[Film Review] Megalopolis (2024)
It is by no stretch of imagination that Coppola’s decades-in-the-making, self-financed passion project MEGALOPOLIS would end up as a vanity fare. For a veteran, octogenarian cinema royalty like him, with no one to answer for, like as not self-aggrandizement and solipsism might run away with him and jeopardize the final artwork which needs to connect with an audience as vast as possible to recoup it colossal price tag reportedly around $120 million.
Technically speaking, no one ought to doubt the mastermind behind THE GODFATHER trilogy and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) will ever fail to actualize his epic vista given a sizable purse. MEGALOPOLIS is a modern-day, full-scale fable almost too literally mirrors the Ancient Rome’s decadence and power battle. So starting with a time-stopping gambit of Cesar Catilina (Driver), a visionary architect in the New Rome megapolis (an alternative New York), teetering on the brink of a high-rise, the film holds our attention with a salvo of splendid visual signifiers (a pristinely digitalized virtual reality that keeps any semblance of realism at bay) to trudge through its unfocused narrative. The stare-down between Catilina and Franklyn Cicero (Esposito), the conservative mayor who holds a personal grudge over him (yet we have no idea what it is), gets convoluted with the brazen escapades of Clodio Puncher (LaBeouf), Cesar’s green-eyed cousin, eying for the fortune of their wealthy uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Voight), the head of the National Bank, and so does Wow Platinum (Plaza), Cesar’s ambitious mistress and an unashamed temptress.
Guilt-ridden for the mysterious disappearance of his wife years ago, Cesar envisions and constructs a utopian city using an invented material called Megalon, which wins him the Nobel Prize, and eventually finds love again in Julia (Emmanuel), Franklyn’s daughter. Simply because she seems to be the only one who can see him through and later help him regain his superpower. Here the conceited metaphorical connotation of a man’s omnipotence and a woman as his indispensable enabler is an example of Coppola’s old-guard, patriarchal habitus which has been ossified since his heyday, but viewed today, it is fairly difficult for audience to grandfather him.
Bacchanalia (it is Wow and Hamilton’s lavish wedding ceremony), calumny (a crudely doctored video as a kompromat), revolt (Clodio’s ascension as a demagogue), assassination (cynically orchestrated to let a kid pull the trigger) and reconciliation (Cicero and Catilina mending their fences after Julia is pregnant with the latter’s baby, another telltale sign of Coppola’s legacy-conscious mindset: every “great man” needs an heir to perpetuate his clout.), are strewn along the way, MEGALOPOLIS waddles through its shaggy-dog story until eventually, things will be miraculously sorted out by themselves.
Driver, whose affinity for projects mired in development hells feels almost uncanny at this point, is solid enough to flesh out a genius’ existential crisis and goes as empathetic as the script permits, but a ghost of unease cannot be effaced from his mien as if he is disconcerted to betray the self-awareness of carrying a doomed behemoth on his own slender shoulders. The supporting cast is a mixed bag. Emmanuel is a less flamboyant manic pixie dream girl fed with stilted lines, LaBeouf’s offensive grandstanding is a sore to one’s eyes, and a barely articulate Voight shouldn’t be hired at the first place. On the plus side, a sobering Esposito manages to carry through the orotund oration with at least some rousing conviction whereas Plaza is a total badass in startling archaistic costumes and goes great guns in her conventionally-devised intrigues and seductions. Her force of determination is a revelation to behold. Last but not least, Shire, playing Cesar's unbalanced mother, fine-tunes her volatility with shadings of ambiguity that isn’t lost on a keen spectator.
Alas, for the sake of a cinephile’s incorrigible respect to a cinema titan who has the audacity to orchestrates a Promethean Götterdämmerung as his (purported) swan song, Yours Truly cannot bring himself to drag MEGALOPOLIS through the mud. It is a self-indulgent, architectonic monument erring on the side of an old man’s outmoded concerns, attitude and ideation. But for Coppola, at the very least, it is his hard-earned prerogative to exercise all his excesses as he wishes, from which no one can deny him.
referential entries: Coppola’s THE GODFATHER PART III (1990, 7.7/10), RUMBLE FISH (1983, 7.7/10), PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986, 6.2/10).
Title: Megalopolis
Year: 2024
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Romance
Country: USA
Language: English
Director/Screenwriter: Francis Ford Coppola
Music: Osvaldo Golijov
Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Editors: Cam McLaughlin, Glen Scantlebury, Robert Schafer
Cast:
Adam Driver
Nathalie Emmanuel
Giancarlo Esposito
Aubrey Plaza
Shia LaBeouf
Jon Voight
Laurence Fishburne
Talia Shire
Grace VanderWaal
Dustin Hoffman
Kathryn Hunter
Jason Schwartzman
Chloe Fineman
Isabelle Kusman
Madeleine Gardella
Bailey Coppola
James Remar
D.B. Sweeney
Balthazar Getty
Rating: 6.7/10