MEGALOPOLIS (2024)

When a director announces that the movie he is working on is “ahead of its time,” you can guess that he’s in deep trouble, because what he’s saying is that the public won’t know enough to appreciate what he has done… —Pauline Kael, Melted Ice Cream

When film critic Kael made the above insight on Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), she was giving him the benefit of the doubt. Coming off of Apocalypse Now (1979), the hellish making of which effectively crippled his confidence and vigour as a director, Coppola would undergo a sea change in his filmmaking philosophy for the rest of his career, beginning with this vapid 1982 Las Vegas musical. From here on out, his films never cease to give off the impression that he was merely trying to put on a show, with premises that were attractive yet half-formed. The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and a whole string of even lesser stylistic exercises failed to elicit the same response or passion from the audience as did his Godfather films (1972, 1974), The Conversation (1974), or Apocalypse Now, and it’s not up for dispute which class of his works left behind them a deeper impact. Kael herself gave the following diagnosis:

If the movie [One from the Heart] is slight and evanescent, it’s because Coppola has begun to think of art as invention—he has begun to think like Edison, or Preston Tucker, the automotive-design genius whom he frequently talks about. The climax of the film comes, really, in the end title that proclaims ‘Filmed entirely on the stages of Zoetrope Studios.’ Coppola has become so entranced by technical feats that he no longer thinks like a writer or a director.

This has never been clearer than it is now, with his $120M-budgeted free verse of a “fable” that is Megalopolis. This self-financed film imbued with an airless neon texture cast onto the achromatic neoclassical marbles and columns, originated as Coppola’s fancy for transposing Ancient Rome—with its rich oeuvre of great men’s rivalries, forbidden romance, civil unrest, and political conspiracies—to modern-day New York, and by extension, America (not unlike how Apocalypse Now was an American transposition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). Part of its set design feels like an unfinished pastiche of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with the vignettes and iris shots of the silent films, alongside the gilded glamour of Art Deco. But while Lang uses the Art Deco decor caustically, polemicizing against the stylistic philosophy’s blind hope for social progress that comes out of technological innovation, Coppola uses it to highlight and endorse that very myopic optimism. His entire premise—of tearing down people’s homes and parks without their consent, promising them a futuristic upgrade and their eventual worship of his architect hero—sounds like a good farce of Ayn Rand, before you realise the inky coldness written all over that architect’s face (Coppola had plans to adapt The Fountainhead at some point, which should raise a red flag for anyone sceptical of so-called “Objectivism”).

As that architect Cesar Catalina, Adam Driver dresses in black cloaks and plays goofy to entertain the female socialites as he orates about his “Megalopolis”, to be erected in the middle of New Rome (this alternate reality’s New York City). There were little hints of himself leaking through the self-seriousness of his character, like how he turns a patty-cake with Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) into a flippant catfight, or when he does a little head isolation to taunt her when they first meet, or when he does a 180-degree turn out of nowhere as he approaches Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), his media anchor mistress who later marries his wealthy uncle Crassus (Jon Voight) for his bank money, and shares with her his “good news”. Everywhere else he’s monotonous, spiritless, and graceless—everything that he wasn’t in Frances Ha (2014) or Marriage Story (2019)—though for the most part he’s not to blame here.

Coppola isn’t known for the overcontrolling approach we find in Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Like the great theatre directors he’s inspired by, he adjusts himself to his actors’ methods, rather than the other way around. But the approach alone doesn’t make for success. Here, his characters are so poorly and thinly conceived, so enslaved by larger thematic roles and philosophical viewpoints each of them was supposed to represent, that the freedom must have left his actors muddle-headed as to how they should go about it. And in indulging himself with a carelessly edited, insipidly lit, and poorly chroma-keyed look, he seems to be viewing his work the way abstract painters and experimental filmmakers looked at theirs; but it’s a misleading outlook.

In one surreal scene at a grandiloquent party, Cesar, now under the influence, is seen engaging in an imaginary tug-of-war with Julia with a rope that’s made out of thin air. What it symbolises—their respective dilemmas between their passion for each other and their loyalty to someone else they also love, and how such dilemmas are but the results of artificial constructs and societal rules—wasn’t emotionally underpinned: there wasn’t any passion to speak of, at least not so far into their relationship, if for no other reason than the pre-romantic, mechanical dynamic between the two of them. I mean, the infantile way their lines were written, they can’t even play up a guru-groupie bond properly. It’s a textbook example of symbolism that’s devoid of any lyricism or poetry, the kind that was put there for the sake of looking mythic and cryptic, that you look up on SparkNotes.com and get tested on in a literature exam to be marked right or wrong. Where the freestyle artist he impersonates was pouring out from within their guts that their abstractions can’t be easily verbalised or rationalised, Coppola shoves down your throat his pre-formed ideas, coming in as non-sequiturs: a bloated “white elephant” of an artwork (to use Manny Farber‘s wording).

