Programme Notes: Megalopolis

When Francis Ford Coppola first began working on the script for Megalopolis, Ronald Reagan was the US president and the number one song in the country was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In the 40 years that it would take the legendary director to finally realise his dream, the story morphed and grew into an ever-ballooning epic akin to kryptonite for major US investors. Unrepentant in his vision, Coppola famously mortgaged part of his vineyard and parted with over $120 million of his money to get the film made. 

The resulting work is one unrestrained by financiers, a rarely-before-seen exercise in worldbuilding that announces itself from the opening credits as a ‘fable’ and plays with all the moral and stylistic flourishes of the great classics. It is a tricky task to encapsulate the story at the centre of it all, but let’s give it a go: in the fictional New Rome, a city somewhere in the future fashioned as a mix of New York and Old Rome, is Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). An artist and Nobel Prize-winning scientist who has unlocked the power to freeze time, the celebrity playboy spends his days dreaming of the titular utopia — a self-sustaining city built entirely of his greatest creation, the indestructible megalon.

But dreamers rarely make change without ruffling a few feathers and Catilina has a staunch opposer in Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a power-hungry leader far too willing to cater to the corrupt aristocracy as long as his pockets are full. And, because this is a fable fashioned after the classic Roman literature, the widowed Cesar falls in love with beautiful Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cicero’s impossibly beautiful, impossibly intelligent daughter. 

And then we have a truly epic list of satellite characters, from the Catilinas with Shia LaBeouf’s backstabbing cousin Clodio Pulcher and Jon Voight’s scummy banker Hamilton Crassus III to the countless more distant relatives orbiting the powerful clan. Aubrey Plaza plays the delightfully named trashy journalist Wow Platinum, Lawrence Fishburne is Cesar’s driver and loyal sidekick Fundi Romaine and the brilliant Kathryn Hunter plays the mayor’s wife, Teresa. Plus, Coppola enlists several of his family members to round out the cast, from Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, Jason Schwartzman as a member of Franklyn’s entourage and even Sofia Coppola’s daughter Romy Mars with a brief cameo as a high school reporter.

For those prone to anchoring their ideas of a film in the referential, Megalopolis plays as Cloud Atlas via way of Amadeus with a peppering of Vanilla Sky and it is closest, in Coppola’s filmography, to another one of the director’s long-dreamed projects, One From the Heart. Much like the 1981 musical, this is a bold, boisterous work that plays with classic genre elements to wear its earnestness on its sleeve. The final product might not be as polished as the films that have catapulted Coppola into cinema’s hall of greats, but it is filled with a sense of youthful curiosity that, mixed with the experience of a veteran director whose career spans half a century, creates a singular prodding at the elasticity of filmmaking. 

All of this is to say that, walking into Megalopolis, one needs to have a certain willingness to surrender to it. This is a film best experienced with an open heart and a curiosity to learn how to read its peculiar vernacular. There is a lingering sense that there is something a little off with the way Coppola walks the audience through his hero’s journey, a feeling that lives somewhere between the amusing and the baffling. Still, it is not such a big ask to yield to the ride once one does away with any expectation of sternness and fully accepts the spoofiness of the humour. 

Plaza’s bombshell Wow Platinum is the greatest example of Megalopolis’s proudly unrefined brand of comedy. She exclaims ‘You’re anal as hell, Cesar. I, for one, am oral as hell!’ while kneeling in between Driver’s long legs, and speaks in a baby voice while begging LaBeouf’s pathetic money-hungry pawn to do her on top of Hamilton’s expensive work desk. This crassness turns Coppola’s opus into a large bacchanal, a snapshot of the life of the rich and frivolous that never finds in its moral questioning enough reasoning to take itself too seriously. 

The arrival of Megalopolis at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was shrouded in expectation. This was the first time Coppola had a film in competition at the festival since 1979’s Apocalypse Now, and his latest arrived at the French Riviera at the end of a year-long public scrutiny on its marketability. The American grapevine deemed Megalopolis unsellable and unmarketable before it even made its first bow, and critics and industry heads all flocked to a packed screening where they sat side by side in buzzing anticipation on the day of the film’s premiere.

Being in that screening was an experience in itself, gasps and giggles merging into one another as the room grew louder and louder in response to the film’s increasing ludicrousness. By the time the lights went half up and a man walked onstage to speak directly to a 20ft Adam Driver on the screen, all bets were off and people at last looked at one another, their befuddlement made visible under the half-dimmed lights. Four months have passed since I first saw the film at that memorable screening, and Megalopolis still plays on my mind as I write these words, not quite sure if I dreamed it. If you are reading this, then you are probably about to embark on the same remarkable journey and, even if it isn’t to your tastes, I hope you are as thrilled as I am that a film like it exists and that madmen like Coppola are still out in the world, willing to risk it all to make their visions come true exactly the way they dreamt it.