The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
Leaving the Cannes premiere of Megalopolis (2024) earlier this year, I remember a few friends and colleagues asking if I’d liked it. Truth is, I didn’t know; a few months later, I still don’t. There were things that felt outright puzzling—the clunky dialogue, the nonsensical storylines, the campy excess of it all. And yet, much like Joey Shapiro at the Chicago Reader, “I also found myself in awe of it over and over again.”
Such an ambivalent response isn’t exactly the most common reaction to Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, which has received a raucous critical drubbing since its release. “Megaflopolis might be a better name for it,” Tara Brady quips at the Irish Times; over at Entertainment Weekly, Maureen Lee Lenker sees it as “a stain on [the director’s] legacy”: aside from “his being the mastermind behind two of cinema's greatest achievements, he's also now the architect of one of its worst.” Legitimate or not, I can’t help but find these appraisals a little hollow, for they assume dualistic value judgements that feel hopelessly reductive—especially for a work like this. If anything, Megalopolis is that rarest of films that forces us to think beyond simplistic binaries; to borrow from Shapiro again, it “is so ambitious that whether it’s good or bad feels beside the point; what matters is that it’s shocking and hilarious and weird.”
A passion project the 85-year-old director self-financed by scraping together a staggering $120 million from the profits of his wineries, Coppola’s film imagines a moribund civilization and wonders whether art and ideas could ever help it avoid collapse. The setting is New Rome, a metropolis that doubles as a battleground between two radically different worldviews. The first is embodied by Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina, the Nobel laureate, playboy, and genius architect who invented Megalon, a revolutionary, matter-bending substance with which he plans to rebuild the city into a futuristic utopia. On the other side, there’s Giancarlo Esposito’s Cicero, Catilina’s archnemesis and New Rome’s mayor, who seems far more interested in stuffing his empire with casinos than in offering residents new, viable housing projects. The two are joined by a small pantheon of other fabulously named members of the city’s elite, including one Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a salacious journalist looking to marry into wealth; New Rome’s richest man—and Catilina’s uncle—Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight); his other nephew, the scheming Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf); and the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), whose romance with Catilina further complicates the power struggle between politician and architect.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
Like Megalopolis itself, New Rome is strangely poised between past and future. The city is at once modeled after New York (Catilina’s office sits at the very top of the Chrysler Building) and ancient Rome: women wear togas, men sport bowl cuts, conversations sometimes dip into Latin—never mind that the film’s title is etymologically Greek—and in one delirious set piece, Coppola models his Madison Square Garden on the Colosseum with chariot races straight out of Ben Hur (1959). In other words, Megalopolis is something of a movie-paradox; it’s a vision of the future haunted by the past. “For a futurist fantasy,” Jessica Kiang observes in her Sight and Sound review, the film “is almost heroically dated.”
A kitschy carving insists this is the 21st century, but almost every historical era is present except now: there are the togas of antiquity and 1940s fedoras, the Art Deco Chrysler Building and the neoclassical City Hall. There is The Tempest and Edward Gibbon, Emerson, Vertigo and Petrarch. And the deranged sidebar about singing sensation Vesta (Grace VanderWaal) seems pulled from that weird late-90s moment when tabloids publicly speculated on the virginity of young celebs.
It bears noting that Coppola conceived of Megalopolis in the late ’70s and began writing it in 1983, which may account for why time in the film feels so plastic. This is a tale that speaks to four decades without feeling specifically tethered to any of them; VanderWaal’s performance before a packed stadium, and the opprobrium she suffers when a deepfaked video shows her in bed with Catilina, could just as easily be read as a pastiche on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” as well as a nod to our present-day fixations on the private lives of pop stars.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
And yet Megalopolis isn’t an old man’s film by any stretch of the imagination. “With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance” Richard Brody writes at the New Yorker, “the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.” It’s not that the director never flexed his more flamboyant side (see his unjustly maligned and swoony 1982 musical, One from the Heart). It’s that, “for the most part, he has subordinated his pictorial power to dramas of tight-fitting psychology and dutiful realism that have both overwhelmed and repressed it.”
But with Megalopolis he cuts looser than ever and is able to do so precisely because he’s also more serious than ever. Coppola fills the movie with fervent, rapturous rhetoric that seems to emanate, almost in his own voice, from behind the camera, and this rhetoric fuses with the visual rhetoric of what the camera does—an aesthetic flamboyance in the movie’s visual compositions, performances, design, costume, and the scale and tumult of its spectacular action. Megalopolis, a movie made with hubristic ambition, is not only a tale of hubristic ambition but is indeed a celebration of it.
To Brody’s point, Megalopolis is a lot. It jumps freely across time as it invokes different creative influences, borrowing from and nodding to such disparate figures as William Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Abel Gance, and Sergei Eisenstein. It pullulates with all manner of storylines, digressions, and narrative cul-de-sacs—including, perhaps most bafflingly, a Soviet satellite falling to earth, a catastrophe Coppola’s script dismisses as an irrelevant aside. The film swings manically between stilted exchanges and memorable one-liners, between tragedy and farce, with over-the-top performances that may make you wonder, as Brian Tallerico does at RogerEbert.com, when exactly the characters will break into song: Megalopolis “feels that consistently broken from reality, expressing itself in ways that traditional character and dialogue cannot.” And there’s even an exhilarating fourth-wall rupture—or at least there was at the film’s Cannes premiere—with a flesh-and-blood actor emerging from the audience and taking their place at a microphone in front of the screen, asking a question of the onscreen Cesar during an in-film press conference. As reported by The Atlantic’s Shirley Li, Coppola had teamed up with Amazon to develop an Alexa-like interactive approach that would have allowed all members of the audience to engage with the film that way, but the company finally pulled out of the project.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
Megalopolis, David Fear contends at Rolling Stone, “is the work of a genuine artist who is shooting for the moon in the most extravagant way possible.”
