I wanted to like this film. Hell, I wanted to love it.
Coppola was never one of My Guys. Paul Schrader’s My Guy. Martin Scorsese is My Guy to an embarrassing degree. Spielberg? Generally speaking, My Guy, especially when he’s working with My all-time-ultimate-number-one Guy, Tony Kushner. Lucas? Not as much, surprisingly. DePalma, Milius? Nope, and nope. Francis Ford Coppola? I love The Conversation, I think it’s a masterpiece, and like most goth-adjacent people I am a Bram Stoker’s Dracula enjoyer. But other than that, while I admire some of his work, I tend not to be moved by it.
HOWEVER.
I really wanted to love this thing. I wanted it be as mindblowing and strange as the early hype claimed.
See there are people who will go with the full title Megalopolis: A Fable, and people who will not. I’ll go with it as far as it wants to go. There are people who will be on board with a movie where Adam Driver clambers out onto the top of the Chrysler Building and screams “TIME STOP!!!”—and time actually does stop. I am such a people, I eat that kind of shit right up. There are people who giggle with delight at a character named Wow Platinum and people who roll their eyes—I’m a giggler, baby.
But when the “fable” is so obvious Aesop could see all the twists and turns coming even though he was sight-impaired in life, and is currently dead, and when TIME STOPS but no one uses it to do anything interesting, and when the character Wow Platinum is a boring misogynist cliché—well, to be honest I become frustrated and sad that my willingness to go with a movie has been squandered.
To get plot nonsense out of the way: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a Nobel Prize-winning inventor/architect/artist—obviously his wife is tragically dead—and he’s the Chairman of the Design Authority in New Rome. His dream project is a bio-tech neighborhood called Megalopolis which he’ll be able to build using “Megalon”. He’s in a heated rivalry with the Mayor of New Rome, Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who says he want to help “the people” but seems to live just as extravagantly as everyone else. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) ends up in a complicated relationship with Cesar. Meanwhile, Cesar’s uncle Crassus (Jon Voigt) runs the bank and is the richest person in New Rome, and he ends up in a complicated relationship with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and his grandson Clodius (Shia LeBeouf at his Shia LeBeoufiest) is a scheming populist would-be autocrat. Laurence Fishburne seems to be creating an oral history of these families, to himself, as he works as Cesar’s driver/bodyguard/marriage officiant.
None of what I’ve just told you matters, really. Things happen to these characters, and all the actors do their best, but none of what happens seems connected to anything else, and none of it taps into any sort of emotional truth or the sense of wonder or awe that I think Coppola wanted to capture.
Here are a few things you could do with the time this movie will irrevocably take from you:
You could fast for three days and then stare really hard at this picture:
You could put a bunch of TVs in a circle, and play Jupiter Ascending at top volume while you sit in the middle reading The Power Broker.
You could blindfold yourself, and have one friend choke you while another stalks around your room screaming quotes from The Fountainhead.
Or, my actual suggestion:
Set aside a day, or maybe three nights in a row, if you can. Watch Paterson, a gentle, moving film in which Adam Driver gives a delicate performance as an artist, that actually says actual real things about the artistic process. Then watch The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s three-hour long film about an uncompromising genius architect who has to deal with the whims of a rich philistine who wants to be a Roman emperor. Follow The Brutalist up with Matrix: Resurrections, a brilliant-if-flawed film about love, the ravages of time, and the transcendence of time, that has a real, beating, bleeding, heart. (And Jonathan Groff!)
I understand that this is a titanic marathon, but these are the kind of movies that will enrich the time you spend with them. They’ll make you feel like you’re living more, rather than that you’re a few hours closer to death. (I mean, hopefully. That’s what they all did for me.) I think Coppola wanted Megalopolis: A Fable to do that, and maybe for some people it will, but hand on my One From the Heart I cannot imagine those people.
In the interest of fairness, here is some interesting stuff from Megalopolis:
- Every acting choice Giancarlo Esposito makes is fucking GOLD. I hope he had fun on this thing. Nathalie Emmanuel has a hilarious New Yawk accent that appears intermittently and then isn’t heard for long stretches of time. It’s like a vocal G train.
- John Voigt shoots people with a crossbow!
- Shia LaBeouf says “revenge is best served while wearing a dress” while he’s wearing a dress.
- Rhere is one (1) well-directed scene
- There’s a whole… I hate to call it a subplot, exactly, but there’s a thing with a Vestal Virgin that is predictable as hell, but I enjoyed watching it play out.
- There’s a fun moment with a baby!
