative that feels as though he is trying to reverse psychology us into getting invested. This is the constant push-and-pull of Megalopolis; every aspect of the film has something to love and/or hate. The dialogue sounds alien to human ears, but it is so blunt and crude that it is still eerily reminiscent of a conversation that you may have had the other day. The pacing is unforgivingly quick, but there is such a glaring lack of narrative cohesiveness that you could fall asleep for 30 minutes and still pick up on what is going on when you awake.
In the ongoing press tour for Megalopolis, Coppola recently remarked on how Apocalypse Now took time to settle in for viewers. He also recalls that Kramer v. Kramer (1979) overshadowed it at the box office. Ironically, Dustin Hoffman has a small, but telling role in Megalopolis. He plays Nush Berman, Cicero’s “fixer,” in other words his consigliere. And this is where another thematic throughline appears; is Megalopolis an ode to the fall of auteur film, but more specifically genuine cinematic culture? Is there a space for a Godfather-esque epic trilogy steeped in realism rather than the fantasy of a Lord of the Rings or Marvel intellectual property in contemporary times? Maybe not, and if Berman is an ode to Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), that might be the reason Coppola kills off Hoffman’s character so unceremoniously. Berman is not only a self-conscious homage to Coppola’s disintegrating legacy, but also to Hoffman himself, being that he is of that same generation of rugged filmmaking.
This theory also complements Jon Voight’s presence as the patriarchal banking billionaire Hamilton Crassus III, both of whom, Voight and Hoffman, starred in the groundbreaking Midnight Cowboy (1969) but are similarly dismantled by a new, younger generation of short-sighted anarchists in Platinum and Clodio. Crassus gets his revenge, but is that how Coppola sees this new generation of filmmakers? That the only way to make genuine cinema is by having complete, unadulterated agency, and to fight back against the novel façade of creative liberty provided by the likes of pseudo-indie studios A24 and NEON? I don’t know, and I don’t think Coppola does either, but I am thankful that he still chose to give us a look into his idiosyncratic thought process anyway.
