Critics reviews

You’d think that a film that has been this long in gestation – Francis Ford Coppola reportedly first had the idea for Megalopolis in 1977 and started writing it in 1983 – and which has been achieved at such considerable personal cost – Coppola sold a vineyard to partially self-finance it – would have something significant to say. But for all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness.

In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.

Even beyond the film’s astonishing visuals, committed performances, and breathless staging, there’s worth in its willingness to crawl out of every hole that its bourgeois menagerie of characters dig for themselves into a better tomorrow, and does it while never once questioning the how.

Neatly filing these characters – or this movie – under ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is largely futile. In Coppola’s worldview, there is no good or bad, there is only great or piffling and Megalopolis may not be great, but it certainly isn’t piffling.

This is a film with bad creative, narrative, and thematic choices, which looks surprisingly flat. And yet, I wholly loved its wild eccentrics and its go for broke attitude. “Megalopolis” is exactly what movies can and should be—unflinchingly earnest.

But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence.

Yet despite being all over place, Megalopolis is actually at times great fun. New York as a decadent Ancient Rome is often played for knowing laughs at the banality of our own pop culture. The stellar cast turn what could be out-of-kilter scenes into some genuine cinematic moments – including one incredible moment from Voight. Plus Coppola hasn’t lost his ability to understand the scope of cinema. Megalopolis is far from perfect, but it is wonderfully ambitious and actually pretty fun to watch – even when completely mad.

With “Megalopolis,” he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones.

Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones. Does it sometimes feel as if it’s distilling decades’ worth of book-club readings and coffee-klatch conversations into a tightly packed two hours? Yes. Was it worth the wait? Dear god, yes.

But once you let go of the understandable dream of Coppola returning with another masterpiece, there is much to enjoy in “Megalopolis,” especially its cast members, leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement.

Megalopolis is a magical, meandering, maddening construction, one that demonstrates that the process of experimentation is in and of itself both deeply entwined with, as well as above, dualistic notions like success and failure. I come here not to bury this tale of Caesar, nor necessarily to praise it, but to applaud its ambition—to revel in its very existence.

Adam Driver brings a brooding energy to the role of a tortured genius architect seeking to craft a modern utopia in a city threatened by mindless spectacle and rampant greed, but Megalopolis is stymied by arbitrary plotting and numbing excess. One can feel Coppola’s anger and sorrow over the decline of his beloved America, but narrative coherence is far less apparent.