Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is a bursting-at-the-seams hallucination of a movie — it’s wonderfully out-there. At once a melancholic lament and futuristic fantasy, it invokes different epochs and overflows with entrancing, at times confounding images and ideas that have been playing in my head since I first saw the movie in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, it was both warmly received and glibly dismissed, a critical divide that’s nothing new for Coppola, a restlessly experimental filmmaker with a long habit of going off-Hollywood.
Nothing if not au courant, “Megalopolis” is a vision of a moribund civilization, though also a great-man story about an architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who dreams of a better world. An enigmatic genius (he has a Nobel Prize) with an aristocratic mien and a flair for drama, Catalina lives in a city that resembles today’s New York by way of ancient Rome, though it mostly looks like an elaborate soundstage. As familiar as Fifth Avenue and as obscure as the far side of the moon, it is a world that mirrors its real counterpart as a playpen for the wealthy and a prison-house for the destitute. The city haunts Catalina; it also inspires him.
What Catalina dreams of is a “perfect school-city,” in which people can achieve their better selves. It’s an exalted aspiration, as seemingly boundless but also as sheltering as the blue sky, and one that invokes a long line of lofty dreamers and master builders. There are predictable obstacles, mostly other people, small-minded types without vision, idealism or maybe just faith. Among these is the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a consummate politician with no patience for fantasies or for Catalina. Their animosity runs through the story, which is narrated by Catalina’s aide, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), dense with incident and populated by an array of noble souls and posturing fools.
The fools prove better company in “Megalopolis” than most of the upright types, though with their all-too human comedy they’re not always distinguishable. They begin rushing in after the jolting opener, which finds Catalina dressed in inky black and uncertainly climbing out of a window in the crown of the Chrysler Building. Before long, he is standing with one foot firmly planted and the other shakily raised over the edge. He calls out “time stop” and everything — the clouds above, the cars below — freezes, only to restart at his command. He looks like a colossus, though also brings to mind the early-cinema clown Harold Lloyd hanging over a different abyss in “Safety Last!” (a title that could work for this audacious movie).
It’s quite the to-be-or-not introduction. Given that filmmakers are in the business of stopping time, Catalina’s entrance also reads as an auteurist mission statement. So it’s a relief when Catalina gets off that precipice, even if Coppola never really does. The filmmaker has a thing for dreamers and their great, big dreams, and it’s easy to see “Megalopolis” — which he mentioned in interviews as early as 1983 — in autobiographical terms. Like Catalina, Coppola has endured and almost been consumed by catastrophic setbacks (most notably with his founding of a film studio that nearly ruined him), only to rise phoenixlike from the ashes. It’s one reason that “Megalopolis” feels like a personal statement on an epic scale.
Much happens, including love, death, a bloody intrigue and a bacchanalia with a three-ring circus, racing chariots and writhing bodies. Amid all this tumult, Catalina falls in love with the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a party girl who quotes the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius by heart. He also separates from his lover, Wow Platinum, a TV host played by a peerlessly funny Aubrey Plaza with much bling and a perfect deadpan. Wow is soon swept up in a scheme involving Catalina’s cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), and a megarich banker, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). There are diatribes about debt and speeches about utopia, none of which seizes the imagination as strongly as Coppola’s filmmaking.
“Megalopolis” is a tragedy about both a world and a man, which is most poignantly and persuasively expressed through Coppola’s ambition and visuals, and by the stronger performances, Driver’s included. The actor holds the center throughout, making Catalina’s existential burden palpable in the downward turn of the character’s mouth and the ponderousness with which he moves through the ruins of his world. It’s a magnetic turn even when Driver and Emmanuel struggle to put across the romance. Coppola showcases their characters’ affair beautifully, including for a kiss they share while perilously balanced atop metal girders floating above the city. It’s a lush metaphor for falling in love, but the romance itself never achieves liftoff the way that Coppola obviously intends it to.
Even so, the image of Catalina and Julia kissing exerts its own gravitational pull on you, as do so many of the movie’s other ravishing visuals: a flower stand that vividly brightens a gloomy street (shades of Hitchcock’s flower shop in “Vertigo); the city’s monumental stone statues coming to life only to collapse in apparent despair; a vestal virgin (Grace VanderWaal) swinging above the fray as she fades. Coppola’s delight in the plasticity of the medium is infectious. The beauty of some of his images is overpowering, as in a brief interlude that shows an enormous pale hand reaching across the screen from a bank of clouds to grab the moon, an image that could be right out of early cinema at its most feverishly untamed.
Throughout “Megalopolis,” Coppola references different time periods in the story — Catalina is a futurist haunted by the past — and in his pictorial choices. Coppola clearly had fun using a digital toolbox for some of the movie’s more far-out imaginings, including the organic shapes that fill Catalina’s plans for the city. He repeatedly draws from early cinema and classical Hollywood as well as film spectacles, theater and vaudeville. Both times I watched “Megalopolis,” a live performer playing a journalist entered the movie theater with a mic, the lights flipped on and the image on the screen briefly shrank so that the eye lines of the performer and Driver matched. (During the movie’s theatrical run, some screenings will feature a live performer, while in others the audience will only hear the journalist.)
It’s a funny-ha-ha, funny-odd moment. While it modestly interrupts the story’s flow, the appearance of a live performer doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as playfully wave at it, which, in some ways, is what Coppola is doing here. For all its serious talk, grim portends and high ideals, “Megalopolis” is also an argument for pleasure. It’s filled with high and low comedy, bursts of slapstick, mugging faces and even teasing burlesque. In one funny bit that tweaks the vanity and pettiness of men hungry for power, Clodio — who tries to take over the city — purposefully marches in, throws his hat to the ground and orders one of his men to pick it up. The minion does, only to throw his hat and order the next guy to pick it up.
In its voracious hybridity and daring, in its visual experimentation, sound design and departure from contemporary realist norms, “Megalopolis” hews closer to the experimental expressionism of Coppola movies like “One From the Heart” and “Rumble Fish” than to the more familiar classism of “The Godfather,” his most lauded film. In the years that followed “Rumble Fish,” Coppola continued to shake off convention in films like his adaptation of “Dracula,” pushing himself further in aesthetically adventurous, noncommercial movies like “Youth Without Youth.” These might have been more generously received, including by critics, if they’d been marketed as foreign-language films or if Coppola’s name hadn’t been attached. Artists who take genuine risks also risk the love of their most passionate fans.
That probably sounds more defensive than I intend it to, but sincere, serious, shoot-for-the-moon ventures like “Megalopolis” deserve more than shallow dismissals. After I saw “Megalopolis” a second time, I flashed on something that the critic David Thomson wrote in 1997 in a review of the neo-noir “L.A. Confidential.” Thomson was enthusiastic about the film, but wondered if big audiences would find it too demanding. “We are out of training,” he wrote, an admirably gentle way to address the lament that the mass audience has no interest in putatively difficult movies. (“The Godfather Part II,” it’s worth recalling, was once thought difficult by many.) With its dependence on genres and familiar stars and stories, the film industry has long encouraged us — trained us, to borrow Thomson’s polite verb — to not expect too much from movies. Coppola, by contrast, has long asked us to expect everything.
I doubt that “Megalopolis” has a big audience, much less any Oscars in its future, but Coppola didn’t make it to pander to viewers or win more awards. It’s a fascinating movie and perhaps his directorial swan song, though I hope not; mostly, it feels like a dream about cinema itself, its past and hoped-for future, one that Coppola, now 85, has nurtured for so long that the film’s commercial prospects seem beside the point (even if I’m sure that he’d like to make some of his money back). In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.
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