Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence
Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman
After five decades of false starts and a lot of wine sales, Francis Ford Coppola has finally brought his pet project Megalopolis to the screen. As it's made by someone as revered as Coppola,
we're obliged to label it an ambitious failure, but Megalopolis is so vapid and uncertain of its own themes that it's difficult
to figure out what exactly Coppola's ambition was to begin with.
Subtitled as "A Fable," Megalopolis is loosely based on the Second Catilinarian conspiracy, an
attempted coup on the leadership of Rome in 63 BC (oh, that one!).
Coppola's version takes place in New Rome, a mashup of Ancient Rome and
disco era New York. The city is ruled over by Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a practical man with little time for art, more focussed on business
than cultural enrichment. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a
genius architect who has developed a material called Megalon, with which
he plans to build a utopian city, Megalopolis. Their differing views on
what's important for the people of a city sees Cesar and Franklyn become
enemies. This rift is further complicated when Franklyn's It-Girl
daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls for Cesar.
Cesar is no everyday genius; he literally possesses the ability to stop
time at his will, a gift he uses to get his work done. Following a
fabricated sex scandal, Cesar believes he has lost this power, but it
returns whenever he's in the presence of Julia, who is the only other
person who doesn't freeze when Cesar pauses time. Coppola has dedicated
his film to his late wife Eleanor and seems to be suggesting that he's
nothing without his muse. It's a romantic notion, but the awfulness
of Megalopolis only serves to compound his theory. The romance between Cesar and
Julia is undone by the sort of trite dialogue you might expect from the
romantic subplot of a James Cameron movie, and Driver and Emmanuel are
on such different wavelengths that they're not so much acting together
as acting in front of each other.
The plotting of Megalopolis might be compared to a soap opera, but that would be an insult to
soap operas. There's nothing here remotely as compelling as the rivalry
between JR Ewing and Cliff Barnes, for example. Cesar and Franklyn are
as pedestrian a pair of enemies as you'll find, and there's very little
of the Machiavellian plotting you might expect from the premise. More
interesting than the central plot is a subplot concerning TV reporter
Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) marrying Cesar's wealthy and
influential uncle Crassus (Jon Voight) while scheming behind his
back with Cesar's cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf). But the only
thing that makes this plot strand more engaging is how Plaza, Voight
and LaBeouf display a self-awareness lacking in Driver, Esposito
and Emmanuel's performances. Plaza vamps it up, channelling Glenda
Farrell's Torchy Blane. Voight is at his hammiest since Anaconda. LaBeouf is delightfully sleazy while cosplaying as '80s Bono. The
trio's final scene is when the movie finally sparks into life, and we're
left wishing Coppola had centred his entire film on these three
hams.
There are just enough visually interesting shots here to make for a
tasty trailer, but mostly the film has the artificial greenscreen
quality of a lesser-budgeted superhero movie. Much of Megalopolis plays like those toilet break moments in Batman movies when Bruce
Wayne has a conversation with someone about city planning. It's as
though Coppola got the rights to Gotham but not to any DC characters.
It's hard to care about a metropolis when it looks so fake, so the
looming threat of a falling Russian satellite proves ultimately
weightless, a subplot that has very little bearing on the overall
story.
Megalopolis is the sort of overstuffed, incessantly busy narrative that
almost always results in epic failure. It's like Spielberg's 1941 except most of the laughs here are unintentional. It resembles
Baz Luhrman at his most obnoxious, but with less musical numbers.
There's very little plot to get through here, which makes its coked-up
pacing all the more baffling. Coppola never lets a scene play out long
enough for it to have any impact. He's constantly dragging us away from
his movie like a real estate agent anxiously rushing a client through a
crumbling mansion. The few times the movie does relax it's so we can
hear some eye-rolling dialogue of the "here's a quote from the last book
I read" variety. A closing speech by Cesar would be torn up by Neil
Breen for being too on-the-nose. The only way to save this movie might
have been to make all the characters bar Driver's Cesar talking apes, or
make everyone a muppet (Muppetopolis?) save for Esposito's Franklyn. To
paraphrase Harrison Ford's thoughts on George Lucas's dialogue, you can
write this shit but you sure can't have it performed by humans.
Megalopolis is on UK/ROI
VOD now.
