C&C 55: I Wasn’t Going to Write About Megalopolis

But Francis Coppola’s movie won’t leave me be

It was never going to be a hot take, and by now it’s ice cold, but here you go: anybody who gives a damn about cinema needs to see Megalopolis on the big screen. Check your local showtimes and you’ll likely see that’s impossible because, in the wake of the movie’s disastrous opening, it’s already vanished from theaters. As I said, I’m not a reliable resource for hot takes. What follows is basically a pie left to cool on a windowsill for too long.

During that first ill-fated week, I ponied up for a ticket to Megalopolis—even though it was, so help me, subtitled A Fable—for multiple reasons. After the Godfather films and The Conversation, I owe Francis Ford Coppola. In a sterile, corporate entertainment environment, any wild folly should be supported. And last year, I read Sam Wasson’s remarkable The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023), recounting Coppola’s lifelong campaign to create an organic, collaborative artistic environment. Wasson posited Megalopolis, which Coppola financed entirely himself, as the filmmaker’s final, valiant attempt at achieving it. Fittingly, its subject is how we can go about building a better world.

Watching the movie, I was buffeted by two contradictory thoughts. The first: Coppola should have made this for TV. The ten-hour limited series treatment would allow ample time to explore the world of New Rome, a futuristic New York City that’s also steeped in antiquity, as well as a chance for Coppola to flesh out plot threads and entire characters that feel sketchy in the film’s 138-minute running time. Bringing me to the contrasting notion that flared up on occasion, one that I begrudgingly admit here: If I were watching this at home, I’d have turned it off already.

It’s often forgotten that Coppola’s first Academy Award nomination and win were for a movie he wrote but didn’t direct, Patton (1970). Coppola has been vocal about how much he learned in the writing of that biopic from his mentor William Bowers, a veteran who came up through the studio system penning genre pictures, westerns like The Gunfighter (1950) and noirs including the crackerjack Cry Danger (1951). Bowers’s influence—swift yet vivid characterization, memorable dialogue—is all over Patton and Coppola’s other lauded scripts, and lacking here. (For starters, Bowers would never put huge blocks of text onscreen that are simultaneously intoned by Laurence Fishburne.) Megalopolis is a film of ideas, myriad ideas, too many of them, some scarcely dramatized.

The villains of the piece fare best, because they have recognizable human motives. You need someone undaunted to play a character named Wow Platinum, and Aubrey Plaza is that someone. Coppola told Shia LaBeouf not to be afraid to go over the top, shouting this instruction at Shia’s back because the actor was already sprinting full tilt toward the summit, and in heels. Every scene they’re in crackles, and that’s before they team up. Adam Driver is asked to do the impossible, playing Cesar Catilina, a master builder who is both imperious and a man of the people, willing to impose a more equitable society on the hoi polloi. Also, maybe he murdered his wife? (One of those underdeveloped plot threads I mentioned that could have used its own episode.) Still, he damn near pulls it off. More than once I asked, “Wait, is Coppola making Robert Moses the good guy? Because that wasn’t my takeaway from The Power Broker.” Then I remembered that the movie is also The Fountainhead and the scales balanced. Nathalie Emmanuel uncorked a glorious outer-borough accent—I grinned hugely at the way she said “Statue of Liberty”—that gave me all the backstory I needed for her character’s father and Cesar’s nemesis, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).

I found myself frequently staring slack-jawed at this spectacle, wondering who this movie was for. It would seem to be aimed at a younger audience, given that it wrestles with the question of where civilization goes from here. But what will those viewers make of the undigested chunks of Shakespeare in the dialogue, or the framework based on Roman history? Weirdly, they’d have no problem with the movie’s most outlandish element, Cesar’s invention of the all-purpose wonder material Megalon, which wouldn’t be out of place in the Marvel universe.

The answer was staring me in the face. Francis Coppola made Megalopolis for himself, and we’re guests at the party. He’s famously been working on it for over forty years, and as the movie barrels along it can seem like he thinks we’re familiar with all of his previous drafts as he excitedly empties out his toy chest, some of the dolls broken, some gewgaws inexplicable, others capable of taking your breath away.

That’s what I’ll remember about the movie, aside from the miracle of its existence: the generosity of Coppola’s optimistic fantasia. Some scenes are going to stay with me. A romantic rapprochement on girders suspended over the city like a Calder sculpture. A sprawling bread-and-circuses set piece complete with Taylor Swift-style vestal virgin. A clutch of images, like a hand seizing the moon, that could have come from the silent era. I still don’t know what Megalopolis is, or if it succeeds. I only know that I’m glad I gave myself over to it, longueurs and all.

As Wasson makes clear in The Path to Paradise, the closest corollary to Megalopolis in Coppola’s filmography is the quasi-musical One from the Heart (1982), the failure of which doomed Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. I had never seen the film, but when the 2024 restored recut, dubbed One from the Heart: Reprise, appeared on The Criterion Channel, I watched it to prepare for Megalopolis.

The film has received a critical reappraisal, and perhaps my opinion will change in a few decades. But Coppola’s attempt to tell a spare, working-class romantic story—Raymond Carver in Las Vegas—is so abstract that it ultimately feels like one of those cognitive tests Donald Trump brags about acing: Man, Woman, Love, Music. The songs, by Tom Waits, are too on the nose, and the choice to have them performed not by the characters but by Waits and Crystal Gayle in a kind of voiceover blunts their effectiveness further; it occurred to me that Frederic Forrest may do more singing in The Conversation than he does here. The movie only really comes to life during an extended dance sequence with a magnificent Teri Garr—who makes such a vivid impression in her single scene as Harry Caul’s mistress in The Conversation and who, lest we forget, began her career go-going in Elvis Presley movies—and Raul Julia. And Harry Dean Stanton is fun as an addled lothario. Still, a love story shouldn’t end with you thinking the lead couple would be better off breaking up.