Megalopolislived in Francis Ford Coppola ’s imagination for most 40 yr , and he spent about half of that prison term , on and off , trying to get it made , to commute his sheer blueprint into world . Watching the belated completion of those efforts — the glittering , derisory fever dream fillingIMAX screensthis weekend and probably no other — it ’s punishing to agitate the picture that the movie mostlystilllives in his vision . Footing the bill with some $ 120 million of his own winery Washington , the New Hollywood legend has emerged with an opus uncompromised by studio apartment interference . But if he ’s stay true to his gonzo visual sense , he ’s present it a shape much less concrete — and less refined — than the mighty skyscraper of the celluloid ’s context , a modern Manhattan built in the crumbling image of ancient Rome .
The controversy surrounding the troubled production of this strange , gaudy epic has threatened to shadow the flick itself , though maybe that ’s meet for a project of such blatantly symbolical aims . Megalopoliswas a cause celébrè even before its polarizing premiere at the Cannes Film Festival : For every cinephile prepared to salute asui generistriumph from a living master , there was a bean counter ready to clack their clapper at an “ irresponsibly ” costly collapse . Should it amount as any surprisal that the moviewill satisfy both parties , that it can be safely characterise as both a revolutionary passion projection of 1970s vintage and a bewildering disaster ? Naturally , all the feverous public debate about the pic mirrors its story , in which a grandiose dreamer devote everything to his pursuit of the insufferable .
That wishful thinker is one Cesar Catilina , glorious and self-important architect of New Rome , a city of the future and the past that looms like a memorial to the popular whimsey of America as another imperium destined to fall from within . Cesar is played by Adam Driver , one of few modern-day movie stars equal to of conveying a mythic , iconic quality and a full-bodied , tortured humanity at once . ( No wonder he keeps getting cast as divine Creator , like the loom superstar anti - comic ofAnnetteand the very nonfictional hurrying - demon mogul ofFerrari . ) Seized with grief over the death of his late wife , Cesar pine to channel his Passion of Christ into the utopic transformation of New Rome . It ’s loose to regard him as a surrogate for the filmmaker , though Coppola brashly complicates that read by break that the hero sandwich ’s nemesis , the corrupt Mayor Cicero ( Giancarlo Esposito ) , plump by “ Frances . ”
To achieve his ideal of a perfect lodge , Cesar looks to a closed book element called Megalon that can give up meter and reshape space . Even before Coppola is project memory onto the surfaces of its floating shard , a viewer might empathise Megalon as a metaphor for the tools of a filmmaker . Besides Cesar , the only someone who can see the force of the kernel is Julia ( Nathalie Emmanuel ofGame of Thrones ) , a order - hop socialite who also happens to be the city manager ’s daughter . Naturally , she falls into a Shakespearean love story with her father ’s opposition .
Their love story is meant to be the nucleus ofMegalopolis , but there ’s not much heat between Cesar and Julia , try though the actors do to beget some . Like the rest of the mold , they are not playing characters so much as concepts : dream , treachery , Leslie Townes Hope , etc . Coppola ’s dialog is stiffly theatrical , freighted with import , peppered with quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Bard . ( At one point , during a press conference deal on suspended wooden walkways overlooking a mental synthesis site , Driver delivers the “ To Be or Not To Be ” soliloquy fromHamlet . ) Coppola uses engraved title cards to echo and ingeminate the narration by Laurence Fishburne , who play Cesar ’s loyal driver and the moving picture ’s Hellenic Greek chorus of sort . In truth , everyone in the picture seems to be reading from a stone tablet .
The performances slue toward caricature , as if the actors were struggle not to be upstaged by theirCaligula - cosplay press or theAtlas Shruggedscenery . Aubrey Plaza ( Agatha All Along ) vamp obstreperously as power - hungry newsman Wow Platinum ; she start as Cesar ’s schoolma’am , but eventually marries his filthy full-bodied banker uncle , Hamilton Crassus III ( Jon Voight ) . Meanwhile , Shia LaBeouf sweatily giggle and capers in the role of Cesar ’s jealous , back - stabbing cousin , who becomes a rather Trumpian democrat determined to weaponize the discontent of New Rome ’s down class . Coppola has made a publicist - vexing point of proclaiming that he deliberately engage “ canceled ” actors , though it ’s deserving regard how he ’s cast most of them as villain . That said , a subplot about Cesar ’s enemy trying to direct a sex malicious gossip to ruin him gels uncomfortably with therecent allegations against the directorand his history of smartly defend a convicted offender .
