Availability: Showing widely in theaters nationally. Streaming could be as soon as October 21. Previous Lionsgate films that have not performed well at the box office (this one qualifies, though it is made for the big screen) have gone to streaming as soon as three weeks after theater release. See JustWatch here for future streamlining availability.
Egolopolis
Amid the Trump era of over-the-top negativity, utopian visions are in short supply. It’s to Francis Ford Coppola’s credit that he can imagine one, even desire it. In this self-financed $120 million sprawling oeuvre, the esteemed director of the “Godfather” saga presents a vision of the future that casts aside government bureaucrats (Ayn Rand targets) and the super-rich (Musk, Zuckerberg, their tech bros) for a fusion of technology and the organic that’s gorgeous if otherwise thin: walk-on-water-based transport, up-in-the-air pod-like structures, steel girders suspended from the sky, buildings with curves.
Coppola may have hoped this film would carve a place for him on the “brilliant man” Mount Rushmore.
The proponent of this utopia is Cesar Catilina, Adam Driver in his “deep thinker” mode, a mash-up of Frank Gehry, Robert Moses, and Rand’s Howard Roark, with a dash of Elon Musk (Cesar has invented a miracle substance for which he’s won the Nobel Prize). A collection of egoists. Coppola may have hoped this film would carve a place for him on the “brilliant man” Mount Rushmore.
Above, Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia and Adam Driver as Cesar, elevated,
in their imagined construction of a poorly imagined utopia.
Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the black Mayor of New York City, is hardly a worthy opponent, representing bland, liberal government. He objects to Cesar tearing down existing housing (ala Pruitt Igoe), but Cicero’s idea of development is—how creative!—a casino. Cesar, whose jacket says “Design Authority” on the back (implying he has some kind of governmental role), has skirted required permits to level the projects. No matter. Cesar has a concept of a plan for a utopia.
Cesar has a concept of a plan of a utopia.
Another enemy of the good is the moneyed class. Jon Voigt has a fine time with the caricatured Hamilton Crassus III, who has inherited his wealth—like some people these days—and lives up to the crass in his name. Maybe (it’s hard to tell in this kitchen-sink of ideas) Crassus also represents an indictment of capitalist philanthropy.
Instead of focusing on his utopia, Coppola turns his lens onto a Sodom-like New York City/ancient Rome. Darkness abounds.
The real bad guy should be the self-interested leader of a populist movement, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a small man doing a pale imitation of bratty Kieran Culkin in TV’s “Succession.” There’s not much time spent on Pulcher and the evils of totalitarian figures until the film nears its end, when newsclips of Hitler and Mussolini and even Ellis Island flash on the screen, the last to remind the audience of the demonization of immigrants by those claiming to represent the “people.”
The height of decadence is women kissing (!).
It’s not so much the characters—Cicero and Crassus and Clodio—that offer the antithesis to utopia, but rather decadence, an all-too-easy target, presented here as a facile combination of Sodom-like New York City in the 1990s and an ancient Rome given over to vile and senseless spectacle. Sex and drugs meet bread and circuses. Madison Square Garden becomes the Coliseum. The height of decadence is women kissing (!). “La Dolce Vita” (1960), “La Grande Bellezza” (2003)—Italian directors have done it better.
Right, Grace Vanderwaal as an updated, Busby-Berkeley-worthy vestal virgin, in a "bread and circuses" Madison Square Garden as the Coliseum.
Coppola’s obsession with time-worn visuals of sex- and drug-crazed folks (including Cesar) getting it on at the heart of depravity, the discotheque, obscures the utopia itself, which is mostly explained visually: tendrils, spirals, moving walkways like rivers, Cesar proselytizing from a cloud-like structure. Coppola uses elevation itself as utopian, evoking New York City’s High Line, Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair (though without the automobiles), and high-level thoroughfares across the country, the Buffalo Skyway among them. At the same time, there’s no non-visual explanation of how Coppola’s utopia might actually function—no cinematic equivalent, for example, of Edward Bellamy’s 19th-century best-selling, science fiction novel, Looking Backward, that inspired several utopian communities.
Left, Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum.
If you wonder when all of this takes place, well, so did we. The hard-to-keep-straight names (and their personal relationships) date from 63 BC and the Catilinarian conspiracy, whatever that is. The Sodom on display seems pure late 20th-early 21st century. There is a sense of a setting sometime in the future, when New York City is known as the Third Rome (Mussolini called his Fascist Italy the Third Empire; the first was ancient Rome, the second the Renaissance). None of that matters.
And women in this futurist vision? Get back in the bedroom. There’s the calculating mistress, named Wow Platinum—“I saw the name on my way to an audition” (Aubrey Plaza at her outrageous best) and the docile, breeding help-mate and supposed muse, Julia (a lovely Nathalie Emmanuel), who stays at the brilliant man’s side and bears his child (the future!).
There are a multitude of ideas in “Megalopolis,” foremost among them the concept of a utopia—without any development or explanation—that fosters community and makes all lives better. When reminded that most utopias haven’t worked, Cesar says the point is to stimulate discussion of alternative ways to live. Weak. Talking about…the concept…of a plan. Coppola also plays with time. With effort, one can elicit from the film the notion that our society is so trapped, so confined, so unable to see alternatives, so dominated by a joyless capitalism, that our only hope is…to stop time! Good luck with that!
In the end, the film is a stew of half-baked concepts: brilliant men, government bureaucrats, populists, immigrants behind chain-link fences, chariot races, sex on the desk, even Vestal virgins in an interminable scene out of Busby Berkeley. Coppola conceived the project in 1977, taking it up again in 1983. It’s now more than 40 years later. Anything that takes that long to develop, that gestates in and through so many eras, is bound to lack coherence, bound to reflect not a moment in time or a period or a culture, but the accumulated obsessions of its creator.
One longs for a man of Coppola’s talents—who takes on a vision and has the chops (and money) to bring everything he can to bear on it—to succeed. But this Emperor has no clothes. “Apocalypse Now” (1979) gained in critical and popular stature over time, and some predict “Megalopolis” will as well. A vain hope.
She says: Not a fan of Adam Driver
He says: An urban version of “Apocalypse Now”
Date: 2024
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Adam Driver, Jon Voigt, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Grace Vanderwaal
Runtime: 138 minutes
Country: United States (filmed in Georgia)
Language: English
Other Awards: One nomination to date: for the Palme d’Or at Cannes
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