…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.
This is largely because, as Christina Newland argues at i News, “there’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment.” If Coppola’s creatively unhinged approach doesn’t always translate into dramatically coherent scenes, “it undergirds the entire movie with a looseness that makes it almost impossible to look away,” David Ehrlich suggests at IndieWire. “The story is sustained by the sheer force of Coppola’s enthusiasm for it, and it hardly seems to matter that each scene feeds into the next with the grace of a wave crashing into a jetty—not when it’s so exciting to see what might happen next, and stray moments of transcendent surprise can be found hiding in even the flattest stretches.”
Still, I can empathize with those who’ll find all this excess numbing. For Ty Burr, over at the Washington Post, Coppola’s “is a packed subway car of a film.” The director “still knows how to make a movie, but he’s forgotten how to structure a scene, and a majority of Megalopolis consists of talented actors spritzing improvisationally at one another on gargantuan sets, milling about and bumping into things.” Even the visuals, for a work of such opulence, can sometimes feel inert. Per Siddhant Adlakha at IGN, “Megalopolis has a strangely cheap and flat appearance for something so expensive.” Cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. “seldom moves the camera, ensuring meticulous compositions, but with a flat, TV-adjacent aesthetic set in a 2:1 aspect ratio that’s somewhere between HD TV and cinematic widescreen.” One could argue that the film’s flatness only reflects the moral rot of its characters, but even so, Kyle Smith remarks at the Wall Street Journal, “the ugliness becomes overwhelming. The special effects—lots of digitized shots of Manhattan that seem deliberately fake, as if in homage to prewar Hollywood backdrops—look terrible through a Budweiser-colored haze, and even the costumes look cheap and ill-fitting.” I’m not sure I would go as far as to call Megalopolis ugly, but there are times when even Coppola’s grandest CGI vistas look oddly dated, especially when compared to the increasingly sophisticated AI and CG imagery, effects, and previsualizations to which we’ve become accustomed.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
And while there’s certainly room to peg the whole journey as a big and convoluted “mess”—a near-ubiquitous word among reactions to the film, positive and negative—“in other regards,” Nick Pinkerton observes at 4Columns, Megalopolis “is uncommonly, unfalteringly lucid. And it’s this clarity, at times near to the binarism of a morality play, rather than any of the invigorating chaos, that diminishes [it]. Catilina, lacking any convincing challenge to his principled, superior-minded righteousness or suggestion of troubling hidden depths to his character, makes for a monotonous protagonist.” Similarly, his Megalon “shows every promise of offering a panacea to all the world’s problems, with no apparent downside,” which means the material’s detractors “can only be motivated by entrenched blinkered conservatism (Mayor Cicero) or rankling jealousy (Pulcher).” Above all, Pinkerton takes issue with the film’s “general tone of messianic optimism”—“a humanism so broad and meaningless,” Dylan Adamson echoes at In Review Online, “as to encompass both Ayn Rand and David Graeber.”
There’s no denying the distance between the film’s aristocratic protagonists and the real people swarming below their gilded penthouses. Yet I can’t bring myself to dismiss Megalopolis as “a work of screaming emptiness,” as Wendy Ide calls it at The Guardian. Nor do I see much point in thinking about whether it’s a “success” or “failure”—not least because of our myopic tendency to conflate a film’s box-office returns with its artistic merit. By any metric, Megalopolis has proved a financial disaster. Earlier this spring, when Coppola started shopping for a distributor, every big studio turned him down—in the end, Lionsgate agreed to distribute it for a fee. But in the three opening days of its North American release in late September, Megalopolis netted a meager $4 million from 2,000 theaters; at the time of writing, over a month later, the film’s still only made $13.7 million worldwide. But if Megalopolis has failed to find an audience, that’s not because it’s “difficult.” Rather, Manohla Dargis suggests at the New York Times, it might be because it’s an experience we’re just not prepared for:
After I saw Megalopolis a second time, I flashed on something that the critic David Thomson wrote in 1997 in a review of the neo-noir L.A. Confidential. Thomson was enthusiastic about the film, but wondered if big audiences would find it too demanding. “We are out of training,” he wrote, an admirably gentle way to address the lament that the mass audience has no interest in putatively difficult movies. (The Godfather Part II, it’s worth recalling, was once thought difficult by many.) With its dependence on genres and familiar stars and stories, the film industry has long encouraged us—trained us, to borrow Thomson’s polite verb—to not expect too much from movies. Coppola, by contrast, has long asked us to expect everything.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
Whether or not Megalopolis really “galvanizes our desire to ensure that [cinema] has a future,” as Ehrlich enthusiastically prophesies at IndieWire, remains to be seen. As much as I’d like to think of Coppola’s as a blueprint for a new kind of film—the kind of picture that isn’t afraid to live up to its creator’s vision, at the risk of alienating and confounding viewers—this remains an obscenely expensive project put together by a man who could rely on vast resources. But at a time when so many films seem designed to cater and pander to us, isn’t it electrifying to come across one so uninterested in pleasing us? Ungainly and incoherent as it is, Megalopolis is also shamelessly and unapologetically its own thing. That alone, Stephanie Zacharek argues in Time, should be cause for celebration:
You might want to laugh at Megalopolis; you might be tempted to walk out. And you wouldn’t be wrong to call it self-indulgent. But then, haven’t we had enough movies that are audience-indulgent, seeking only to appease—and never, ever to offend—legions of fanboys and -girls who have very specific ideas about what they want from entertainment? I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.