Megalopolis and all the images you see in this review are owned by Lionsgate
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Is it just me, or have the bad movies gotten more interesting in 2024? Sure, they’re still bad movies, but I’ve had a lot to talk about when it comes to stuff like Borderlands and The Crow, and while I was looking forward to enjoying this as a good movie when it was first announced, the last few months of bad press and worse behavior from its grumpy creator has lowered my expectations considerably. Is this a cinematic triumph from one of its greatest auteurs, or is this simply a case of an old man yelling at clouds for two hours? Let’s find out!!
In the city of New Rome, there is a struggle for the fate of society as Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) envisions a Utopia within his lifetime brought about through the building of a great city he will dub Megalopolis. Despite his brilliant foresight into the future of humanity, he is opposed by the mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), as well as certain members of his own family who are jealous of the genius and acclaim that seems to come so naturally to Cesar. One such enemy, at least at first, is the daughter of the mayor Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) who wants to humiliate him for how he has humiliated her father, and yet even she cannot help but see the perfect world that Cesar hopes to bring about as she spends more time with him. Alas, outside forces are not the sole source of Cesar’s struggle as his genius compels him to act out in self-destructive ways as the truly exceptional among us often do, and it threatens to diminish the wisdom trapped within his skull. With so many forces trying to stop the perfect future, can Cesar convince the common folk to back his cause and pressure the government to put all their eggs in his basket? What is the true source of his self-destructive tendencies, and will Julia have what it takes to keep his mind clear and his butt out of jail? Is it just me, or is the writer, the director, and possibly even the producer of this movie, trying to say something with this unsung and tortured genius trying to make the world a better a place according to his image of it?
I’ve got to be honest; I’ve never been the biggest fan of Guilty Pleasures as a concept. I prefer to stay positive about most things and if I like something then I like to think that it has genuine value. That said, my position on this has been tested now that I’ve sat through Francis Ford Coppola’s remarkably broken and uncomfortably revealing magnum opus. The movie’s greatest strength is also its greatest flaw, as Coppola’s nostalgia infuses this movie with an energy and creative spirit that’s unique in today’s cinematic landscape, but also makes it feel creatively arrested and retrograde in its thematic elements. Its paltry handful of modern day sensibilities are only in its crisp cinematography and its general sense of place, what with mobile devices being prevalent and having non-white actors playing key role, but its story, framing, and structure all feel bizarrely out of place and in a constant struggle to thread whatever needles Coppola is obsessing over. Half of his sets are lavish and ornately designed, while others are just an apartment building or a grimy alley. The story tries to be intimate and character driven while also epic and bombastic, but the vacillation in scope only makes it difficult for either end to feel fully developed. That said, this does create a lot of compelling spaces in between where the vision seems to come together for just a moment before slipping back into its convoluted plot and uneven tone. There’s quite a bit of imagination throughout with the director of photography, Mihai Mălaimare Jr, having a real eye for unique shots that get across how big and meaningful all of this is supposed to be.
The cast is working mightily with what they are given, but it’s almost complete nonsense when it isn’t laughably pretentious. Adam Driver is trying to infuse his part with some humanity, but there’s no escaping how little nuance he’s given and how lovingly the movie frames his character no matter what he’s doing, while his co-lead Nathalie Emmanuel has a lot of screen time, but never feels significant to the plot itself. Aubrey Plaza and Giancarlo Esposito at least know the roles they are playing and aren’t asked to carry this on their shoulders. Plaza seems to understand the disconnect between the film’s grand operatic vision and the messy production trying to put it all together, while Esposito finds the humanity in a rather thankless role. He’s a man too small for the world he lives in and the duty he’s been given, but he tries his best anyway and manages to come off as sympathetic even when he’s an ostensible antagonist. It’s interesting to see how Coppola directed them and some of the choices throughout are certainly embarrassing, but there’s something genuinely entertaining in the struggle of it all, and I think the actors manage to elevate whatever it was that Coppola had put on the page.
It’s clear that Coppola is simply trying to have his cake and eat it with this movie. He wants to make a self-indulgent story about great men accomplishing great things, while also making a modern day fable inspired by the political stories of the ancient world. It’s hard to do both without coming off as Propaganda, and his comments about how this isn’t a woke-movie certainly points us in some sort of direction, but maybe that’s the goal. How do you square the circle of aristocrats backstabbing each other for every crumb of power while the populace is suffering while also saying that those same aristocrats, or at least a select few of them, are the key to dragging the uncultured masses to the promise land? The answer Coppola came up with was to do both at the same time, and damn the incongruity which is, at least, an interesting creative perspective to examine, but hardly makes for a satisfying narrative. That’s not even getting into the straightforwardly bad sci-fi writing on display that clutters the already confusing narrative. In its broad strokes and looking at it from a generous angle, the story still feels archaic, with the world being saved by one lone genius fighting against the banality of the normies and the jealousy of his enemies. Every chance to inject nuance are brazenly avoided, and all the characters flaws are framed as the tortured cries of a bad-boy whose too smart for this world which I assume was to make a larger than life character to fit the film’s grandiose themes, but ultimately make him paper thin and more than a little insufferable.
What makes something a guilty pleasure is a feeling of disconnect between how we want ourselves to be seen, or how we perceive ourselves, and our inner truth that contradicts that. Being a connoisseur of good movies doesn’t fit with enjoying a movie everyone else says is bad, to give an extremely generalized example. This is why I typically don’t feel the need to couch things as guilty pleasures, as I don’t have any pretense to what it is I like, but there is a disconnect here that bothers me in a way that isn’t just taste. We’ve heard about the misconduct from Coppola on the set of the movie, and it doesn’t help matters that he’s included alleged abuser Shia LaBeouf in the cast. It’s not just the actions of these individuals, though for some, that would be enough to avoid this; it’s the retrograde attitude of it all. I suppose the guilt I’m feeling is in finding a significant amount of comfort and enjoyment in something that feels like an old movie that was recently unearthed. There’s a reason movies are no longer made the way they were back in the studio days, and Coppola himself has shown that Auteurism is often a clock for abusive behavior, but I can’t deny that the classic-Hollywood affectation didn’t work on me and that I wasn’t fascinated by his absurd vision. Lavish sets, larger than life characters, a story without a franchise bolted onto the end of it, that’s the nostalgia that Coppola is hitting on here, and while those things never truly went away, there’s still an itch that this movie is scratching that, at least for me, justifies its existence. Still, Coppola’s movie is looking backwards in so many ways, and there’s nothing but stagnation and irrelevance for an artist who doesn’t want to look forward. His movie is closed off from the rest of the world and might be nice to peek into just for curiosity’s sake, but spend too much time in there, and you’ll remember why everyone moved on a long time ago.
There are a lot of reasons to avoid this movie, and the reasons to go and see it aren’t so unique that you can’t find other, better, movies like it. Coppola made a fascinatingly bizarre fable that may at least garner a few laughs if you don’t appreciate its old-school sensibilities, but it’s hardly the unsung masterpiece he clearly expects it to be. I enjoyed my time with it and there’s a certain appeal to the strange little world he’s crafted, but I don’t think it’ll have much resonance with general audiences who can turn to movies like The Wolf of Wall Street for hedonistic excess or Everything Everywhere All at Once for a story about people too big for the world they live in. If you want both of those things smashed together with all the grace of a trash compactor, then this will fit the bill for this oddly specific scenario, but who doesn’t like a little variety now and then?
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