And there are A LOT of non-sequiturs, linguistically and visually. The dialogue, composed of quotes such as from Cicero’s orations against Catiline in the latter’s famous conspiracy to overthrow the establishment of the Roman Republic, as well as faux-philosophical babbles that came to Coppola’s head as he was catching up on his readings, is like a solipsistic classics scholar’s Frankenstein’s Monster; it feels all over the place, giving you the feeling that what he did was essentially throwing in quotes and ideas that manage to vaguely resemble a back-and-forth, and working his way out from there. It carries so much burden of the million ideas Coppola wants to put in that any sense of drama or humour the film might’ve had was sucked right out. Watching the actors act and talk in such fashion is like observing deep-sea creatures doing a poor Baz Luhrmannian burlesque of a Sophocles play, except you don’t even feel like laughing off it, as there’s no absurdist energy threading it through.

In his date with Wow, with all of Coppola’s hatred of the press projected onto her loathsomeness, Cesar rambles on about how there needs to be “the beginning of the discussions”; that is, about his wet dream project “Megalopolis”. When Wow interjects by berating how his “Megalopolis” means little to her, he answers by saying “conversation isn’t enough” and how “it’s the questions that lead it to the next step.” Whenever there’s a moment like this, you could feel like there’s a throbber swirling about in the middle of your brain’s pineal gland. How could he have suddenly preached in the very next instant with a straight face, how “conversation” is as “urgent” to us as “air and water”, if all we’ve seen of the people’s reactions and “conversations” is their anger at their homes being torn down? Is the film so excessively conscious of its director’s self-absorption that it’s shitting itself? Or is its stupidity stemming from its lack of a consciousness at all? If it was going for self-conscious camp, then how is it so unconsciously drab and insufferable?

Perhaps Coppola was seeking a deliberately absurd, dreamlike quality in the dialogue design we see in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) or Querelle (1982): using the appearance of preconscious romanticism, that one may mistake for plain naivety, to deal with unmistakably self-conscious, modern subjects. If we’re to be infected by such hypnotism, however, then why couldn’t Coppola replicate that same dreaminess here the way he could, even if not wholly, in Rumble Fish and Dracula? It’s amazing how deep in their own world an artist can lose themselves. In one interview, Coppola boasted about how no one thinks that Megalopolis is boring… I can’t begin to imagine how many moviegoers are going to laugh behind his back hearing that.

Yet you can already guess how “cinephiles” are ready to like this film before they’ve even seen it. They remind themselves how the critics had got it “wrong” about The Shining (1980) and The Thing (1982), and how the flopping reputation surrounding Coppola’s latest epic may be but a mirage of snobbish nearsightedness, because you see, for men of Coppola’s genius—or for that matter, David Lynch’s, Kubrick’s, Martin Scorsese’s, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s—-you must adapt to their frequency and transpose yourself to the musical key they’re in, to be able to appreciate their art.

They have no duty to make art specifically for you, so you must try at it from their perspectives. Analysis, then, should begin from the assumption that the auteur knows what he’s doing, and that he has the taste and the intelligence to succeed at what he’s doing, so no matter if you can’t catch his drift: you’re just not up to it, so come back anytime to revisit! Experience contrary to critical and popular consensus, it follows, is likely invalid and missing the point, for if the viewers were expecting something different from the one who’s done The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, they need to get real. True, it may be that if Megalopolis was the work of someone else not worthy of the name, then maybe it should’ve been seen in a drastically different light, but we will greet it nonetheless with the same enthusiasm for its audacity! Or will we?

Such is the disease that is auteurism, and such is the cesspool that is the circle of cinephiles. Swimming against the tide in her Persona (1966) review—hardly an opinion I agree with—Kael nevertheless hits the nail on the head with the observation that:

People can be heard saying that they “didn’t worry about whether it was good or bad,” they “just let it happen to them.” And if the educated audience is now coming around to the larger audience’s way of seeing movies, I would suggest that they are also being sold in the same way as the larger audience, that advertising and the appearance of critical consensus it gives to certain movie are what lead people to “let” certain prestigious movies “happen to them,” just as the larger audience lets an oversized musical spoof like Thoroughly Modern Millie happen to them. The idea is that “art” should be experienced, not criticized. There seems to be little sense that critical faculties are involved in experience, and that if they are not involved advertising determines what is accepted as art.

