Joyce Glasser reviews Megalopolis (September 27, 2024) Cert 15, 138 mins.
If you’ve seen American Graffiti, The Conversation, The Godfather (Part I and II) and Apocalypse Now, you’ll know that five-time Academy award winning director Francis Ford Coppola has had something important to say about the state of the USA, if not humanity. And in these films, at least, he says it emphatically well.
Judging by some of the ideas floating around in the 85-year-old writer-directors latest allegorical extravaganza, Megalopolis, he had something important, even prescient, to say on the eve of the US presidential election. But Coppola has been developing Megalopolis for so long that what might have been a story with a coherent, cohesive theme, has been dissipated.
The resulting wild and often arresting visual spectacle is never boring and Coppola’s employment of older A list actors is commendable. It’s a shame then that you struggle to believe in their characters as Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire are slotted into woefully underwritten roles.
The film is set not so much in a futuristic New York City, called New Rome, as in a present day alternate universe. America is a Republic with a lot in common with ancient Rome including nepotism political disunity and upheaval, familicide, gladiatorial entertainment, and clothing. More on ancient Rome later.
Adam Driver – who brings an air of confidence, if not arrogance, to his character – stars as superstar architect Cesar Catilina, who blows up housing stock to make way for his new city plan. A bit like NYC’s controversial urban planner Robert Moses, he is opposed by conservationists and proponents of solid, practical, social housing.
And Cesar has as much clout as Moses, not only as head of the Design Authority, but as a Nobel Prize winner for his invention of Megalon. Megalon is a “bio-adaptive” building material that is designed to grow with the city and its inhabitants. It’s all very sketchy.
Oh, and Cesar also has the ability to stop time. This superhero gift, you’d think, merits a sci-fi movie of its own. And the time-stopping here is so incidental that it seems to be a remnant of another movie.
Opposing Cesar’s idealistic, revolutionary plan is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) a landlord himself with a vested interest in the status quo. When a Soviet satellite falls, intentionally or not, out of orbit over New Rome, more buildings are destroyed and Cesar starts to build his city, ignoring Cicero.
While we don’t see kitchens and living-rooms blossoming, bedroom politics play a role here. Realising Cesar is not going to lavish jewels or much attention on her, Cesar’s power hungry mistress, Wow Platinum, (Aubrey Plaza) targets Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), the wealthy CEO of a bank. Their society wedding is the occasion for gladiatorial entertainment, netless trapeze acts and a song by virginal pop-star named Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal).
When in Rome, they say, and Mary Beard has prepared us to expect nasty family infighting from the ruling elite. When Cesar’s cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) crashes the reception to discredit Cesar with a fake video showing Vesta in bed with the architect, Vesta’s image is shattered and Cesar is arrested. He is later released, which is lucky, as he is now dating the Mayor’s beautiful daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) who will soon announce – to her father’s horror – that she is pregnant.
When even an assassination attempt does not stop Cesar, the rabble-rousing trouble maker Clodio stirs up the crowd with fascist rhetoric. Wow Platinum, frustrated by her pre-nup with Crassus, seduces Clodio to do her bidding with bloody consequences.
So we have Greed, Lust, Infidelity, Ambition, Corruption, Murder, Infidelity and Love, but these primarily abstract nouns do not a movie make, and Megalopolis did not set out to be a morality play. It seems to have been conceived as an allegory drawing comparisons between the decline of the Roman Empire and the current decadence and self-destruction of the USA if not the western world.
Few could argue with that premise. But Coppola has stated many times that the concept of the film was The Catilinarian conspiracy, an attempted coup d’état by Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) to overthrow the elected Roman consuls of 63 BC.
One of the councils was Marcus Tullius Cicero and citizen Marcus Licinius Crassus’s surviving letters corroborate the conspiracy, which may have involved land reform.
Frustrated when the voters shunned him at elections, Catilina, posing as a populist, assembled an army of malcontents (as Clodio, not Cesar does in the film) to assume control of the state. Eventually Catilina loses and is killed in the fighting.
Only some Roman names survive this concept. If ancient Rome’s Catilina’s sour grapes at not getting elected sounds like a recent American Presidential candidate we all know, you could say Coppola’s concept was prophetic. The trouble is that the movie’s characters do not correspond to the Roman conspiracy which is not dramatised or alluded to. Instead, there’s a subplot about Cesar’s deceased wife that comes from nowhere and has little relevance to the plot, such as it is.
Dear Francis Ford Coppola, one of the greatest directors of the late 20th century, where are your brilliant, era defining ideas? Where is that taut tension, brilliant dialogue and memorable characters that we expect in your films? It’s a sad way to end a stellar career, but Mark Anthony’s words on Julius Caesar’s death are not applicable: you will be remembered for your good deeds and great achievements.