Oceans Of Time

My thoughts on Megalopolis

Most directors of note have at least one passion project that they yearn to make but are constantly stymied in their attempts to bring them to the screen. Most of these dream projects (such as Spike Lee’s proposed Jackie Robinson biopic and David Lynch’s super-strange creation Ronnie Rocket) eventually fall by the wayside to leave cineastes to dream about what might have been but every once in a while, the dream becomes a reality and the film in question actually gets made. The only problem with this is with a lot of these long-gestating creations, you get the sense that the filmmakers spent so much time creating it in their minds that by the time they were finally able to get it in front of the cameras, they had already expended all of the energy and inspiration that they had for it. For example, for years and years, Francis Ford Coppola had talked about doing a biopic of innovative auto developer Preston Tucker and some of the ideas that he bandied about in interviews (as I recall, he had at one point contemplated doing it as a musical with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Greene) made it seem like it was going to be a truly wild trip. However, when he finally got the chance to do the film, Tucker: The Man and His Dream towards the end of the Eighties, a period of extensive tumult, the result was a fairly conventional work without any of the freakier touches that he had been hinting at over the years. Mind you, the finished film was quite good and well worth watching but those who knew of its history and what it could have been no doubt come away from it feeling a tad disappointed that all the oddball touches where nowhere to be found and that it just didn’t live up to the singular creation that they (and Coppola) had been carrying around in their minds for so long.

Now comes Megalopolis, another wildly ambitious project that Coppola first dreamed up back in 1977 and has spent the subsequent decades contemplating, considering and discussing at length ever since. After decades of preparation and a couple of false starts (he had script readings and even reportedly shot some test footage in 2001 but that iteration was abandoned when the events of 9/11, which supposedly had some discomfiting parallels with the narrative, made it untenable), Coppola has not only finally brought it to the screen but has made it perhaps the biggest gamble in a career that has repeatedly seen him putting his personal and professional reputation on the line—sometimes winning, as he did with Apocalypse Now, and sometimes rolling snake eyes, as with One from the Heart—by financing the gargantuan production himself to the tune of something in the neighborhood of $120 million acquired through the sale of one of his vineyards. For anyone with a remotely serious interest in cinema culture, the film’s release would instantly become one of the key film events of the year but even those who awaited it with uncommon eagerness and anticipation must have been wondering if another Tucker situation was about to unfold and that Coppola, perhaps mindful that he was personally footing the bill, would reign in the more audacious elements that he had been considering over the years in an effort to make it more palatable to a moviegoing audience that is, to put it mildly, not nearly as adventurous as they used to be once upon a time.

Rest assured, right from the opening images, in which we see a man teetering over the edge of the Chrysler Building and freezing time by uttering the words “Time Stop,” it is evident that Coppola has not sanded away the edge of this particular creation in order to appease the masses. This is, quite simply, one of the most batshit crazy films that I have ever seen in my life, a work that crams together so many ideas and elements—everything from political corruption to vast futuristic cityscapes to natural/man-made disasters and ukulele solos—that even the huge IMAX screen (where it truly needs to be seen) struggles to contain it all at time. This is a film so audacious and so uninterested in following the familiar patterns and templates of contemporary American cinema that it will no doubt baffle most viewers, not to mention hackier critics who will despair of trying to figure out a way to summarize its disparate range of ideas and themes into the kind of pithy quote that could turn up in an ad. (Face it, “It is the combination of Caligula and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that we never knew we needed” does not exactly leap off the page.) Even the combination of bold surrealism and pseudo-profundity that controversially made up the final passages of Apocalypse Now seem practically staid in comparison to what is on display here. Put it this way—at the screening that I attended, a fight broke out amongst some of the attendees as the end credits were rolling and since the film included an actual live element amongst the numerous coups de theatre conjured up by Coppola, I wasn’t sure for a while if it was an actual fracas or one final bit meant to subvert the humanist message on which the film concludes.

This, I hasten to add, is not a bad thing because to these eyes, Coppola is at his best as a filmmaker when he is at his wildest and most unhinged—when he indulges the showman inside of him and just goes thrillingly for broke. Yes, the Godfather films are stately and  elegant masterworks that are among the greatest and most important of films ever made. However, if I were to pick my favorite Coppola films—the ones that give me the greatest pleasure and which also dare to push the boundaries of what the cinema can accomplish—I would go with his gorgeous musical fantasy One from the Heart and his sumptuous go-for-baroque take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, projects in which he allowed his imagination to run completely wild with often-startling results. Megalopolis is uber-Coppola through and through and even though it has more than its share of borderline-embarrassing whiffs here and there—the inevitable result of swinging for the fences with every pitch—it proves to be more daring, inventive and thrillingly alive than any American film that I have seen in a long time, the kind that will stubbornly stick in the mind long after more conventionally acceptable titles have dimmed in one’s memory. Of course, your particular mileage may vary a tad, so be prepared for anything.

