Midway through Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) blather about their favorite subjects: utopian idealism (Cesar) and hard-hearted pragmatism (Franklyn). “Oh dear,” Franklyn’s wife Teresa (Kathryn Hunter) sighs. “Blah, blah, blah.”
Judging by the snorts and snickers in the audience at the IMAX screening I attended, Teresa speaks for many moviegoers. A rush of surreal imagery that sometimes recalls Terrence Malick and blunt dialogue that could have been penned by George “I Don’t Like Sand” Lucas (a Coppola protégé), “Megalopolis” practically begs you to dismiss it as the ravings of an old man who gazes at the horizon, yet is stranded on the shore.
Better to be stranded with a genius than sailing with an ignoramus, I say. Like Cesar, “a reckless dreamer who will destroy the world sooner than he can build a better one,” Coppola nearly obliterates his own creation to construct a paradise, resulting in a film mesmerizingly at war with itself: obvious and abstract, conservative and progressive, ugly and beautiful.
Conceived four decades ago and partly based on Roman history, “Megalopolis” is a work of time fusion. In the New York-ish city of New Rome, citizens witness the fall of a Soviet satellite, the spread of 9/11-esque destruction, and the rise of Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf), a yowling pseudo-populist hailed as well-suited for politics because of his experience as “an entertainer.” The era? Then, now, someday.
It is the someday that rouses Cesar, who leads “the Design Authority,” a nebulous organization that wields godlike power over New Rome’s infrastructure. When Franklyn proposes building a casino at the heart of the city, Cesar rebuts with plans for a futuristic urban center, featuring a garden for every resident and an iridescent version of the people movers found in airports.
If you’re wondering why iridescent people movers are permitted by New Rome’s zoning ordinances, “Megalopolis” may not be the movie for you. Coppola’s vision of tomorrow is benignly vague, while his vision of today is horrifically specific: The economy is tanking, fascism is surging, and guns are in the hands of 12-year-olds. So disturbing is the present that even a half-formed hope for the future comes as a godsend.
Coppola may waffle on what that future would look like, but he knows who won’t be welcome in it: tyrants like Clodio and temptresses like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a Wall Street journalist who dramatically informs Cesar, “I need to be half of a power couple!” and sings a lascivious ditty about being “on the trading room floor.” Um, Wow.
Clodio and Wow are the villains of “Megalopolis,” but that doesn’t automatically make Cesar the hero. To build his “stupid Megalopolis” (as Wow calls it), he must demolish countless houses, igniting riots inflamed by Clodio (who selects “Hands off our homes!” as a campaign slogan). Like the former president he’s clearly based on (and his namesake, Roman politician Publius Clodius Pulcher), Clodio exploits the suffering of others to satisfy his ego. Somehow, none of his followers notice that he’s the narcissistic grandson of a grotesquely rich banker (Jon Voight).
One Trump trait Clodio lacks is the MAGA godfather’s toxic masculinity; after framing Cesar for statutory rape, Clodio crows, “Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress!” Plenty of Coppola acolytes will be desperate to give the director the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard to take his putative progressivism seriously when his leading antagonist is a gender-fluid Lothario and his chosen protagonist responds to rumors about his own sexuality by asking, “Who doesn’t prefer girls?”
Lines like that make me wonder who exactly Cesar’s Megalopolis is for. The unseen masses he allegedly wants to liberate from Franklyn’s capitalist nightmare presumably include Americans who are Black, brown, or part of the LGBTQ+ community, but they are more or less invisible here. Despite its scope and daring, “Megalopolis” boils down to a race to see which wealthy, self-appointed white savior will commandeer New Rome first, a conceit that reeks of paternalism and elitism.
It doesn’t help that Cesar loves Franklyn’s daughter, Julia (the talented “Game of Thrones” actress Nathalie Emmanuel, wasted in an empty role). A Caucasian visionary luring a young Black woman away from her bureaucratic father is not a pretty sight—and it suggests that Coppola, despite his criticism of Trump, has ingested some of the former president’s bigoted preachings.
As a prophet, Cesar is as imperfect as Coppola. When not crafting buildings and parks out of a super-material called “megalon,” he drinks heavily, joins Wow’s sexcapades, and loses himself in hallucinations of his wife, Sunny Hope (Haley Simms), who died of an insulin overdose. Sunny may be gone, but the memory of her is more real than Megalopolis—so real that Cesar works his hands through empty air, imagining he’s braiding her hair.
That moment makes it hard to forget that Coppola’s wife, the filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, died in April. Yet as Cesar’s Megalopolis draws close to completion, the movie refuses to be reduced to autobiography, priming us for a thrillingly unreal sequence where Cesar addresses New Rome from inside a golden, levitating blossom.
“We are in need of a great debate about the future!” Cesar cries. By the time he speaks those words, he’s survived scandal, prison, and being shot in the eye. That his optimism regrows—along with the flesh torn from his face—says more than any hazy rhetoric ever could about the might of megalon and the human spirit.
Sunny hopes are eternally unfashionable, but only young men have the luxury of making nihilistic masterpieces like Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979); they have their whole lives to be pessimistic. At 85, Coppola is running out of time, which may be why “Megalopolis” evolves into an unabashedly sentimental paean to marriage and fatherhood—even as it acknowledges that all parents must cede the stage of history to children with impossible imaginings of their own.
Cesar is right: We are in need of a great debate about the future. I don’t believe that Coppola is the man to lead it, but under clouds of uncertainty and possibility, he has given us a gift: a movie worth debating.