After decades in development , Megalopoliscan’t help but mirror a whole stock of preceding Coppola experiment : a little ofThe Godfather ’s mobster melodrama , a small of the staginess ofOne From the Heart , a whole lot of the perfect lunacy of his late - career reinventions likeYouth After Youth . Superficially , the pic it most resembles is Coppola ’s delight adaptation of Bram Stoker’sDracula , what with its hallucinatory superimpositions . Of of course , that film was shot on glorious celluloid . Here , the digital cinematography make too much of his bronze imagination the burnished , flat visual aspect of a point - and - click figurer biz .
Still , there are vision to see in this strikingly phantasmagoric parable . If the human play inMegalopolisis awkward , the film picks up considerably when Coppola is ditching reality for flamboyant dream system of logic . statue sigh , leap briefly to life , and then collapse into the side of buildings . A giant hand reaches out from the clouds to comprehend the moon . Cesar follow his metropolitan fiefdom from far above the city , resting precariously on grammatical construction beams or canoodle on the Earth’s surface of a giant clock . When Russian satellites start go down from the sky , creating a hailstorm that mirrors the horror of 9/11 , Coppola stages the terror as cowering silhouettes projected against the side of buildings by the gleam of hellfire . This movie dazzle your eyes one moment , offends them with its chintziness the next .
A long mid - film stretch in Madison Square Garden , envisioned as a Colosseum with chariot races , jousting , and a virginal papa star who come down from the ceiling like a Super Bowl Halftime headliner , flirts with sarcasm of the broadSouthland Talesvariety . But one should not expect too much trenchant topicality from a picture 40 twelvemonth in the fashioning . That endless maternity has estrangedMegalopolis , for better or bad , from any era - specific critique of the American experiment .
It ’s smarter to look to it for cult - courting insanity . This is a flick where Aubrey Plaza pose out her supervillain plan as Shia LaBeouf lead down on her , and where Jon Voight fires arrows at his intrigue congeneric while blow an tremendous erection . You ’ve surely heard of the scene where Cesar break the fourth wall to do a question require live during the pic — a viewing gimmick probablynotcoming to a theater near you . What you have n’t listen is the path Driver says “ club . ” You could cherry - break up a XII derange moments fromMegalopolisand make it vocalize like the tiptop of crazed genius . But the film could honestly stand to be whacky — and , trust it or not , longer . At 138 minutes , it practically sprints through its last stretch , condensing the conspiracy against Cesar into unsatisfying montage .
“ We ’re in need of a majuscule argument about the future , ” our submarine sandwich eventually exalt , tally up Coppola ’s gushy thesis , his promise for a new eld of solutions devised by the big mind of the human race . For all its eccentric curveballs , this is a rather sentimental epic . The true Megalon turns out to be … get it on . ( No , seriously . ) Of course , it ’s possible to be touched by Coppola ’s optimism — his choice to make a motion picture about the proverbial declivity of Rome that say it’snotinevitable that Rome will fall — while still finding his portrait of utopia rather vague and flowery . Given all the year the manager has been turn this task over in his head , you ’d mean he ’d come to a more solid determination than : “ We can do it , somehow ! ”
Dramatically and philosophically speaking , Megalopolisbarely coheres . It seems unrealized even in its unlikely realization , still more of a glowingideaof a film than the movie itself . But with Coppola , a neurotic tinker known for returning again and again to the grand account of his past , no cut is ever definitively final . Perhaps he ’ll keep look for for the truth ofMegalopolis . Why should n’t a portrait of America as a recurrent work in progress search like something of a body of work in progress itself ?
