As personal and selfless as you might expect from a $120 million self-portrait that also serves as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to gamble his fortune in a more optimistic vision for the future, not because he believes he can realize that vision alone, but because history has taught him that questioning the current condition of a civilization is the only reliable hope for avoiding its ruin. Needless to say, the movie won't arrive a minute sooner.
After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola is bringing "Megalopolis" to screens at a time when his chosen medium is struggling to find a way forward, and the world around him seems to teeter on the brink of collapse. Just as in 63 BC, when an evil patrician named Catiline appealed to a coalition of malcontents in an attempt to overthrow the Republic, we are suffocated in the clutches of delusional aristocrats and vertically integrated conglomerates whose lust for power and profit is matched only by with his lack of foresight. Even with the past as a guide, we run the imminent risk of allowing the now to destroy the forever.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel
Coppola has always believed in America, but his faith is eroding by the second, and "Megalopolis" is but the boldest and most overt of his many attempts to stop time before it's too late (an effort that has informed so much of his career, from “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Bram Stoker's Dracula” to “Youth After Youth” and “Jack”). As always, he recognizes the futility of the attempt, even if his characters sometimes take a while to grasp it.
What elevates "Megalopolis" so far above those other films - even "Jack" - is how clearly the constant madness of his madness and the occasional disaster of his design serve as conduits for the entire creative spirit of his writer/director/producer/financier. Coppola may lack the imagination necessary to invent the new cinema that his new film so desperately wants to become a reality (he is not even De Palma in that sense, much less Godard), but he has always seen the need to do it better and with greater urgency. than any of his contemporaries.
With “Megalopolis,” he brings together 85 years of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clumsy, strident and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. Not only does he speak to Coppola's philosophy, he embodies it to the core. To cite one of the most acute incongruities of a script that swims in them: “When we jump into the unknown, we show that we are free.”
"Megalopolis" begins naturally with his hero, Coppola's young Adam Driver-like avatar, struggling to put his trust in that promise. His name is César Catalina, he's essentially a dark and edgy mishmash of Steve Jobs and Robert Moses, and he almost came off the roof of the Chrysler Building before being saved by his ability to stop time with a snap of his fingers. A modern, more altruistic variation on the ancient Catherine, this Caesar dreams of building a utopian “school city” on the ruins of New Rome, but this arrogant power broker seems to be suffering from a lack of faith that he can pull it off. (The character development never goes beyond what is conceptually required by Coppola's script, and even by the end of the film, it is difficult to identify many traces of human reason or emotion in Caesar or anyone else.)
Like Caesar, it might be better if we take a step back. Let's start with New Rome, which is practically downtown Atlanta disguised as a modern Manhattan that's been artificially saturated with a vanilla skyline and decorated to look like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie (with the same faux-libertine energy, and (a series of dazzling digital flourishes that also place “Megalopolis” somewhere close to Vera Drew's “The People's Joker,” the only other film so far this year that can match the unfettered visual exuberance on display here).
Coppola, and the special effects team that his nephew Jesse James Chisholm was hired to assemble after the director fired his original visual effects supervisor, attempt to complete the illusion with a variety of composite long shots that highlight the scale of the city. , but the fact that Ruby Foo's Restaurant in Times Square survived the jump to New Rome should give you a precise idea of how far this fable strays from geographical reality: not much. In other news, Madison Square Garden has naturally been reimagined as an arena coliseum.
So while it may be tempting to see this eccentric, nepotistically cloistered, and unscrupulously expensive magnum opus as the selfish work of a fading artist who has lost what's left of his ability to distinguish good ideas from bad, "Megalopolis" does it. does everything in its power to remind the audience that we share the outcome of their demented fever dream. Which is not to say that we are obligated to make this particular film a success, only that we would do well to examine the source of any hostility it may reflexively produce within us. Why does change scare us so much that we would rather lose our freedom to imagine a better world than have the possibilities that freedom allows? Marcus Aurelius said again: “The universe is change; Our life is what our thoughts make of it.”
And “Megalopolis,” at its most dazzling and audacious, pierces the screen to bridge the gap between life and thought, art and reality. It's a moment that may only exist in Cannes, in the same way that Coppola's dream of remixing "Twixt" live during a national tour failed to survive beyond his Comic-Con panel, but the impossibility of replicating it Tomorrow is no excuse. Don't celebrate it today. Like much of this film, the scene in question doesn't so much show us the future of cinema as galvanize our desire to make sure it has it.
“I will not let time take over my thoughts,” César repeats to himself like a compulsive mantra. "Artists can never lose control of time," Julia tells him. “The painters freeze it, the poets sing it, the musicians rhythmize it…” she stops. What do filmmakers do? They stop it to remind us that we can't. With the deeply moving final shot of “Megalopolis,” Coppola insists that this is all the more reason to fight for the future.
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