Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

The most talked about moment in Megalopolis is surely what Lionsgate has dubbed the “Immersive Experience”, where someone (probably some poor theater employee) walks in front of the screen and engages in a Q and A with Adam Driver’s character, Cesar Catalina. This direct dialogue with the audience is indicative not just of the film’s galaxy-brained ambition, but also the sincerity of Coppola’s ideas. That those ideas basically amount to needing “a GREAT DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE!” is less important than the fact that Megalopolis, which Francis Ford Coppola self-financed by merging two of his wineries, is a major artist packing everything he possibly can into an idiosyncratic diaristic monument of a film.

Despite this romantic description, Megalopolis isn’t actually as grandiose as it sounds. Instead, its shifting between registers of irony and sincerity, of incredible beauty and shoddy cable-TV aesthetics, of past and present, is genuinely weird. It’s a one-of-a-kind object, but not one that’s a self-evident gorgeous extravagance, an undeniable curio that’s easily met with a response of “well, that exists”. It’s all the more unique for being less a shimmering, visionary masterpiece than a rambling run-on sentence. Set in the present day of a New York that’s been reimagined as New Rome, Megalopolis follows the construction of its titular city, a futuristic utopia made from the magical substance Megalon. The project is the brain child of Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina, who believes Megalon, and Megalopolis, will solve all of humanity’s problems. The film doesn’t track the intricacies of how the city is built. Instead it’s an opera, somewhere between Batman, Annette, and Shakespeare, following the dramas and conspiracies swirling around the imagined city.

As a film concerned with how we imagine the future, the need for all of us to alter our conceptions of space, time, and material conditions to save the world from the far right, the film is incredibly shaky. What’s more interesting, however, is the mixture of earnestness and inarticulation in each of the film’s turns. The most moving of these relates to Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, to whom the film is dedicated. Early on, we learn that Cesar was wrongly accused for the murder of his wife. He’s haunted by this loss, visiting her in a dream-world of his own creation in a beautiful sequence ripped from Vertigo. This grief, which first appears as a drug and alcohol problem but quickly mutates into a realization that Cesar will soon join his wife, animates Megalopolis’ political urgency (in case the threat of fascism weren’t clear enough, the film includes “Make Rome Great Again” signage).

In many ways, Megalopolis is a film of succession, of an uncertain godfather passing the world down to his children. Coppola’s onscreen avatar isn’t just the artist, Cesar, but also his bitter rival, Francis Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a man who struggles to understand his daughter’s (Nathalie Emmanuel) romance with Cesar, befuddled both by her idealism and her bisexuality. One of the most striking elements of the film is that what seems to be the central conflict (Cicero vs. Cesar’s political and familial disputes), is resolved without incident, basically with polite disagreement turned persuasion, despite various hints that something more sinister might occur. That in the end, good faith seems to unite Cicero, Cesar, and the rest of their extended family (sans Shia Lebouf’s Trumpian cousin) is one of the more heartfelt elements of the film, aided by the fact that familial loyalty is reflected in Megalopolis’ production, with Coppola’s relatives such as Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzmann, Talia Shire, and Romy Mars all part of the production. Megalopolis’ family is a good-intentioned ruling class, somehow both criminally unaware of how their actions affect the material reality of American citizens (see: passing references to police brutality, housing crisis), but also genuinely leading humanity towards collective salvation. It doesn’t really play as Coppola having his cake and eating it too because it’s clear from the start that following Megalopolis’ logic is a fool’s errand, and honestly, the contradictory naiveté feels authentic.

Incoherence, which can be generously read as productive confusion, penetrates every aspect of Megalopolis. The film’s visual textures alternate between looking like a made-for-TNT sci-fi film and a nu-age digital Batman, while occasionally approaching pure psychedelic beauty. While reaching for an undefined future, New Rome is either clearly present-day New York, a warped rendering of Ancient Rome, or that “society if…” meme. Even the dialogue switches between English, Italian, and spoken Latin, between singing and speech, between Shakespearean verse and contemporary vernacular. How does one square the beautiful three-panel montages with Jon Voight hiding a bow and arrow as his boner? Megalopolis is its scramble towards its messily drawn call for love, hope, and patriotism. Whether that scrambling is ineffably moving in both desperation and disarming sincerity, or an unmitigated disaster is hard to say. The fact that I landed at a measured appreciation is irrelevant. More than any other film this year, it’s one to go see and decide for yourself.