Having spent $120 million of his wine fortune to bring his multi-decade passion project to life, Francis Ford Coppola seemingly wanted to play by his own rules with Megalopolis.
The polar opposite of a trendy studio lob with box office baked in, Coppola finally realized his great white whale by breaking through the glass ceiling of what even a resplendent imagination like his is capable of conjuring.
Rather than pay self-homage to his grand works, Coppola plucks your head off your shoulders, puts it on a game board and spins it like a top around his kaleidoscopic fable of two worlds, one from his wildest dreams and another from his worst nightmares.
Somehow playing like a Robert Zemeckis reimagining of Citizen Kane, a head-over-heels romance out of the French New Wave and a thornily politicized episode of Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, the towering director is trying to take whatever strands of cinema he has left to invite a societal plunge into something new, fresh, perhaps bewildering in formal grasp.
Megalopolis is transfixing in a way few films have been this century.
Occasionally, it’s unwieldy and free-flowing like Dadaist community theater. Occasionally, it’s basically Coppola endearingly cribbing from Orson Welles, William Wyler and Frank Capra with the unburdened visual splendor of the Wachowskis. Occasionally, it’s so gonzo-bonkers public access delirium you start to wonder if Coppola is trying to emulate the after-midnight block of Adult Swim.
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It’s formally daring and occasionally lost in its own train of thought, a film guiding its audience like the ghosts of Roman Art-Deco past, present and future through what Coppola thinks we can be and what he’s pretty darn worried we’re veering toward. While the film carries the exhaustion and sloppiness of a great pitcher making one last, triumphant stand at the mound before his arm gives out, it still coalesces into an outrageous achievement in the medium by one of its all-time architects.
While Megalopolis’ plot mechanics operate with the same discipline of an errant gob of Flubber, Coppola’s general template is pretty easy to grasp.
One character (Adam Driver) represents a beautiful future, one where we’re not afraid to let go of what we have and reach for the sky, even if we occasionally falter and lose our way. Another (Giancarlo Esposito) represents holding firm to the practical past and the status quo, suspending moral and imaginative potential for the same neon lights that guide the public and private. Two more (Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf) just want to scheme their way into power, using the media available to them to manipulate the citizenry.
Coppola knocks around these characters-as-pillars of thought like Kaijus in a Godzilla movie, which can play as so obvious that even a fifth-grader could write a compelling essay on Megalopolis’ themes. Perhaps that’s the point? Freeing himself, for better and worse, from the complexities of progress, Coppola might not fulfill philosophical brilliance as much as he absolutely soars in the realm of using film to make you feel his message all over.
That’s the power of movies, after all. Even the shakiest of scripts and outlandish of approaches can stir together in a big, boiling pot to make for something special and delicious. Coppola even tears through the fourth wall when the film is rendered in its intended form, as a person in the actual theater has a brief-yet-stirring dialogue with Driver’s character on screen.
That hasn’t been attempted anywhere else but Muppet*Vision 3D when a Disney Parks cast member in a Sweetums costume pops out from behind the stage with a flashlight to look for a wayward Bean Bunny. Like Jim Henson, Coppola is a true visionary who isn’t afraid to scramble your expectations in real time with mirth and chaos.
Your mileage, to be very clear, may vary.
Megalopolis isn’t a great movie in the same way Dune: Part Two and Challengers are great movies. Coppola’s film isn’t as meant for mass appeal as it is for the most adventurous and generous of audiences, ones who can withstand the film every now and then hewing closer to The Room than The Godfather. There is a real intent, whether purposeful or accidental, to the film’s most slack-jawed moments, as if Coppola is trying to grow his warning for a grim American future in the same soil Mike Judge used for Idiocracy (you know, the one watered with Brawndo, which has what plants crave).
It’s that 2006 comedy masterpiece powered by electrolytes that Megalopolis may well share its most kinship with of any other film, as Coppola and Judge both have roughly the same idea of where we’re headed if we can’t dig a little deeper and dream a little bigger. Whereas Judge took more of a drooling Brutalist, King of the Hill from Hell approach, Coppola really seems to have borrowed heavily from the cringe-laugh Tim and Eric aesthetic as much as anyone when trying to ridicule his society crumbling on a hill. This movie is absolutely hysterical when it wants to be, and don’t assume it’s by mistake.
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In contrast, his most optimistic moments feel like they’re born out of the latter Matrix movies and the collective works of Robert Rodriguez, a computer-generated utopia utilizing whatever technology is available to welcome us into something lush, peaceful and plentiful. It’s in those scenes where Coppola throws caution to the wind and leaves himself at his most sweet and vulnerable, where the man who made more than one great American epic just speaks from his heart, however awkward and messy that might get.
At times gleefully crass and indulgent, at times disorienting to the point of slight vertigo, at times so genuine that it hurts, Megalopolis feels like the culmination of a fever dream for a filmmaker finally getting one last chance to challenge us, as the vox populi and as the moviegoer, to want more for ourselves. In an era where studio movies have become so homogenized and serialized, it’s downright whiplash to go from comfort food to a eleventy seven-course tasting menu whipped up by a stark-raving mad genius chef.
That’s the beauty of Megalopolis. As soon as its rushed ending immediately zooms you into a better future, the credits roll and you feel as if you’ve woken up from a deep sleep. You might not be able to put this film back together like a puzzle in your mind, but you won’t be able to shake the feeling you just witnessed something monumental, either. It’s in your bones.
Whether you think it’s monumental gold or monumental garbage is up to you, but Coppola can rest easy knowing he did it his way. In this day and age, that’s a pretty remarkable thing to behold. Even if you quibble with the logic and assembly, you cannot deny the singular, awestruck vision.
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