MEGALOPOLIS: Good, Bad, Brilliant

Coppola's likely swan song is everything everyone says it is.

Reality is so much stranger than we give it credit for being. Take, for example, the well-known “double-slit experiment,” which is significantly less salacious than it sounds. In this experiment light is passed through two slits in a barrier and, depending on whether it is observed or not, displays different properties. Light is a wave but light is also a particle, and it is both those things until the moment you take a look at it. I’m not doing a good job of explaining this, but that is in the tradition of Megalopolis, in which Talia Shire gives a speech about string theory that has no connection to the rest of the film and is also not a particularly good explanation of string theory. 

Megalopolis is the cinematic version of the observer effect - it is a bad movie and it is a good movie, both at once, until you observe it and then the wave function collapses and it settles into one or the other. Megalopolis is good. Megalopolis is bad. Both of these things are true at the same time. To argue otherwise is foolish. 

That’s why a review of Megalopolis is almost completely pointless. I can only tell you about the experience I had with the film, which may be vastly different from the experience you have had or will have. Yes, this is true of all movies in a sense but I have never watched a movie where it was as aggressively true as it is with Megalopolis. Every take I read about the movie is different, even when they have similarities, and it’s clear that this movie is an intensely personal experience that hits everyone’s brains in a different way. We’re all looking at the same crystal, we’re just all seeing different facets of it. 

I fully understand not liking Megalopolis. Sometimes when a person dislikes a movie that I like, I’ll have arguments that might change their mind. Your mind will not be changed about this film. Nothing I can say will sway you, and no complaint you have will be wrong. It’s like S&M or spicy food - if it’s not for you, nothing can make it for you. 

But me? Me, I loved Megalopolis. I spent the film’s entire runtime with a huge grin on my face. I was engaged and enraptured by the spectacle and the silliness. I was provoked by Francis Ford Coppola’s sometimes masturbatory intellectual explorations. I was charmed by the brazen weirdness, the chaotic tone, the endlessly bizarre choices. What I saw in that IMAX theater was Coppola trying the impossible, to bring everything that is the movies into one film, with styles and aesthetics that span the history of the medium from the silents to modern green screen blockbusters and everything in between. It’s a movie that tries to engage with theater and art and literature as well as cinema, a movie that attempts to contain within it the essence of all Western culture throughout Coppola’s life. It’s a movie respectful of the past but obsessed with the future, with what comes next and how to get there. It offers no answers but the questions it raises are intended to have us buzzing as we leave the theater. People have complained about the film’s murky thematics, but the themes are spoken aloud at the end of the movie, as Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina says that the true utopia is the conversations we have about our ideas for the future and how we should live. 

Does Megalopolis succeed? Sometimes, sometimes not. But the mark of a great artist is the willingness to jump into the unknown and risk failure; sometimes failure is the success you needed. There’s a whole runner in this movie about this idea, that Great Men take big swings, and that we should be rewarding this. But when Megalopolis fails it does so well, by which I mean the movie’s failures are intriguing, are interesting and are entertaining. I couldn’t imagine finding Megalopolis boring, because every few minutes it’s trying something new, utilizing a different technique, rapidly shifting up tone or simply jumping to another plot point. 

In some ways the biggest problem with the movie is that it’s simply too short. Megalopolis feels like an adaptation of a thousand page book; you hit all the beats but there’s a sense that everything is crowded in. I’d love to see a longer cut of this movie, something that luxuriates at closer to four hours, because 138 minutes - not that long by superhero movie standards! - is all too brief. There are more ideas crammed into a ten minute span of Megalopolis than some filmmakers attempt to grapple with in their whole careers and all I could think was “more, more more!”

Which is a helluva response to a movie that is quite maximalist. From design to performances, everything in Megalopolis is going for broke. Coppola is doing something very interesting with his actors; he’s asking them all to eschew naturalism and enter a more theatrical, often Shakespearean mode*. Subtlety is not the name of the game here, and everyone dives right into the deep end. It may not be fashionable to say this, but one of the people who most gets what Coppola is doing here is Shia Labeouf, who modulates his performance between Richard III and a villain from the Batman 1966 TV show. Sometimes he’s doing both in one scene, and it’s endlessly delightful. Also getting it very much is another canceled member of the troupe, John Voight, who has the single most insane sequence you’re likely to see in a movie theater this year. It involves a big boner. 

*By the way, this goes for the visual effects as well. I don’t believe that Coppola is trying for photorealistic work. There is very little in the movie that reads as entirely realistic, from the hyper-ornate sets to the costumes that mix everything from Ancient Rome to the 1930s to science fiction. Sure, some of the green screen stuff doesn’t look real, but there’s also a scene where Shia Labeouf steps on a tree trunk to make a speech and the trunk is in the shape of a swastika. And that was practical. 

Given the biggest task is Driver, whose Cesar Catilina is clearly a Coppola stand-in. He’s a great genius who cares only about the work, is willing to bankrupt himself if need be, is given to bouts of bad behavior and who finds that true love is the thing that stabilizes him and allows him to achieve. One of the many questions swirling inside Megalopolis is not whether a Great Man who is also sometimes a Bad Man can be redeemed but rather whether or not society can thrive without this exact kind of man. At times Cesar is almost a Randian ubermensch, at other times he’s sort of a total dipshit. Driver weaves it all together, and more than that he is able to deliver Coppola’s monologues convincingly, even if sometimes these monologues don’t always make the most sense. 

Or maybe they do. Walking out of Megalopolis I was ecstatic, having just bathed in a font of pure cinema, but as I got farther from the theater the more I realized I was going to have to see this movie again. And maybe again. Because while as an experience Megalopolis is thrilling on first viewing, as a statement it will likely take a lot of work to unpack. The film is dense, and there are moments where I knew Coppola was making allusions to something but I wasn’t always sure just what. It’s been a long time since I felt this way, but Megalopolis left me wanting to read a hundred reviews, to dive into a book that dissects it, to get into passionate arguments with other people about what scenes and characters mean. 

Decades ago Francis Ford Coppola took George Lucas under his wing, and the smaller, quieter filmmaker eclipsed his mentor when it came to box office and cultural impact. But with Megalopolis Coppola has his moment - this is very much the kind of movie I believe Lucas wanted to make with the Prequels, but his commercials instincts would not allow him to make. It’s a weird science fiction (Cesar can stop time, although I’m not exactly sure why or what this accomplishes in the movie, but I think it has something to do with cinema being the art form that most exists with and works with time?) meditation on culture and society and art and everything that is rattling around inside of Coppola’s head. I think in many ways this is what Lucas wanted those movies to be, a weird and compelling story that engaged with all of the styles and eras of filmmaking, and that sort of is what the Prequels are, but when compared to Megalopolis the difference is stark. Unbound by commercial consideration, Coppola just made the movie the way he wanted to make the movie, and as a true artist does he worried about what he wanted to say more than what the audience wants to see. 

If this is Coppola’s last film - and it seems likely to be that way - he is going out with a grand gesture of genius that will be studied for years to come. Megalopolis is a certified disaster at the box office, but that was always going to be its commercial fate. What’s important is the work, which is one of the things Megalopolis is talking about. This is vital, enthusiastic filmmaking, the kind of stuff that younger directors wouldn’t be able to pull off. It’s insane and it’s brilliant, it’s weird and it’s didactic, it’s ambitious and it’s silly. It is all of this, it is all things, and it is a landmark in an art form that many had begun to write off as dead. But it has a future, and Coppola is trying to point the way.