Megalopolis: An Entertaining Mess
Bad films fall into several different categories. Some are funny, poorly made on a technical level but entertaining to laugh at with your friends. Some are borderline unwatchable, boring, or offensive along with being low quality. The rare bad film falls into a third category, where after viewing it it causes you to question what the binary of “good” and “bad” films even means. How do you measure quality? How do you reconcile your personal enjoyment with critical evaluation of the final product? Is it possible for something to simultaneously be the worst and best movie you’ve ever seen? This is what was running through my head after watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
Megalopolis was a long time coming. Coppola began developing it in the 1980s, loosely inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy. The Catilinarian conspiracy was an incident in 63 BCE in which Roman politician Lucius Sirgius Catiline attempted to violently overthrow the Roman state after losing a consular election to his political rival, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Coppola was intrigued by this story and decided to reimagine it in a modern context, an alternate version of the United States where New York City is culturally identical to Ancient Rome. He spent decades refining the story, but struggled to get it made. Development and pre-production were halted many times due to a lack of funds and his other projects getting in the way.
Finally, putting aside any misgivings and setbacks he had experienced over the years, Coppola boldly declared he was finally going to make Megalopolis in 2019, fully self-financing the project. There was a sense of gravity in the months leading up to the film's release, both because of the film’s extensive development process, and how it relates to Francis Ford Coppola’s legacy. While Coppola has not announced his retirement, it is very likely that Megalopolis will be his final film, being that the director is 85 and, prior to Megalopolis, had not made a film in over a decade. Final films are a weighty subject amongst directors, especially ones as respected as Coppola. Fellow behemoth director Quentin Tarantino has gone on record saying that he only plans on making ten films in his lifetime in order to maintain his legacy and not end his career with something he’s unhappy with. All in all, there was a lot riding on Megalopolis, and the result was…..mixed.
Megalopolis follows Caesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver, a famed architect who just won a Nobel Prize for the invention of Megalon, a seemingly magical building material that defies the laws of time and space. He wants to use the Megalon to build “Megalopolis,” a perfect, utopian city. He attempts to realize his vision while experiencing sabotage and pushback from Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, the conservative mayor of the city. It is a war between realists and dreamers, with Coppola firmly on the side of the dreamers. Much of the film feels like it comes from an autobiographical place, the idealistic creative who will do whatever it takes to realize his magnum opus even when it seems like the whole world is against him. Driver’s performance works well for the character and his larger-than-life sensibilities, but the real stand out of the film is Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, (yes, that is the character’s real name,) a power-hungry journalist and Catalina’s former mistress. Plaza is hilarious as always and brings some much-needed levity to many of Driver’s overly serious scenes. The film was surprisingly funny, although it was often unclear whether certain scenes were meant to be laughed at. The characters all talk in their own bizarre lexicon as if they’re aliens who just learned how to speak, and many ridiculous lines are recited with absurd amounts of gravitas.
However, despite many entertaining moments, the main flaw of the film is that it’s overstuffed. There are new plotlines and characters introduced every few minutes, and none of them are given the time or weight they deserve. There’s a sex scandal, a conspiracy about a dead wife, and a Soviet satellite that crashes into the city, to name a few, all with enough story potential to be the central plot of their own movie. Yet all of these potentially interesting plotlines get resolved within ten minutes, leaving them to feel irrelevant. It is very obvious that Coppola has been thinking about this project for over 40 years, the script is overflowing with detail and ideas that there is simply not enough time to cover. This leaves a chaotic and messy film that is difficult to follow, the viewer is not given enough time to process an idea before it speeds on to the next one.
Despite all of this, I enjoyed watching Megalopolis. It is rare to see a film so completely itself, where the director has made exactly what they wanted and not been forced to compromise their vision. I will always prefer an overly sincere, big swing of a movie over yet another soulless sequel or reboot of a beloved intellectual property. Even if Megalopolisdidn’t quite hit the mark, getting to see it on a huge screen in all of its weird, wacky glory was an experience to remember, and I would wholeheartedly recommend going to see it while you still can.