So, is Coppola still worthy of an artist’s name and a viewer’s critical judgement? Old machinery doesn’t work so well when you’ve left it for nearly 13 years, regardless of its former glories. The Coppola now of the winery trade is all but an empty shell of the Coppola of the 1970s. But some cinephiles—fans of Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan, and Denis Villeneuve, I suspect—who are particularly susceptible to an empty big-brainedness, may find themselves eating this up.

Let’s take one of the “high-minded” themes of Megalopolis: time. It is said that artists manipulate “time” when they create. This isn’t in dispute. The revolutionary Discobolus of Myron, which paved the way for the entire classical sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome, was but a depiction of a discus thrower frozen in time, immortalised. It was to the ancient world of Greece what Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train (1895) was to us: though in actuality suspended in time, our image of the immovable nude athlete appears as if he’s only stopping temporarily, concentrating, gathering all power before unleashing; it’s a breath-taking sight once you’ve stared too long at it. For another example, Kurt Vonnegut had all but dispensed himself of temporal continuity in such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five—a high school reading I grant—in which we as readers are taken to one point in the narrative, and then without forewarning we’re transferred into another, with no apparent rationale or destination, as such is life and history—senseless, and aimless.

But whatever’s going on with Coppola’s philosophical fancy with “time”, the way he plays with it (if you can call it “play”), is like how you spell it out for your four-year-old before they fall asleep from the hypnosis of your abstruse words; how could you even finish? When the disaster befalls New Rome, which is the film cautiously recalling 9/11, you don’t feel the sense of doom or urgency of the very victims on the ground that the film stylises for looks, with high-contrast shots of silhouettes of human figures in distress and chaos projected onto the buildings. You merely look down from above, from a distance. If the film had wanted to communicate how there’s so little time you have, and how you should cherish it before you lose it to misfortune, then we never felt it or even got the hint to register it subliminally. It’s not your fault if you’ve mistaken the disaster for a plot device, or, half-mistaken.

Cesar is gifted with the power of stopping time, yet despite all the film’s preachiness we never had an idea of how that particularly helped him, except that it made for good shots when a building came tumbling down and saved him from jumping off a skyscraper somewhere, for some reason (I’m sure there must be one). He throws at us wordplays about “time”, too. In the sequence where he’s drugged, Cesar repeats over and over how if our mind is what made God, and if God is the one who was supposed to have control of time, then why can’t we channel that mind power directly and control time for ourselves? Or at least that was what I could gather from the tiresome mumblings.

One might say the dream sequences are themselves the film’s subversion of time. It’s true that the editing—essentially how a film senses its time–of everything else is basically banal and conventional, if heedless and rudderless. But when the film does dish out the editing tricks when it goes gonzo, it’s all hat but no cattle. Erratic shots of partying with great colour contrast between rose red and electric blue; Driver dancing with the camera as they spin and circle out of control; every trick in the book—dissolves, slow-motion, reverse motion, shallow focus, racking focus, parallel cuts, match cuts, Dutch angles, low-angle shots, increasing saturation, fake 180º spins, ellipses.

It’s as if Coppola was throwing his hat in the ring and trying to reinvent cinema, if such empty plaques of quotes as “now is the time to leap into the unknown” were any indication; it makes Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls (2024) look like watching paint dry. The surreal imagery, like the hand-made cloud stealing away a full moon, has so little allegorical power that you can’t latch onto anything they want to evoke in you. There’s nothing else going on in them other than the good looks and the razzle-dazzles. Like, what are these surrealist sequences if not, or little more than, stylistic self-indulgence? What are we to get out of them if not the auteurist’s sycophantic “I’m glad he’s having fun with himself”?

When Cesar regains his power to stop time by holding Julia’s hand, there is no sign that he is in love with her. If the premise is that it’s love that enables his power, we certainly don’t see it. When Julia asked him to hold her hand and then try to flex his power, his expression was more akin to “Okay?” or “Fine” than “Oh, Julia!” The emotions are not organic, but mechanical and plot-required. Did he fall in love with her because she randomly can restore his power to him, rather than the other way around—that his power was restored because he accepts his love for her—like the film would have you believe? They kiss, of course, but you can’t help but feel flat for them, that is if you’ve felt anything at all.

