Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Big, Beautiful Mess

“When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free,” says trailblazing and controversial urbanist Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) in Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis. As the title itself suggests, this film has the director reflecting on his own megalomaniac tendencies—and Coppola himself certainly leaped into the unknown when he put up $120 million of his own money to finance the movie through the sale of his wine-making empire. The question, then, is whether this Catilina wine mixer sticks the landing, and whether the freedom that Coppola has granted himself translates into something interesting for his audience, too. One thing is clear: This unbridled expression—with the film’s wild kaleidoscopic montages, almost sped-up narrative progression, and bizarre performances—makes Megalopolis a perfect example of the so-called late style some older auteurs adopt (for better or worse) at the end of their careers.

Lateness is, in a way, Catilina’s chief concern—the film’s opening sequence, which was shared as a teaser a week before the Cannes Film Festival premiere, reveals that he has the ability to simply command time to stop, a power he alone seems to possess. Comparisons to the Matrix trilogy abounded on social media, but Catilina doesn’t believe that the world we experience is an illusion we need to wake up from. Instead, he wonders whether we can fix our society and whether utopia is achievable despite human nature and how far we have sunk into depravity. He has proposed a redesign of New Rome (New York, but more debauched and with more Greek sports) to make it “a city that people can dream about,” but his lofty ideals and concern for the future fail to address the very real problems that citizens are experiencing right now. The misunderstood genius also doesn’t have the support of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants only to maintain his hold on the populace and who, in his role as district attorney years prior, had blamed the death of Catilina’s wife on Catilina himself.

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Catilina’s brand of urbanism is, of course, a metaphor for Coppola’s intentions as a filmmaker—to create a work of art that stops time in its tracks, to help people by teaching them about life and how to live it well, and to bring solace to others for generations to come. But Megalopolis is instead located out of any semblance of reality and seems to unfold entirely within Coppola’s brain, a stream of over-consciousness that he’s been mulling over for decades, slowly depleting it of the energy and feeling that first accompanied it until nothing but big, dry ideas are left. This navel-gazing intellectualism becomes apparent very quickly, in one of the film’s most baffling and frustrating scenes (although there’s plenty of competition). Catilina showcases a big model of the city of his dreams during a broadcast ceremony where all his friends and foes appear to argue with him. Although the stage they’re standing on is simply square shaped, Coppola manages to lose all geographical sense through his coverage-heavy and manic editing, filming every character from every possible angle. As a result, the tone of the scene is just as fragmented and unreadable, going from Catilina’s eccentric, idealistic speech to the utterly unnecessary and unfunny remarks of Cicero’s fixer, Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman, who is sadly not given anything more interesting to do throughout the film). We get a modicum of clarity when Driver starts reciting a portion of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, with a hefty dose of irony: Catilina is declaring his determination to “bear the whips and scorns of time” and not give up so easily. It’s interesting that Coppola didn’t let him recite the last section of the speech, which includes this devastating conclusion:

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Coppola’s conscience is on override, and the pale cast of overthinking clouds his whole enterprise: So determined is he to make a timeless work that he’s lost the plot, literally and figuratively. Certain films are bad because no passion at all seems to be fueling them; others, such as this one, are filled with such fervent resolution that they burst at the seams, pushing their extravagance and ambition onto us so forcefully that the message never actually reaches us.

In a Guardian article about the making of the film published a few days ago, one crew member discussed his frustration with Coppola’s analog approach to visual effects, which apparently meant spending “literally half of a day on what could have been done in 10 minutes.” Defenders of the auteur lamented this crew member’s inability to realize how lucky they were to be experiencing a true master at work, yet it’s hard not to sympathize with this perspective when the film fails to make something grandiose (or at least coherent) out of its often impressive images. After his project launch, Catilina embarks on a drug-induced bender, supposedly because of the high pressure he’s experiencing and because he’s essentially a tortured artist, which allows Coppola to indulge in his taste for flashy colors and discombobulating effects. Driver lets his body wriggle and screams in a trance while the light on his face divides him in half and the camera swirls. The film’s visual style comes close to abstract and even experimental territory at times, yet here again, Coppola’s impulses don’t cohere into something genuinely transcendent. Instead, these loony sequences test our patience and fall back into clichés of the persecuted artist falling down the dizzying rabbit hole of his own mind.

