Nick Pinkerton
In Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, a visionary architect with utopian dreams navigates political chaos and conspiracy to
rebuild a declining American city.
Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
Megalopolis, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola,
now playing in theaters
• • •
After three decades occupied with for-hire work, viniculture, handcrafted “little” films, and experiments in live cinema, Francis Ford Coppola is swinging for the fences. Megalopolis, his paid-out-of-pocket, decades-in-gestation passion project, and his first in many moons to be visible outside involuted cinephile circles, picks up where his last big-budget auteur projects left off: its stylistic debt to German Expressionism and its Hollywood heirs connects it to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); its depiction of a visionary prodigy hemmed in by the running dogs of the status quo to Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).
Still from Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
The genius with clipped wings in Megalopolis is Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina, an architect / urban planner who aspires to transform the dilapidated face of “New Rome”—a municipal agglomeration bearing more than a passing resemblance to Manhattan and its environs in long shots, to downtown Atlanta in close-ups—with the assistance of a miracle substance of his invention, Megalon, while facing stiff opposition from Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero, among other reactionary forces.
Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero in Megalopolis. Courtesty Lionsgate.
Set, per one of its recurring title cards, “in the Third Millennium of the 21st Century,” Megalopolis—the title reflecting the name of Catilina’s proposed garden city—overlays the Roman republic in its waning years of crisis onto a contemporary American scene. Several monikers in Coppola’s film refer to key participants in the Catilinarian conspiracy, a failed coup d’état of 63 BCE led by Lucius Sergius Catilina, namesake of Driver’s character, and put down by consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, forebear of Franklyn. The historical Marcus Licinius Crassus, general and power broker, becomes in the movie Jon Voight’s Hamilton Crassus III, Catilina’s venal plutocrat uncle; Publius Clodius Pulcher, a shit-stirrer alleged to have cross-dressed his way into an assignation with Julius Caesar’s wife, becomes Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher, Crassus’s no-goodnik heir apparent. Other central characters, such as Aubrey Plaza’s unscrupulous financial-sector reporter Wow Platinum and Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter and Catilina’s lover, have no clear historical precedents.
Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
The word “mess” has appeared in more than a handful of slighting reviews of Megalopolis. This pejorative might be applied to everything that recommends the film: its stylistic eclecticism, its crazy-quilt mixture of tones, its narrative eccentricities. (The death of Dustin Hoffman’s political “fixer,” ostensibly of some importance to the plot, is handled in a tossed-off flashback that’s like a Family Guy digression.) In other regards, however, the film is uncommonly, unfalteringly lucid. And it’s this clarity, at times near to the binarism of a morality play, rather than any of the invigorating chaos, that diminishes Megalopolis. Catilina, lacking any convincing challenge to his principled, superior-minded righteousness or suggestion of troubling hidden depths to his character, makes for a monotonous protagonist. The wildest excesses of his personality—a moody workaholic monomania partly responsible, or so he believes, for driving his first wife to an early grave—appear to have been reined in by the time he comes to pay court to Julia. His overindulgence in drink and drug is seen to be but a handmaiden to his brilliance; his fondness for public histrionics, like crashing a press op to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy, just good old-fashioned ballyhoo: he is but mad north-northwest.
Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
As for his Megalon, from what we see it shows every promise of offering a panacea to all the world’s problems, with no apparent downside, and his opponents can therefore only be motivated by entrenched blinkered conservatism (Mayor Cicero) or rankling jealousy (Pulcher). There are occasional flashes of ironic circumspection—Catilina’s program for urban renewal gets a significant boost after large swaths of the city are flattened by chunks of a decaying Soviet satellite falling to earth, the detritus of another century’s idealist project clearing ground for a new one—but these scarcely suffice to dampen the general tone of messianic optimism. There is nothing here of the cynicism that marks actor Sam Bottoms’s description of the dysfunctional set of Apocalypse Now, pitched by Coppola as a communal endeavor: “Like any utopia, the truth is there is one person who gained, and everyone else suffered.” On the whole, the treatment of uncompromised rugged individualist architect Howard Roark in King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which shares some DNA (but not a moral compass) with Coppola’s film, leaves the viewer more space for ambivalence concerning its hero.
Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
Treading in Cecil B. DeMille territory, Coppola runs into the old DeMillian paradox: the representatives of vice dominate his plea for virtue. Voight, the image of pink, powdered senescent satiety, is a hoot. So are Plaza, modeling the same pretzeled-asp brassiere worn by Theda Bara in 1917’s Cleopatra, and LaBeouf, sporting a raffish rattail and castoffs from Michael Jackson’s HIStory World Tour. The latter two will emerge as the film’s villains, with Pulcher casting himself as populist demagogue in order to lead an uprising against cousin Catilina, effortlessly winning over a throng of gormless commoners with barked sloganeering (“Don’t tread on me!”). Rather than tapping into familiar nativist talking points, he builds his base from a group referred to as “immigrants”; they appear, like most representatives of the masses seen, however briefly, in the film, to have emigrated from the 1930s—a crowd of newsboys, stevedores, and Bowery Boy lugs.
Shia LeBeouf as Clodio Pulcher (right) in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
There is nothing in Megalopolis to confute opportunist Pulcher’s view of the plebians as easily manipulated rubes, a curious omission in a movie that’s positioned as a humanist hymn to our species’ higher potential. To envision, as Coppola does, that the fate of the American republic will be decided by a clash between aristocratic factions is not, perhaps, unrealistic, but for a film that bills itself “A Fable” and fairly froths over with utopian sentiment, it does represent a certain limitation of imagination. The final image of Megalopolis is an awed, low-angle composition recalling the triumphal conclusion of Vidor’s film, though gazing up at a newly installed family dynasty rather than a lone Übermensch. They are shot from the underside of what appears to be an acrylic platform, which gives the disconcerting impression that they are standing on top of you.
Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero and Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina in Megalopolis. Courtesy Lionsgate.
The proposition that our last, best hope for the future is a benevolent ruling-class technocracy ushering us into a new Eden of ’90s CD-ROM game graphics is not a particularly stirring one. Yet Megalopolis can be deeply moving, a spend-it-all splurge crackling with cinematic bravado: the screwily busy choreography of the meet-cute between Catilina and Julia, the eerie augury of a divine hand snatching the full moon from the sky, allegorical statues across the city slumping on their pedestals as if in a laudanum trance, shadows of writhing bodies projected onto the faces of skyscrapers to suggest a modern-day Pompeii, invocations of Gance, Griffith, Eisenstein, Clair. Catilina’s platitudinous public-forum sermonizing on possibility and potential is more eloquently expressed by the giddy ingenuity of Coppola’s filmmaking, and in fact the character in the film nearest to its director may be Voight’s Crassus, who impulsively decides to unburden himself of his fortune for the public good—let us call him Francis the Generous. All of which is not to say that Megalopolis, as an AI-resurrected Roger Ebert said of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in an early (and speedily shelved) trailer for Coppola’s latest, is “a triumph of style over substance.” A real human being with a real feeling for art understands that they are much the same thing.
Nick Pinkerton is the author of the book Goodbye, Dragon Inn, available from Fireflies Press as part of its Decadent Editions series. His writing on cinematic esoterica can be found at nickpinkerton.substack.com, among other venues. The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.