At 85, what Coppola seems to be doing with these 138-minutes of blather is a cri de coeur for the fraternity of the human race, which he (rightly) regards as a miraculous and intelligent creation (and a fact he rightly pointed out is widely underappreciated). But it’s like a religious buffoon preaching to a peasant to love thy landlord neighbour: a man in his power and position, he can’t make his plea without a certain condescension and distance. Coppola is still an intelligent man. When asked about the problems of current society in interviews, he sums up his angle succinctly and pointedly: that what he called the “advertising industry” thrives on selling people the idea of happiness, but to perpetuate its selling, it curbs the supply of actual, material happiness, so there will always remain a dire demand for it, and so the customers will always bend their knees towards them.

But he is also a liberal. In the aftermath of the disaster that struck New Rome, Cesar, when asked by the media about the future, says: that when we start the conversation with each other contemplating “what can we do”, and that when we begin to question “if this society and our way of living are the only ones that are available to us”, then that’s a “basically a utopia”. Reading through Utopian literature, pre- or post-Marxist, you can immediately see the abusive nature of his usage of the word: nowhere else has “utopia” been taken to mean something so reductive. It’s the same old Steven Pinker syndrome: to think it’s enough to build a better world out of love or creativity alone, or a mere willingness to start and engage in conversations, or any other such platitude.

Is the contemplation about settling down with a stable supply of food and water any more “utopian” to the hunter-gatherers as simply the reality of agriculture? Are dreams about a world of science, abundance, and efficiency just as “utopian” to the medieval peasants as simply the reality of an industrial society? Dreams are where utopias were conceived, and literature where they were born, but Coppola took it to mean that “utopia” will always remain on paper, rather than a state of affairs that’s not only conceivable, and communicable, but also realizable, as it already had in the course of human history many times over. It may be that Coppola genuinely doesn’t understand what utopia means or entails, that to a liberal like him it’s but a fancy word, like “dream” or “time” or anything else you want to write on your forehead. 

It is true that for ideologies that advocate for an alternative way of life, details often are impossible to be worked out. So what happens is that such imaginary societies often come down to one or a few maxims. To the Karl Marx of “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, socialism can be summed up as “to each according to [their] contribution”, and communism as “from each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] need”. To the Benito Mussolini of “The Doctrine of Fascism”, fascism can be reduced to a “totalitarian” state, “outside of [which] no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value”. To the Noam Chomsky of Understanding Power, anarchism does not and never did represent “chaos”, but rather “a highly organized society, just one that is organized democratically from below”. They all come with their own attitudes, like how Marxism emphasises class liberation and democratization of the means of production and the distribution of the fruits of labour; or how fascism does violent xenophobia, perpetual warfare, and a cult of an imagined bygone era and its ethos; or how anarchism does scepticism towards power and authority, and that any institution bears a burden of justification. But they all lay out a logical foundation for people to work with, not vague ideas and placards to crown yourself with.

Besides cringing at a line like “so much injustice, so much suffering” as the film depicts police brutality, you wonder if Coppola the rich, white liberal has anything else to say than to express paternal pity. He tries to cope with the similarities in privilege and status between the likes of Cesar—his self-insertion—and the “greed” of the people in and out of his family, through a brainless question like “Why do you [Cesar] pretend to be so bad?” He’s saying that he’s rich and powerful only incidentally and cynically and that it’s the show you have to put on to earn the trust of others in power. People’s signs of protest against Cesar and his Design Authority were so dismissively short and abrupt that you may find yourself in a good bit of suspicion that Coppola is trying to dodge and deflect the same potential criticisms he is appearing to be welcoming with open arms.

Seeing Coppola so lost in the world of ‘great men’ of the past in interviews, not the least of which were Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus, it is no wonder that the belief in individual saviours is so integral to the film and so ingrained in his intellectual consciousness. And it invalidates much of Coppola’s appeal for “utopia”: practically all Utopian thinkers understood that if any such dream was to become a reality, it must be achieved bottom-up, by organising the streets and the pastures against the courts and the manors. In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin declares:

That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all – an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.

By showing us a class of elites coming to terms in the end and investing the money they used to copulate themselves within “Megalopolis”, the film sucks up to the idea of an enlightened wealthy giving away their power voluntarily. And by trying to make us identify with Cesar against his protesters—in confused shots where signs of outrage over home demolitions are framed side by side with revolts holding up the Confederate flag—the movie was saying that the masses are too short-sighted to see their own long-term interests and too blindsided by what’s in front of them that they can’t think outside the little boxes they live in; decisions have to be made for them, for their own good. It’s a similar sentiment when George Orwell expressed in The Road to Wigan Pier how an average working man’s “vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring around the same things as at present—family life, the pub, football, and local politics”, but without Megalopolis’ Second Coming of Cesar.

To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter’ hours and nobody bossing you about.

As a socialist himself, Orwell wasn’t without his qualification: “Often, in my opinion, [the working man] is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency.” Of course, all this comparison is to presume innocence from classism in Coppola’s vision, which it doesn’t deserve.

