Summary
Almost four decades in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus arrives in all of its glorious insane delights.
Francis Ford Coppola has taken some big swings in his career, resulting in colossal misses and certified classics in unequal measure. This might be the biggest swing of them all, a collision of sound, vision and existential ideas. It doesn’t all work but it also somehow works perfectly, which may be the enigma that we’ll be unpicking long after this gnarled branch we call civilisation has withered off the tree of life.
After almost forty years in development, MEGALOPOLIS arrives with a loud slam. It begins with the frenetic energy and rapid cutting of a music video, maintaining and suverting that feeling for almost two-and-a-half hours. The setting is New Rome in the 3rd Millennium, a kind of parallel reality where the Roman Empire has fused itself onto 21st century New York.
The central conflict that threatens to topple this empire is between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a maverick architect who wants to remake the city as a sustainable entity run on the mysterious Megalon, and the conservative Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who likes things just the way they are. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) stands between them, enraptured by Cesar’s haunted vision but still loyal to her family.
In the thirteen years since Twixt (2011), Coppola’s last directorial effort, the filmic landscape has changed exponentially. Yet Coppola remains both defiantly independent of those changes, thanks in part to the freedom of self-funding American Zoetrope through his winery and resorts, but also wholly aware of the demands of modern event filmmaking. After all, this is a film that has both elaborate chariot races and giant living statues alongside erotic interludes and media commentary. (Honestly, I have four and half pages of notes and I’ve barely broken the surface on this thing). It shouldn’t all work together, but the fact that it somehow does is one of the things that we’re all just going to have to live with in time.
In what could almost be described as a victory lap through his impressive career, there are times when Coppola is just dipping into his massive bag of tricks and seeing what works. At one point, Stargirl‘s Grace VanderWaal (playing vestal virgin pop star Vesta Sweetwater) is hanging from the ceiling of a stadium harmonising with multiple versions of herself. At others, we’re glued to the intimate and unrestrained glee of Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf involved in some verbal and sexual power play.
Being Francis Ford Coppola, the cast is a bit of a who’s who. Not everybody gets their place in the sun, such as the barely seen Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman. Yet here’s a film where Laurence Fishburne is both assistant and narrator, one who vacillates between extradiegetic and fourth wall breaking observation. The film’s dialogue can be, to put it mildly, jarring at times. It’s the kind of high camp that could put this in the same breath as House of Gucci if you are so inclined. The audience in this festival session was very much in on the joke. After all, here is a work that very much finds you where you’re at.
Coppola’s willingness to experiment on a scale this grand after sixty years of making films is something I continue to admire, especially in a film that combines the canvas of a blockbuster with the intimacy of live installation art. It’s a film that is both unabashedly optimistic and deeply critical of modern empires. It is a contradiction and a reconcilement. It is, in short, MEGALOPOLIS. If this is his swan song then it is surely one for the greatest hits package.
2024 | USA | DIRECTOR: Francis Ford Coppola | WRITER: Francis Ford Coppola | CAST: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, Dustin Hoffman | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2024, American Zoetrope | RUNNING TIME: 138 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 5-16 June 2024 (SFF 2024)