So what is Megalopolis anyway? Essentially, it is a film that contemplates the decline of the American empire  as we know it by creating a narrative that uses the conspiracies and controversies that log ago helped to bring down the Roman Empire as a framework to ponder whether it has reached the point of no return or if we can still salvage something of value out of the wreckage and rot that has accumulated of late. The setting for this saga is New Rome, a sort of retro-futurist take on New York City that blends the seemingly distinct features of both eras into one. (Perhaps in a reminder of how long this project has been in the works, the concept of social media is almost entirely absent.) However, some things in New Rome remain the same regardless of the era—those few who have accumulate wealth and/or political clout rule from above over the teeming masses who seem to exist only to be exploited and/or ignored by those in power. Although the elite seem comfortable enough in their gilded dissolution, there is the sense that New Rome is at a tipping point and one wrong move could reduce the entire thing to rubble.

Now back to that guy atop the Chrysler Building. This is Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), perhaps the most celebrated and reviled resident of New Rome. On the one hand, he is a notorious drugged-out bad boy who has long been a fixture of the tabloids, most infamously when he was tried and eventually acquitted for the death of his wife in a suspicious-seeming car accident years earlier. On the other, he is a brilliant, Nobel prize-winning architect/scientist—one who, as previously mentioned, can apparently control time and space—whose most spectacular innovation is a miraculous new building material dubbed Megalon. Now he plans on his most spectacular move to date—having been designated Design Authority by the federal government, he has begun to embark on a new building project, dubbed Megalopolis, that finds him razing chunks of the city in order to rebuild it into a Utopian ideal that will benefit all for centuries to come.

This puts him directly into the cross-hairs of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the increasingly unpopular leader of New Rome who has long harbored a vendetta against Cesar (he even served as the prosecutor at his murder trial) and who is offended on an almost visceral level by virtually everything about the man and his plans, from his barely disguised sense of superiority and arrogance towards anyone he doesn’t consider to be on equal terms with him to his belief that the time, money and resources being devoted to his plans for Megalopolis—and, by extension, his ultimate legacy—could be better utilized on things like infrastructure, public works and other things that would have an immediate benefit for those who need them right now. This conflict becomes even more complicated when Cicero’s party girl daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), develops a fascination with Cesar after inexplicably being able to bear witness to his time-stopping trick that eventually blossoms into a romance with Shakespearean overtones.

Although these are the characters and conflict that make up much of the heart of Megalopolis, there is a lot more going on as the narrative sprawls with all the subtlety of a grand opera. There is Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), the oddball host of a financial cable show who has been sleeping with Cesar but is willing to do most anything in order to accumulate wealth and power for herself rather than simply reporting on others who have it. Her chief target in this regard is Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), the aging and obscenely rich plutocrat who, like so many before him, is willing to allow the cunning and ruthlessness that has made him who he is fall almost entirely by the wayside after some flirtatious banter. Meanwhile, Crassus’s loathsome grandson, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) remains a constant thorn in his family’s side while nursing avaricious plans of his own to accumulate his own power. Also popping in and out of the proceedings are Cesar’s mostly contemptuous mother (Talia Shire) and loyal factotum (Laurence Fishburne), Mayor Cicero’s bumbling aide (Jason Schwartzman) and vicious fixer, Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman). Hell, there is even an appearance from Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWall), a 16-year-old pop star whose position as New Rome’s symbol of virtuous innocence amidst all the decadence and corruption ends up being called into question in an extremely public way.