- And finally (and especially given the week we’ve had in Actual Current New York) everyone boos the Mayor everywhere he goes. Good stuff.
But still! A few fun moments do not a movie make.
Coppola wants to give us a modern Rome, and he keeps telling us how debauched everyone is, but there’s more debauchery in the DVD menu of Caligula. The most we get is, uhhh, two girls kiss, and then one of them licks coke off the other one’s sternum. Maybe I just went to an extra-good college, but that doesn’t seem like a wild night to me? It’s also implied that one character is sleeping with his sisters, and by implied I mean people say it repeatedly, but we never see it and it has no impact on the plot, so what’s the point? We hear about unbridled corruption, but since the oppressed people of New Rome are an undulating shadowy mob with no characterization, we never see how they’re being oppressed, or why they stand for it. And I get that they could only hire so many extras, but maybe they should have used some of that AI from the advertising budget to pad the crowds out.
I’m joking, no one should use AI for anything, ever. Fuck AI.
What Megalopolis: A Fable reminded me of most was Tomorrowland. Remember Tomorrowland? The teen adventure/fantasy from Brad Bird back in 2015 that was meant to be full of hope and imagination and Big Thoughts About The Future? In the end too much of it revolved around meaningless fights and cartoonish villains, and worst of all to my mind, the film didn’t show any of the work that would go into creating the utopia it wanted us all to believe in. Everything difficult was just magicked away, or A Great Genius had already invented the thing they needed to spirit the characters into a better world.
That’s how this goes. Cesar Catilina just has Megalon, that he synthesized somehow—they kind of reveal where it comes from but the explanation is stupid and doesn’t make any sense—and he uses it to build things and stop time and… grow an organic planned community? I think? But if you remember the scene in Iron Man 2 when Tony invents a new element out of clues his dad left in the StarkExpo blueprints—that shit was more grounded in tactility than this. There’s a model of the project made of detritus and junk, but no sense of how Cesar is going to take the project from here to there. There’s a scene of Cesar, Julia, and some employees doing an acrobatic dance routine as, I think, a symbolic interpretation of their work together—which is fantastic—but it’s nowhere near enough to help us see the Utopia that’s in Cesar’s mind, or how this exercise is helping these people create it in the film’s reality. There’s nothing to hold onto, nothing to care about, nothing to root for except the end credits.
I’ve seen people on Film Twitter talking about this film as a masterpiece. I’ve seen people call it visionary and unpredictable, that this is what happens when you cut studio executives out of the filmmaking process, and even that people who don’t like it simply don’t understand it. I even saw one person say that if you hate Megalopolis, you just don’t like movies.
And, well… no. No, I love movies enough to dedicate hours of my life, each week, to studying them and trying to talk about them under my own name, in public. I’m not here to tell you that if you love Megalopolis you don’t like movies. I’m not here to judge your taste. I’m here to tell you what I thought, and to explain why.
I don’t think Megalopolis is a good movie. Do I admire Coppola for still making movies after all these years, self-financing, holding fast to his vision? Of course. Is this a cool thing for a rich person to spend their money on? Sure. But Francis Ford Coppola is not just any other rich man, and I have too much respect for him as an artist to damn this thing with faint praise, and too much care for you as a person reading this to say that you might as well spend your money on it.
Do you want a visionary film that was fucked over by studio executive? A restored version of The Fall is streaming on MUBI now, and it might even be coming to a theater near you. Any Todd Haynes movie is bolder and more interesting—most of them have more debauchery, and all of them have less misogyny. You want a three-hour long movie about an uncompromising architect? The Brutalist actually has things to say. You want a film about artistic process? Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is as indie as you can get without selling a vineyard, and it’s incredible.
I’ve also seen a few people talk about the film as boomer optimism.
To be personal for a moment: I’m a socialist, a position I take about as seriously as I take most things, and I believe in Utopia. I believe Utopias are necessary to help people to imagine better futures than the one we wake up into each day. We should build dream scenarios and castles in the air and Megalopolii in our fiction, because they might become maps, but even if they don’t they’re fun to build. (I’m a socialist who also believes in Art for Art’s Sake—painful but worth it.) This film claims it’s looking into the future and building a Utopia but the only scene showing the process makes no sense. It gives us nothing concrete—or steel—about how it works, how it’s afforded, how it will help all the teeming squalid citizens of New Rome who are trampled beneath the feet of the main characters. Megalopolis is supposed to be for them, maybe, I think? But it’s never made clear how, exactly? Because The People are all represented as shadowy figures who either (a) furious and holding signs/lit molotovs, (b) sad women holding babies, (c) wide-eyed Dickensian urchins clutching chain link fences. (There are more prominent fucking chain link fences in this thing than in the last act of Godspell, and the mobs are teeming and violent but no one ever tears the fences down??? It’s a polite unwashed mob, I guess.)
