Megalopolis
Real Art Ways
Hartford
Oct. 15, 2024
Sometimes you need someone to tell you no.
Major studios spent years telling Francis Ford Coppola “no” when he tried to get Megalopolis made. The movie spent decades in development hell before Coppola spent $120 million of his own money to make it, financed by his winemaking business.
The production of the film is a useful parallel to the film itself, in which an anointed genius tries to upend the status quo and show that he was right all along. Unlike the movie though, Coppola’s fairy tale does not have a happy ending.
Megalopolis is clearly a labor of love, but it’s also a labor to watch.
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, an artist/architect who seeks to usher in a new age through the construction of an urbanist utopia he calls Megalopolis, using an ill-defined material he invented called megalon. Opposing him is Giancarlo Esposito’s Franklyn Cicero, the mayor of New Rome who proposes to build a casino instead. The two battle metaphorically until a disaster that destroys much of the city presents an opportunity for the two of them to come together.
The film features a star-studded cast including Nathalie Emmanuel as Cicero’s daughter/Catalina’s love interest Julia Cicero, Aubrey Plaza as TV reporter and scheming social climber Wow Platinum, Jon Voight as Catalina’s absurdly rich uncle Hamilton Crassus, and an unforgivably underutilized Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine, the film’s narrator.
The standout of the cast though is Shia LaBeouf as the true villain of the film, Clodio Pulcher. LaBeouf embodies the decadence and cruelty of Coppola’s vision of a modern Rome without devolving into mustache-twirling vaudeville. I enjoy LaBeouf’s turn as a villain far more than I’ve liked his attempts at being a hero, and I hope this is indicative of more nuanced and ambiguous roles in his future.
Unfortunately, the great work of the cast is buried under Coppola’s heavy-handed and at times nonsensical script. Coppola spends too much time recreating the debauchery of the late Roman empire, complete with virgin performances and crumbling colossuses symbolizing the fall. Coppola reportedly took an experimental approach to the project, allowing the cast to improvise and rewrite scenes on the fly, with him adding in his own last-minute changes.
This is where Coppola needed someone to tell him no. I know that the studio system crushes individuality, saps creativity and churns out mediocre film after mediocre film in constant pursuit of a greater payday. But they also hire editors and give notes and feedback on projects, and Megalopolis desperately needed someone to tell Coppola that not everything he was trying to do would work.
I know that Coppola spent almost 50 years dreaming of this movie. Those long-held dreams are the most creatively dangerous projects precisely because they’ve had so long to germinate and take on dimensions that exceed anything that a person can reasonably accomplish. The idea grew into a literal megalopolis in Coppola’s mind, and it was always going to be impossible to translate that vision to the screen. Someone needed to be standing over his shoulder to tell him to reign it in.
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