Coppola gets political in his TDS monstrosity.
Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in a near-empty theater differs from other post-Covid lockdown moviegoing but indicates that the artist who inarguably made the single most popular film of the past half-century, The Godfather, is out of touch.
By reimagining New York City as New Rome — an allegory warning that America faces the same fall as the Roman Empire — Coppola intends the grand-scale sci-fi political allegory of Megalopolis to address the great popular audience he had legitimately earned.
Megalopolis also serves as a personal statement of Coppola’s artistic anxieties as a man, a paterfamilias and an artist aware of his social responsibilities — seen through the character of Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a young architect and visionary based on Lucius Sergius Catilina, the subversive Roman demagogue of 80 b.c. But Coppola can’t keep up with the millennium. Madness has outpaced his wildest imaginings. Megalopolis is an inadequate reflection of our moral chaos and a pale presentation of Coppola’s artistic ambition.
The Roman allegory — in which Cesar aspires to change his government while fulfilling his creative hubris, enjoying the perks of fickle celebrity — is both inexact and unoriginal. Vin Diesel already aced this in the surprisingly Shakespearean Chronicle of Riddick, and Coppola can’t compete with the extravagant world-building of comic-book movies. Miscasting Driver (Kylo Ren in the Star Wars reboots, now with a bowl haircut and that impenetrable Rags Ragland density), then surrounding him with mannered stylizations of social excess, is a miscalculation. Megalopolis has the same film-school artiness as George Lucas’s unwatchable THX-1138 (which Coppola produced in 1971). Cesar’s adversary, New Rome’s elderly conservative mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), advises, “Utopias offer no ready-made solution. Utopias turn into dystopias.” The conflict between the naïve Cesar and the wise elder falls laughably short of what every teenage fan of the dystopic Marvel Comics Universe already knows.
When far-left publications from the New York Times to the Washington Post praise Coppola for his aspirational determination, you know that something idiotic this way comes. Praising Megalopolis is a new form of elitism. Preview screenings for Coppola’s Hollywood surrogates proved that no one there understands artistic ambition anymore — so illiterate that they missed the film’s too-obvious parallels to contemporary politics. Coppola’s emphasis on white protagonist Cesar is, in Hollywood liberal terms, facile and archaic. We don’t even recognize clear thinking anymore. Expectations are diminished, contaminated by politics.
Had Coppola focused on the dilemma of a white idealist challenged and intimidated by a black political power player, setting off political subterfuge that nearly destroys the dynasty Cesar was born to, Megalopolis might have ignited pop recognition and excitement. But his idea of a conservative black urban mayor defies credulity. Megalopolis posits a world of clueless liberal self-satisfaction, missing every point of contemporary alertness to ongoing lawfare and sedition.
Coppola was never necessarily a political filmmaker, but now he can’t resist the impulse (like Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon). The conceptual failures seen throughout the unwieldy Megalopolis make it a monument to Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Remember: The Godfather’s pop-genre format provided a personal, ethnic focus that inspired Coppola and saved him from his own film-student conceits. Megalopolis pushes Coppola into unchecked futuristic, pseudo-classical narrative fabrications (evoking the Shakespearean pall cast by the death of Caesar’s wife). The linchpin is a subplot featuring Cesar’s cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), a decadent wastrel compared with Cesar’s genius-philanderer.
LaBeouf gives the film’s only entertaining performance, a shadow-and-silhouette sex scene with Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum that is the film’s highlight. Clodio exploits the social dystopia that Cesar cannot avoid, encouraging the city’s black populace to protest both Cicero and Cesar’s housing redevelopment. It recalls LaBeouf’s participation in a 2016 Museum of the Moving Image installation that exploited and protested Trump’s presidential election. (“He will not divide us!” LaBeouf repeatedly screamed at visitors and docents, prompting the exhibit’s closure.) The quasi–Bonfire of the Vanities episode in Megalopolis similarly trashes Coppola’s central dynamic. Claudio’s palace intrigues (attempting to overthrow Jon Voight’s Crassus, who wounds Claudio by shooting Deliverance-style arrows) initiates the film’s eventual mess.
Despite high-flown quotations from Emerson and Marcus Aurelius, scene segments portentously announced with marble engravings, and a few truly impressive shots (the inanimate statue of Justice instinctively collapses, Cesar’s nightmare of his hand in a cloud grasping after the moon) to match many silly ones, Megalopolis ultimately founders. Coppola snatches unassimilated ideas from current political paranoia and recent cultural catastrophes (manic news media promoting celebrity insanity), all tossed into the mix with demented incoherence. Cesar’s multicultural wedding reception, emulating the tripartite screen of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, might be the worst idea. It makes one sympathetic to Coppola’s creative drive (that hand in the cloud) yet infuriated at his trivial summation of the social and spiritual condition of our embattled republic.
Megalopolis closes with an engraved motto about “life, education and justice for all” which is surely the most puerile epigraph a socially disengaged filmmaker has ever asked the pubic to take seriously. None of it coheres as either political reflection or narrative. Megalopolis is stuck between being Coppola’s ultimate film maudit and a hectic romanticization of Hollywood’s casual social impulses.
The overkill of F/X in Megalopolis looks thin and claustrophobic. It lacks the pulse of great cinematic imagery and prompts Coppola’s 1979 Oscar ceremony prophecy about the digital future: “We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the industrial revolution look like a small-town try-out.” It has come to shambles.