Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Monument to the Impermanent Edifice of Ego

Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating Megalopolis is a dizzying portrayal of excess and egotism. Fitting for a Roman epic set in modern America, as the auteur describes it, but not quite as much fun as it sounds. Coppola throws everything he’s got at the screen but, alas, almost nothing sticks.

The film is named for the radiant and virtuous city within a city imagined by Manhattan architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). A legend in his own mind, Cesar cavalierly blows up low-income housing to make way for his development, indifferent to the people displaced by his grand vision.

Naturally, Cesar lives and works in a stunning studio at the tippy top of a shimmering skyscraper, close to heaven with his head in the clouds. Coppola seems unaware that we plebeians don’t see Cesar as a living god in silken threads but as a spoiled, out-of-touch tech billionaire.

Cesar isn’t a villain to Coppola but an artist, a utopian, a creator of worlds, a futurist, a dreamer. Cesar represents the best of humanity — creativity — and thus must be allowed his indulgences, missteps and flaws. To state the blindingly obvious, Coppola identifies with Cesar.

The Philistines in the crowd may jeer Coppola’s self-serving and self-serious framing of his own life’s work. Especially when contrasted with the witty self-deprecation with which Federico Fellini depicted the foibles of artists.

I find it both admirable (what vitality and persistence!) and sad (what is there to prove?) that the writer-director of a quartet of certified masterpieces (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now) is compelled some 50 years later and at this point in his life to spend $120 million of his own money to defend or declare that he is not merely a filmmaker of commercial movies but an artist.

Coppola’s rejoinder, no doubt, is that he has something to say about the present moment in America. In Megalopolis, compromised politicians (Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero) joined with mega-wealthy fossils (Jon Voight as Hamilton Crassus III) are helpless to solve problems while cynical fascist wannabes gain supporters among the disenfranchised masses.

Borrowing from Shakespeare, Herman Hesse and 20th-century New York urban planner Robert Moses, Coppola has devised a film of Big Ideas that lands with a chorus of thuds. For all the pomp and pretense, the plot is a rehash of the old tropes of ambition, greed, power and betrayal with scarcely a fresh or moving insight into human nature.

Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt if we care about the characters strutting and fretting upon the stage. Without exception, we don’t. The platitudes spilling from Cesar’s mouth might seem less pretentious if they were delivered by an actor who exuded warmth and naturalism. The women in the film are astonishingly one-dimensional, either conniving (Aubrey Plaza as TV reporter Wow Platinum) or loyal (Nathalie Emmanuel as the mayor’s daughter who falls for Cesar).

In lieu of flesh-and-blood characters and compelling drama, Coppola overwhelms us with a visual phantasmagoria of imagery and techniques. Visual effects, split screens, animation, voiceover narration by Laurence Fishburne (relegated to Cesar’s driver/bodyguard and erstwhile historian Fundi Romaine) — the saving grace of Megalopolis is that, in the time-honored parlance of Hollywood, all the money is up on the screen.

In the most lavish example, all the characters convene at Madison Square Garden for a benefit fundraiser. The bread and circuses in this scene, which goes on for at least 15 minutes, features trapeze artists and wrestling gladiators as well as the requisite champagne and coke. Amid the orchestrated chaos, there is a chariot race.

Echoes of ancient Rome! Homage to Ben-Hur! Contemplate the expense! For two shots amounting to 10 seconds of screen time, I kid you not.

Coppola treats it like a throwaway bit, and maybe that’s his point: Money and human life are insignificant to the powerful and terminally decadent. Unfortunately, Megalopolis is an unceasing barrage of lavishly produced, stunningly costumed, beautifully photographed moments that leave fleeting, flickering impressions.

Perhaps Coppola has become impatient (like late-career Orson Welles) with the building-block shoot-and-edit requirements of narrative storytelling, or enamored with the grandiosity of philosophy and the ephemerality of poetry (like Terrence Malick). The experience of watching Megalopolis is less that of an engrossing, inexorable story than an overlong music video.

In the course of his career, Coppola has pushed and stretched the narrative form. He successfully introduced operatic emotion into a pulp crime yarn (The Godfather). He took a literary header in Apocalypse Now with Brando’s speechifying from the pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He shot the Las Vegas-set romance One From the Heart on a soundstage in an effort to confront and transcend the artifice of filmed entertainment.

The filmmaking in Megalopolis aspires to be innovative, which is a remarkable impulse in an octogenarian filmmaker. The film has energy and even beauty. If it is Coppola’s grand finale, it’s not a terrible note to end on. It’s just a shame that his ambition, and perhaps his ego, didn’t result in a pithier, punchier saga for Cesar Catalina.

‘Megalopolis’ opens Friday, Sept. 27, 2024.