Again, any nod toward realism could have made this interesting, if not successful.
Please understand I’m not trying to make some ageist blanket statement. But I ask you to look at The Fabelmans. Steven Spielberg, born in 1946, and Tony Kushner, born in 1956, wrote a script together that drew primarily from Spielberg’s life with a little bit of Kushner’s folded in. The film looks at the past with an absolutely scabrous eye. Post-WWII gender roles are a straitjacket for Mitzi Fabelman (who is mostly Leah Adler with, I think, a little bit of Sylvia Kushner layered in), and anti-Semitism shapes young Sammy Fabelman’s life, where not only are bullies after him but even the girl who thinks he’s cute tries to get him to accept Jesus before she’ll make out with him. Sammy is born with an obsessive need to create, which is good, right? Except it’s also the only way he feels safety in the world around him, and as he gets older, it becomes the only way he can connect to life. This is not some nostalgic, triumphalist portrait of an artist, it’s dark, and sad, and uncompromising. If you haven’t seen it, I ask you to watch this film, and then go back to Close Encounters and E.T., and see how they feel now.
Look at Silence and The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. (This is Scorsese, at I think 72, 75, and 80 years old, respectively.) In Silence he unpacks and unpacks and unpacks whether there’s anything at the heart of Catholicism, and looks straight at the destruction caused when religion allies with imperialism. In The Irishman he turns again to a story of what violence and toxic masculinity does to a human who makes himself a monster. What that does to the people around him. What kind of society can produce such a person. And Flower Moon? Scorsese took a book that was about the creation of the FBI and shifted the focus on to the lives and deaths of members of the Osage community. He made their families, and their very recent history the center of the story. He connected those acts of terrorism to the white supremacist massacre of Black Americans in Tulsa. He looked at the complicity of every single white person in those people’s lives. But again, that’s only one level of the film. In the last ten minutes he swerves into an absolutely brutal look at how this real pain is turned into entertainment—radio plays and films made by white people, for white people, to profit white people—that became the foundation of the modern True Crime genre. He uses multiple cameo appearances to implicate himself, as a white creator who has made his living through violent spectacle, in the pain suffered by real, living people, often minorities, women, marginalized people who were treated like they were worthless. It’s fucking breathtaking.
Here are these elder artists untangling the past to, I think, point a way forward for their fellow artists.
Megalopolis does the same thing a lot of older people do in my experience, where they say to younger folk, “you’ll be the generation to fix [problem]” or “it’s up to you to save us all”—whether it’s through climate activism or voting for people who aren’t fucking fascists. It’s a two-hour-and-eighteen-minute cinematic act of skipping ahead to the bit where the hard work is already over.
This is Amadeus (one of my favorite movies of all time, to be clear) positing that Wulfie was just channeling his music from some other realm, rather than showing us the hours of drudgery and practice in his childhood, as his father forced him and his sister to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. This is skipping all the touring, all the students, all the hours he spent writing music to produce masterpieces. This is making a film about an artist that never shows us his art.
What is “megaloid”? Who knows. How does Cesar create it or synthesize it or discover it or smelt it or whatever? Coppola doesn’t tell us. How does Megalopolis point humanity toward a brighter future? Through those moving sidewalks they have at airports that don’t actually make the journey any faster (they maybe make it a little easier if you’re disabled like me and can’t walk as far as you used to, except then people always want to create a lane for walking, too, except if you have suitcases with you that gets really tight, and then there are always little kids who want to run full speed on the things cause they’re fun if you’re young and able-bodied, except then those of us who are neither of those things get really stressed out that we’re gonna, you know, die when they crash into us at top speed) but my point here is that this isn’t much of a vision of the future.
I will also say, though, that Adam Driver deserves an Oscar for his performance, or perhaps the Nobel his character has already won by the beginning of the movie, because he acts the hell out of this role. The lasting impact of Megalopolis: A Fable may be that it gets me to watch Silence for the twentieth time, but I was going to do that eventually anyway, so again, I don’t think this film was worth it. And I don’t want to pit films against each other—obviously each film is itself, and there is wonder and value to be found everywhere—but if you want to watch a long film about architecture under capitalism, I ask you to seek out The Brutalist, a film that inspired a flurry of train-ride-home notes for my novel, over Megalopolis: A Fable, a film that inspired the frustrated, pissed-off review you’ve just read.
