The arrival of Megalopolis at the Cannes Film Festival has felt something like watching a comet hurtle towards the Earth while standing helpless to do anything about it. In a town where the best in world cinema congregates for two weeks a year, no one wants to talk about anything but Francis Ford Coppola’s anticipated passion project, if only because everyone is expecting the worst. Reports from early screenings have been bad, production was reported to be a trainwreck. But this is the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now (and, well, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Twixt), anything can happen.
So as the lights turned on at the press screening, the audience erupted into smatterings of “what the fuck”, followed by scattered applause and light boos. Outside the doors, journalists immediately hounded attendees for their opinions. Around the Croisette, you couldn’t walk two steps without someone accosting you with one film, and one film alone, on their lips. And for good reason — trying to make sense of a film as batshit as Megalopolis is a futile endeavour.
Coppola turns the fall of ancient Rome into a fable about the perils of American capitalistic greed. Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a celebrity architect with aspirations to build a utopia in the ruins of Coppola’s uncanny facsimile of New York City, here called New Rome, the battleground for war between Catilina, Mayor Frankyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), head of the national bank. There’s also a sex scandal, an attempted assassination and armageddon, filtered through periodic kaleidoscope vignettes and dodgy CGI. It’s confounding.
Many critics have dismissed Megalopolis as an unmitigated disaster, but I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. Megalopolis is a mess, certainly. The cast all deliver performances one degree removed from reality, speaking in the archaic word salad of a uni student trying to make their essays sound smarter by filtering every word through thesaurus.com. There’s inspirational jumble like “What is courage but the beginning of a vital conversation?” and a conversation spoken in Latin. At one point, Adam Driver performs the entire “to be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet to a crowd that doesn’t question it. Why? Why not?
For a cautionary tale about unfettered ambition and greed going unchecked, perhaps Coppola, who spent $120 million of his own money on the film, is displaying a little self-awareness. News from Wall Street is delivered in the cadence of TMZ. “I want to fuck you so bad, Auntie Wow” is a line that exists. Megalopolis is funny when it’s trying to be and equally as funny when it’s not. Why else would he cast Aubrey Plaza, with her deadpan aggression as a provocateur/financial news host/dominatrix? Or SNL’s Chloe Fineman, whose role ostensibly is one of the friends of the mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), but more resembles set dressing in a bodycon dress? Or Romy Mars, Coppola’s granddaughter and the true visionary of the family dynasty?
Coppola stuffs two dozen lofty ideas in and arranges his half-baked ideas into something somewhat coherent, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. But as unrelentingly absurd as Megalopolis is, it is a singular piece of art, throwing every single rule out of the window to forge something entirely new. When a man walked on stage to speak to Adam Driver through the screen, any loose grasp on decorum was lost. There were gasps, bewildered conversation, and phones out (in Cannes no less!) to capture the maddening work of a director attempting something that has never been done before. It’s history being written in real-time.
Very little of Megalopolis makes sense, but it’s nonetheless fascinating to watch the story of a man playing god against all odds and witness Coppola attempt the very same. It is ludicrous and awe-inspiring. Most importantly, it is never boring.
