138 min | R | September 27, 2024 | Lionsgate
Francis Ford Coppola spends forty years and $120 million of his own money to make his dream project. The result is a glorious, incoherent mess that only a genius could make this badly.
New Rome is New York reimagined as a crumbling empire. Cesar Catilina is a visionary architect who can stop time and wants to build a utopian city called Megalopolis using a miracle material called Megalon. Mayor Franklyn Cicero wants to preserve the existing corrupt order. Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter, loves Cesar and mediates between two visions of the future. The film is a Roman allegory about American decline and the tension between idealism and pragmatism. That description makes it sound more coherent than it is.
Adam Driver plays Cesar with brooding intensity and genuine commitment to material that defies conventional acting. He delivers philosophical monologues to empty stadiums. He stops time in the middle of traffic. Driver treats it all as serious and that seriousness is the film’s anchor. Giancarlo Esposito plays the mayor with political authority. Aubrey Plaza plays Wow Platinum with camp energy that feels like a different film. Shia LaBeouf plays a populist demagogue with unhinged menace. Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Dustin Hoffman populate a cast that is enormous and mostly underused.
Coppola has been developing Megalopolis since the 1970s. He self-financed the film because no studio would. That independence gives the film a freedom that is both its greatest strength and its fatal flaw. There are no guardrails. Scenes of genuine visual beauty sit next to scenes of baffling incoherence. The production design is lavish. The visual effects range from stunning to unfinished. The editing creates juxtapositions that are sometimes brilliant and sometimes bewildering.
This is either a masterpiece or a disaster depending on how much you believe in the artist’s right to fail spectacularly. Coppola made The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. He earned the right to make this film. Whether the film earns the audience’s patience is another question. It is messy and overlong and pretentious and sometimes breathtaking. It is the work of a man who wanted to say something about humanity’s future and spent four decades figuring out how to say it badly and beautifully at the same time.