If one were to give Coppola the benefit of the doubt, they would at least have the decency to admit how political conversations are gravely needed in people’s lives: the Western public is so ridiculously opposed to the idea of simply speaking one’s mind or even reflecting about the political reality at the dinner tables, let alone about prospects for political change, that in a sense they’re as much to be blamed for their misery as their oppressors and class enemies. However, Coppola doesn’t merit our benefit—any of it—and his commentary cannot come off without sounding a beat off: he’s too high up in his ivory tower that the simple realities which undermine his hope for progress escape him easily. When Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) raised the legitimate concern to Cesar that his “utopia” does not offer solutions, his chosen phrase–“ready-made solutions”—makes it seem as if he was begging for his argument to be nullified. And when Cesar responds by saying that “utopia” is not meant to offer solutions but to ask the right questions, we wonder what “utopian” questions could be elicited from a futuristic technocratic pipe dream built on the rubbles of people’s homes, and draw a blank. When Cicero made another legitimate concern about “utopia” potentially turning into “dystopia”, Cesar takes that to mean that any criticism towards his vision is effectively a defence for the status quo of “endless conflict”, and turns the conversation into a laughable exchange of contrary quotes of Marcus Aurelius. How can one quote something like “civilization is the great enemy of humanity” and credit it to Rousseau and then to Plutarch, without letting us know what those philosophers meant exactly or what their suggestions were? Did Coppola just gather them up to let you know that he’s literate?

The answer is simple: the liberal has no capacity or willingness for systemic analysis and experimentation. When asked about which institution to preserve in his “utopia”, Cesar answers: “Marriage.” As to the why or the how, it’s anyone’s guess. The vision of a liberal’s “utopia” is one without a revolution, one that’s simply the current system with all the bad news distilled off, by reforms and hopeful rhetoric. Ideas can be as innocuous as having workers as the very owners and sole shareholders of a business, on a one-person-one-vote footing, which means a cooperative. Yet they can be as alien to the consciousness of a liberal as simple geometry is to that of a village idiot: self-evident in its truth by little thought and guidance, and yet as distant to him as he is to kingdom come. How else do you have educated men condescending with flowery words like “love” and “creativity” without speaking of or pushing for the conditions in which their proclaimed “love” and “creativity” can thrive and flourish?

The very fact that Coppola prided himself on having people of different political convictions working on the same set (not that this is any problem in and of itself) says as much about his sensitivity for political thought as the idea in Civil War (2024) that warfare can be divorced from politics entirely says about Alex Garland’s. It’s the same liberal brain rot that’s keeping the mainstream Democrats from recognising the naked fascism of the current Republican Party in the United States, and it’s the same foolishness of the SPD, so keen on suppressing labour uprisings during the Great Depression and keeping up with their appearance of parliamentary civility by forming coalitions with the conservative establishment, that led to the Nazi Party gaining sympathies among the poor and taking power. When the Republicans now run on campaigns that vow to deport millions of migrants—legal or illegal—and upend the democratic institutions that safeguard basic human rights to abortion and gender identity, it does not do to have polite conversations with these “human cousins” of yours who, in many cases, simply want you dead, no questions asked. Many of them aren’t even keeping their masks on anymore, for there has proven so little consequence to openly advocating for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Artistically, what Coppola has done here may be to intentionally jar you. It’s his idea of “play”. If a banana can be taped to a wall, what is there to stop him from feeling his oats? The free jazz musician can understand to not abandon structure altogether––they reshape it––and the linguist can understand that the miracle of language lies in how you can convey infinite meanings with a finite set of symbols, but Coppola can’t appreciate the truth that creativity and freedom are built on the backs of a rigid structure. There is nothing wrong with not knowing exactly what you’re doing when you make a movie; sometimes an artwork has to flow out of you. But when the dialogue was written in a cross of Roman and Shakespearean parlance, and yet the deliveries were so anachronistic it verges on parody, even when there is no comical element present other than the awkwardness, you should take the alarm sounding within the artist inside you seriously. It’s not as simple as having different visions and creative sensibilities collaborate, and come up with ideas and improvise on set as to what or how to shoot: you need to have a well-worked out conceit and structure that does not subject one aspect to another’s dependency. Directors like Hitchcock and Kubrick may have pushed that to an extreme, but when you know what you’re doing, as did Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Coppola himself in his thirties, you’ll find yourself in a delicate balance act.

USA | 2024 | 138 MINUTES | 2.00:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Francis Ford Coppola.
starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter & Dustin Hoffman.