Francis Ford Coppola sold off one of his wine companies in order to secure a $120 million line of credit to finance his dream project “Megalopolis.”
With all great respect: You were better off with the Pinot Noir, sir.
Coppola has been developing “Megalopolis” for so long that Paul Newman was once involved in a table read and Coppola reportedly shot 30 hours of second-unit footage nearly a quarter-century ago, but after some 40 years of tinkering and the aforementioned $120 mil, the end result is 2 hours and 18 minutes of bombastic, overwrought, tedious and campy gibberish.
It has been said that medium-talent filmmakers aren’t inventive or bold enough to make bad films — that it takes a visionary to reach so high and crash and burn in truly spectacular fashion. Alas, the man who has gifted us with some of the greatest works in cinema history has provided us with evidence backing up this theory. From the unconvincing CGI to the meandering and convoluted storyline to the preachy messaging to the unfortunately hammy performances, “Megalopolis” is a most foul and unpleasant journey.
“Megalopolis” is partly inspired by the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 B.C. and is set in a version of New York City called New Rome and features characters reciting Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “The Tempest,” and also contains a sci-fi element and clear parallels to modern-day American troubles. In other words, it’s all over the place.
Adam Driver, sporting a bowl haircut that makes him look like a member of the Beatles parody band the Rutles and gesticulating wildly throughout, plays the architect and urban planner Cesar Catilina, who is also something of a sex symbol and is prone to heavy partying. Cesar is chairman of the Design Authority in New Rome and has won a Nobel Prize for developing a revolutionary, environmentally friendly, cellular-level building material called Megalon, and he wants to use it to rebuild the city and create a utopian metropolis for the people.
His sworn enemy is the old-school conservative Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is backed by cronies such as the fixer Nus Berman (Dustin Hoffman), who looks like he stepped out of a Joel Schumacher “Batman” movie and says the only way to restore New Rome to greatness is “concrete, concrete, concrete and steel, steel, steel.”
We’re just getting warmed up. Turns out Frank once unsuccessfully prosecuted Cesar for the murder of Cesar’s wife (Haley Sims), who sometimes appears to Cesar as some sort of vision or holograph. Also, Cesar’s uncle is the obscenely wealthy, disturbingly horny, feeble and Trump-like Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who controls the city’s purse strings. Then there’s the scheming Clodio (Shia LeBeouf, in an irritatingly showy performance), who is Hamilton’s son and has hated his cousin Cesar since they were kids.
Oh, and Cesar breaks up with Aubrey Plaza’s grandstanding financial TV reporter, who is named Wow Platinum, I kid you not, and strikes up a romance with Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is the mayor’s daughter, and the jealous and crazy Wow seduces craggy and creepy old Hamilton so she can take control of his banks and destroy Cesar in the process.
All of this soap-opera stuff is set against the backdrop of a city that has a kind of Greco-Roman motif mixed with a 1980s-era Studio 54 vibe combined with real-world New York landmarks including the Chrysler Building, which houses Cesar’s offices.
We learn early on that Cesar has the ability to stop time on command, but that’s never played up as more than a parlor trick. “Metropolis” also indulges in bizarre gimmicks, e.g. a moment when the film is literally stopped, the lights go on, and a live actor poses a question to Cesar, who answers onscreen. (It remains to be seen if this stunt will play out in every single theatrical screening.)
And in one of the most insane sequences I’ve ever witnessed, Madison Square Garden is reimagined as a modern-day Colosseum where a teen pop star called Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal) performs a musical number accompanied by multiple holographic images of herself while scads of leering rich men in the crowd promise to contribute thousands and then millions of dollars to support her virginity pledge.
“Megalopolis” is a cautionary tale about the current state of American politics, and a clarion call for humankind to embrace the better angels of our nature and build a better world. There’s no doubting the sincerity of Francis Ford Coppola, but if this is the last film for the 85-year-old lion, the best tribute we can give him is to just forget about it and celebrate the treasures he has given us in the past.