When you’re a director with a career as legendary as Francis Ford Coppola‘s, it buys you a lot of latitude to make mistakes. His run of films in the 70s produced four all-time classics in a row. That his career since 1979 has been a mixed bag at best therefore seems of little consequence. And despite some misses, Coppola hasn’t been without some decent films in the last few decades.
Megalopolis arrives after a 13-year hiatus from filmmaking. The film is a pet project for Coppola, something he originally conceived in 1977 and nearly shot in 1988 and again in 2001. Varying circumstances prevented the film from advancing until 2019, when Coppola finally committed himself again to shooting the film, selling off a portion of his winery to help fund it. With such a prominent and epic history, it had potential to be a new opus for the legendary director.
Unfortunately, the film does not live up to that history. To be fair to Coppola, it is a unique work and clearly the product of a specific filmmaking vision. The film has many gorgeous shots and moments and attains a new sense of individuality in the editing process. Scenes flow into each other in a unique manner as Coppola attempts a seamlessness of time.
But the rest of the film does not match the visual components. The script is a messy affair, dancing between disparate elements and rarely adding up to anything like a satisfying whole. Adam Driver stars as an architect of sorts and an intellectual leader in a futuristic form of New York, where America has adopted imagery and styles paying homage to the Roman empire. He leads an opposition to the authoritarian mayor, played by Giancarlo Esposito. The idealist battle is complicated by Driver falling in love with the mayor’s daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel).
While those broad strokes are certainly in the film, the movie’s ability to actually convey that narrative with coherency is more mixed. Aside from general ideas of freedom and power, the actual underpinnings of the thematic material aren’t very specific. When washed in with the film’s overall careening sense of storytelling, it’s hard to derive much intrigue out of the film. Coppola has stated he sees parallels between the fall of the Roman Empire and present-day America, but the film only vaguely gets at that concept, leaning more so on the admittedly neat imagery of futurist Roman fashion and set designs.
The performances are varied. Adam Driver is decent enough, though his character is lacking in depth for him to munch. Likewise for Esposito, who has a natural presence, but similarly lacks enough specificity for true acting opportunities More entertaining are the broader performances of Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf. Both play rather bombastic and larger-than-life characters, and their performances inject some needed life into the proceedings.
As stated, Megalopolis is not without its strong moments. A scene where a blend of a modern pop star and virginal temple girl gives a performance for a crowded, golden, gleaming, futuristic Roman Colosseum is captivating from a sense of set design. If only the film had been refined into something befitting its grandiose ambitions. It has a massive cast of talented players all eager to work with a filmmaking legend. Would that they were given characters in return. Megalopolis feels like the raw, unedited consciousness of Coppola, both for better and mostly for worse.
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