Over the course of 138 minutes, we watch as these characters—and many more—interact through the New Rome landscape that he yearns to remake. During that time, we see them become involved in familial strife, romantic engagements, naked power grabs, assassination attempts, corruption, rising tides of anger amongst the lower-ranking members of society that some try to harness and exploit for their own ends and even a potential disaster looming from above in the form of a satellite in imminent danger of crashing. Does all of this “work,” as people like myself tend to ask in reviews like these? Not by a long shot—even at quadruple the length, there would still be hardly enough time to fully develop all the themes and ideas that Coppola has tossed into the pot this time around. Most of the characters do not really speak so much as they philosophize, usually quoting at length from the legendary words of long ago. (Marcus Aurelius is quoted so much throughout the proceedings that his descendants could have potentially mounted a successful campaign for him to receive a screenplay credit alongside Coppola.) Some of the ways in which the film depicts the excesses of New Rome cannot help but look a tad ridiculous—including a literal circus for the ruling party complete with a chariot race—and just when you think that the only symbols decadence that Coppola hasn’t deployed is a Vegas-era Elvis impersonator, one turns up to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

And yet, I see so many movies that do “work”—at least in the sense of making sure that every theme and idea is spelled out at length for anyone watching to understand and every plot thread is either perfectly tied up or conspicuously left to set up a sequel—that to see one determined to march to the beat of its own drummer, as Megalopolis certainly is, makes for an undeniably refreshing change of pace. If many of Coppola’s previous epics have seen him presenting his unique visions like a maestro conducting a symphony so that all the different elements combine into a whole, he comes across here like a master chef offering his audience the world’s wildest tasting menu of flavors ranging from the obscure to the inexplicable, confident in his belief that if you don’t happen to like the tidbit being presented at the moment, another one coming up may be more to your liking. Here, there are things that don’t come off—ranging from a couple of awkward performances (although both are fine, Driver and Emmanuel can’t quite overcome the occasional blandness that befalls their characters) and story ideas that could have stood more development (such as the relationship between Cesar and his mother) to some clumsy efforts in the visual effects department—but for every element that doesn’t quite click, there are a couple that do—nice performances from much of the supporting cast, flashes of real wit and a fair spectacular visual style (thanks to the efforts of production designers Beth Mickey and Bradley Rubin and cinematographer Minari Malaimare Jr.). Unlike most filmmakers these days, Coppola is aiming high throughout—when he hits his targets, the results are spectacular and even when he misses, his errant shots still hit harder than the bullseyes from most others.

What is best about Megalopolis is that there is never any point where you can sit back and comfortably predict where the story is headed—Coppola always has a trick or two up his sleeve to keep you on your toes while watching it. Consider for example, the character of Crassus. Because he is an aging financier who fancies himself a ladies man without ever quite recognizing that they are interested less in him than in his wealth and because he is played by Jon Voight, a number of the early comments about the film have suggested that he is meant to serve as the story’s equivalent of Donald Trump. As it turns out, things are not as cut and dried in this regard because despite serving as a living embodiment of several of the seven deadly sins, Coppola has engendered the character with a sort of old school dignity and resolve that, no matter how buried it may be at times, will eventually break through the dissolution when the time arises—this is a character who is simply more interesting than Trump has ever shown himself to be in real life. Thanks to this (not to mention Voight’s impressive and often-funny performance), what could have been a one-note joke turns into one of the film’s oddest and most unexpected pleasures. (The character portrayed by LaBeouf, on the other hand, is much more in line with public perceptions of Trump—a connection made quite explicit at certain points—and this, combined with the actor’s deeply strange and often irritating, albeit in a way befitting the part, will no doubt make him the film’s most controversial aspect.)

As I said before, Megalopolis is an enormous gamble on Coppola’s part, one that risks a sizable chunk of both his fortune and his artistic credibility, and so the question remains as to whether they have ultimately paid off. From a financial standpoint, which will be the yardstick from which most people will measure it, I cannot say except to note that, barring some unexpected shift in the tastes of the masses, it probably will not be generating massive profits anytime soon. From an artistic standing, which is the one that should count, it is a knockout—a crazily ambitious combination of youthful ambition, veteran craftsmanship and sheer hubris that is most likely going to subvert the expectations of anyone who encounters it (unless they go into it with the specific hopes of seeing a $120 million dollar version of Youth Without Youth,  Coppola’s underrated previous effort into alternately heady and head-spinning territory) but which is more likely to stand the test of time—which is one of the film’s resounding themes when all is said and done—than any of the current box-office champions. At a time when borderline hacks like Todd Phillips and Zack Snyder are regularly decreed as “visionary” filmmakers—primarily due to their box-office grosses than the quality or originality of their work—Francis Coppola has returned to show them what the term really means and the result is enough to reaffirm one’s belief in the power, majesty and, most of all, the promise that the mechanics of cinema can still conjure up when wielded by someone who isn’t afraid to push them to their limits and beyond.