Megalopolis

Megalopolis will spin your head around. It’s brilliant. It’s cheesy. Coppola invents a new visual language as well as new flavors of dialogue vernacular. Yet, he directly quotes large excerpts from classical sources like Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius. He seems almost desperate to get his point across. In a Q&A for the film, he shared how passionately he holds the idea of a great debate about the future, particularly given the parallels in the U.S. right now to Rome just before the fall of the republic.

The moral core of this story is the knowledge that while systems of governance (like a republic) inevitably fall to corruption, ideas, and creative striving don’t have to. Cicero says in the film that “utopias always become dystopias,” but Cesar exhorts him to “never let the now destroy the forever.”  The message is indeed timely.

As a movie… Megalopolis feels like someone bolted Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet to 2001: A Space Odyssey, overlaid Gladiator, mixed in Goodfellas, then added a dash of slapstick comedy and sex. Is it good? Bad? Both? Yes. No. Is this on the test?  The performances are insanely good, except when they’re bad. See where I’m going with this? Esposito is inspired. Driver is uneven but often superlative. Plaza steals her scenes with power and a deadly magnetism. The production design is gorgeous, using the Chrysler building as a jumping-off point and focusing on NYC edifices in a Romanesque style.

Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum in Megalopolis. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate

“…shouldn’t work…but somehow in the end it all comes together…”

There’s so much going on, wildly disparate in tone and quality, that the film can’t be judged as a monolithic work. Each chapter could get a distinct rating from “sublime” to “WTF?” There’s also no conventional logic at work. The cynic would ask why Catilina doesn’t simply stop time and do whatever he wants by using the megalon material? Imagine the weapons one could create… but that would be a much shorter film, and the logic here is emotional, not tied to real-world physics.

Megalopolis will be regarded as either an incoherent, self-indulgent failure or as a work of staggering genius. Maybe it will take time. Perhaps when Coppola has passed, it will be revisited with a new appreciation. This is a film that shouldn’t work. It should collapse under its own weight, but somehow, in the end, it all comes together after a fashion, and that’s the magic of Coppola.