The Power Broker: MEGALOPOLIS

How small our imaginations and expectations have grown as a culture if we have no room to accommodate something as grand and singular—for better and for worse—as Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in over a decade, a passion project he partially financed himself, is a long, rambling, sometimes hallucinatory narrative set among the powerful in a city that’s somehow simultaneously modern New York and ancient Rome—New Rome. It’s a warped funhouse mirror of our present’s problems, and a cockeyed rearview mirror of problems we’ve had since ancient times. It’s a big swing, full of ungainly ideas and vivid juxtapositions. You’ll never quite guess what you’ll be seeing or hearing next. This has been greeted with sighs by some who seem preemptively exasperated by the financial folly the project represents. It’s so uncommercial they say; it’s so unusual and confused and messy. Others seem to greet it with schadenfreude, somehow gleeful at the supposed downfall of a once-great filmmaker. They seem to find it laughable that a master director in his mid-80s would dare try to make something bold and wild and weird—something so unmistakably his own, every idiosyncratic idea honestly intended. Indeed, this is a movie that’ll challenge conceptions of conventionality. It’s too direct and flat and ungainly to be called a mainstream narrative. It’s full of posturing and speechifying, theatrical symbolism and pulp philosophy, thudding narration and aloofly schematic emotionality. But it’s also too arch and vulgar and full of wriggly low humor and with passages of bewildering narrative density to be purely schematic art film. It refuses to fit neatly into any box other than, perhaps, this: a modern Francis Ford Coppola experience.

That din you hear when the mind fills up as the film unspools is the noise of every Coppola movie happening at once. Here’s a man who directed a little bit of everything: from a Warner Brothers musical to a 3D nudist movie, from a scrappy Corman horror picture to lavish all-star literary adaptations, from epic, luxuriously filmic period pieces to tiny, high-contrast experimental digital indies. Here’s a career that stretches the whole breadth and scope of American movies from the end of the studio system to whatever we call now. With Megalopolis, he’s giving it all back to us at once in one heterogeneous mixture. It’s the family saga of The Godfather and the special effects extravaganza of Dracula and the artifice of One from the Heart and the resourcefulness of a Dementia 13 and the self-portraiture of Tucker and the deeply personal superimpositions of Twixt and the scope of Apocalypse Now and the slapdash comedy of You’re a Big Boy Now and so on. But it’s also a mad jumble of other inspirations or comparison points—a carousing Felliniesque city of appetites; a Fritz Lang Metropolis of big, blocky metaphors; a Cecil B. DeMille epic of Golden Idols and fallen angels; a Star Wars prequel of green-screen politics and emotional constipation; a hodgepodge of anachronisms like Julie Taymor’s Titus; a Richard Kelly dystopia of disordered modernity. It’s filmed in an unreal honeyed glaze, with characters who pontificate and pronounce more than dialogue, and a storyline that’s a work of grubby modern scheming scandal and prejudice shot through with a vaguely classical sense of stakes and design.

We meet a troubled artist: an arrogant city planner (Adam Driver) who dreams of building a better future with glowing sci-fi public transit and a fabulous downtown bustling with life. That he might need to demolish areas of New Rome makes some forces upset. (He’s Robert Moses meets Hippodamus of Miletus.) Driver plays up the sanctimony and impetuous ego and the troubled, druggy, playboy image he both indulges and resists. And he’s just one of many in a powerful web of family and entanglements. His lover (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the daughter of the loathed Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). His Machiavellian party-boy cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is the troubled son of the city’s sleazy top banker (Jon Voight). Even his driver (Laurence Fishburne) has an important role: he’s a witness and a philosopher—a historian behind the wheel who narrates, sometimes in phrases chiseled in stone. There’s also a sneaky TV personality named Wow Platinum who plays up her shamelessness (Aubrey Plaza) and a pop star who plays up her purity (Grace VanderWaal). They’re all Power Brokers, trying to grow their influence and leave legacies, consolidate power, or use theirs to build a future. The figures strut like Roman politicos—with laurels and robes for Senators and Vestal Virgins alike—and appear on talk shows or in City Hall. They shout pseudo-Shakespearian speeches—and sometimes the real thing—through bullhorns and microphones and show up for chariot races in Madison Square Garden. It’s boldly iconographic, and interpersonally messy, high culture and low conflict colliding and kaleidoscoping, often enveloping and maddening.

It’s so much: political intrigue swamps idealistic agendas; a nuclear satellite is crashing to earth; a Deep Fake makes a phony scandal; there’s a new element that allows for fantastic creations; there are assassinations and uprisings and parades and concerts and telethons and press conferences—including an actual question from the audience, if you’re so lucky—and hostile takeovers and sex jokes and incestuous allusions and off-screen murder mysteries and cross-dressing and magical realism and tearful confessions and oddball line-readings and elaborate sets and gloriously fake backdrops and split-screens and montages and a score somewhere between a flourish of brass and an electronic pulse. It has computer-generated visions and concept art paintings and historical footage—like Hitler and 9/11—and flubbed lines and living statues and spinning newspaper headlines and a rewritten Pledge of Allegiance. Does it have clear politics? No, but it has the suggestion of them. Does it have philosophical perspective or insight? Sort of. All of that is a strange stew of half-formed impulses informed by its historical mishmash and a host of name-dropped oddities, like a scene in which a father and daughter bond by quoting Marcus Aurelius, or when a man arrogantly refers to his “Emersonian mind.” It certainly has style. It’s freed of the idea of telling a coherent story or legibly tracking character’s motivations or building conventional setups and payoffs. We’re left with a balance of the banal and the transcendent, as its enormous cast is full of figures who drift in and out of focus with the thematic web ultimately a justification for its metatextual melancholic hope in amorphous striving. Here’s where someone might exasperatedly ask: but is it good? Well, that’s complicated. It’s certainly nothing less than exactly what it wants to be. The result is disorienting, befuddling filmmaking. It’s not easy to recommend, but it’s hard to forget. I watched it knowing that I’ll be thinking about it forever.