As the director who made Al Pacino famous and who captured such beautifully subtle performances as that of Gene Hackman in The Conversation and Marlon Brando in The Godfather, to cite just a few, Coppola here seems to have told his cast only to have a little fun and try things—a non-direction if there ever was one. As someone already comfortable with his own eccentricity, Driver brings the zaniness that first made him famous in Girls, to varying but generally decent results. Aubrey Plaza almost matches him in energy and playfulness as the blond bombshell journalist Wow Platinum, Catilina’s mistress, who wants more power. Shia LaBeouf is expectedly more than able to enliven all of his scenes, improvising and interacting with other actors with his usual intensity, but the film (and probably cinema at large, considering the reports of abuse made about him) could have done without him—or at least made more of his part, the Trumpian Clodio Pulcher, who takes advantage of the citizens’ despair for his own political gain. In this story, which is arguably about whether humanity can be saved from itself, Coppola fails to truly engage with the reality of people’s misery and wickedness, and Clodio feels like a feeble attempt to be topical. Jon Voight’s turn as the banker Crassus is the most painful to watch, but the blame doesn’t lie so much in the actor’s performance as in the scatterbrained editing and mise-en-scène, with cameras pointing in every direction.

I was disappointed (if not surprised) to hear critics start booing Megalopolis as soon as the image faded to black at Cannes, especially since they should have expected that the first thing to appear next on-screen would be a dedication to Coppola’s wife, Eleanor—not only because she passed away just a few weeks ago, but also because the film’s text itself is an homage to her. Ostracized and losing faith in his ability to save the city, Catilina can no longer stop time, but things start looking up again when he meets Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s rebellious daughter, who can’t help admiring and falling for the architect. It’s in this story line that Coppola finally shows a degree of humility and sincere sentiment, albeit in a clunky fashion bordering on sappy. Like almost every other actor, Emmanuel seems to struggle to offer the kind of consistent performance that would make a difficult editing process easier, and her connection with her costar is tenuous. Still, Catilina is full of regret about his previous marriage and his own failings as a husband, and it is only thanks to Julia that he finds his spark again. Coppola’s own typically difficult character is the stuff of legends, and his wife’s dedication to him over the years is evident in her work—in particular her documentary Hearts of Darkness, on the chaotic making of Apocalypse Now—as well as in the talented children they raised together. Coppola’s focus on her contribution is inevitably moving. Together, Catilina and Julia can stop time again, and the urbanist finally understands the true secret of healthy and effective creation: “Love is an unstoppable force” that could make humanity not so terrible after all.

It’s at this juncture that Coppola employs an innovative filmmaking technique that is better enjoyed unspoiled (if you can avoid the tweets) and that seems to be an attempt to address and respond to his audience even more directly. The effect is startling and baffling; is it a genius way to connect his film to the spectator’s present? Or simply another example of Coppola’s galaxy-brained idea of cinema as a “perfect school” where audiences can learn important life lessons from the timeless works left behind by wise filmmakers? We certainly do learn a thing or two, lecture-style, when Julia defends her lover to Cicero by reciting not one, not two, but three Marcus Aurelius quotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s warning that “the end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization,” implicit in the film up to that point, is also spelled out directly.

Through this amalgamation of famous sayings rich in meaning, Coppola tries to transcend his own story and reach a higher ground, a realm way beyond that of his characters and their trials and tribulations. Ultimately, these big statements about the nature and potential of humanity amount only to the spiritual but surprisingly banal conclusion that love is the only way forward. Through a rapid montage in which all of Catilina’s problems suddenly vanish, he and Julia finally create their magnum opus, and the architect is proved right. The same can’t be said of Coppola.

However impressive, the filmmaker’s boldness and ambition in addressing eternal themes are undercut by his own lack of judgment. Catilina concludes that a utopia is attained not by finding perfect solutions, but by asking the right questions—but has Coppola done so himself? After all, isn’t true courage the willingness to examine your impulses, however powerful they may be, and restrain them when necessary? Isn’t it braver to allow for feedback and impose certain rules on yourself (from practical ones, such as the 180-degree rule, to more artistic ones), rather than to push your scattered thoughts and images onto the spectator with an implausible and sudden resolution in which your protagonist—and thus yourself—comes out a hero? One only wishes, to quote again from Hamlet, that there was method in Coppola’s madness.

Manuela Lazic is a French writer based in London who primarily covers film.