‘Megalopolis’ Review: Coppola’s Roman Empire Hits Audacious Heights of Brilliance and Excess | Cannes

To say that films are the stuff that dreams are made of, could be true for many a title. But sometimes, resorting to a cliché description is absolutely worth it and this is certainly the case for Megalopolis, the long-awaited new film by living legend Francis Ford Coppola, premiering in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The cinema-dream comparison riffs off Shakespeare, but so does Megalopolis: unashamedly so, to the point that the film seems like it can absorb an endless count of famed quotations and still keep its own idiosyncratic image. While the first showing of Coppola’s latest has been preceded by investigative articles and negative private screening reactions, I found myself enraptured by the myriad of ways Megalopolis makes its quirky (to put it lightly) bits work to its advantage. Such a statement has little to nothing to do with kneeling at an auteur’s altar, but takes in the undeniably good and the inexplicably bad that tints the film’s 133-minute runtime.

Even if Megalopolis cannot be described as fresh, especially the way it handles its last act and ending, the film benefits less from a canonic reading than a generous, intellectual-film-enjoyer type of interpretation. It paints its plot and conviction with broad strokes—utopia, societal values, unconditional love—but within that abstract goal, it also manages to fit genuinely moving renditions of beloved genres. Melodrama, neo-noir, and tragedy take turns in driving the narrative of an imagined version of New York as an American symbol, called New Rome. Coppola (like, supposedly, any guy) has a fascination with the Roman Empire that could be brushed off as memeable, yet the director manages to take pastiche to another level of emotional impact, relating a story of a familial feud turned social (like in Ancient Rome) to the microcosm that is falling in love. New Rome is fractured: on the one hand, Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) demands practical solutions and social improvement (like a huge new casino), and on the other hand, his rival architect Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) promotes an utopian future cast in megalon, a material he discovered, with questionable qualities and big technological promises. 

In the wider framework, there is Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), New Rome’s financial backbone and also Catalina’s uncle. In the very beginning of the film, a criss-cross of power dynamics is sketched out, between Catalina and the second generation of power: Crassus’s nepobaby Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) and the dashingly smart Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is the Mayor’s only daughter. This merry bunch is joined by bombastic TV anchor Wow Platinum (an admirably toxic Aubrey Plaza) whose attempts to climb up the social ladders seem successful at first, making her a glorious femme fatale. Plenty other names join their ranks, like Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwarzman, and Lawrence Fishburne, but the spotlight is mostly on Driver as he embodies a wacky, grief-ridden genius whose thoughts are preoccupied with existential angst after the suspicious death of his wife. In his moral investment in megalon, we can read a blind strive to guarantee and achieve a future; he is the reckless dreamer who can bend everything to his will, including time. This sci-fi element to his skill-set is made apparent in the film’s opening sequence, where he climbs out of a window atop of the Chrysler Building (New Rome’s version of it) and freezes, one foot in the air, before stepping back. 

It would be an excessive endeavor and a largely tiresome exercise to recount the plot any further, but it’d suffice to say that Megalopolis takes its big ideas seriously in terms of theory and practice. A well-read audience member will discern Ancient philosophers and poets such as (the OG) Cicero, Mark Aurelius, or Cattulus, from Shakespeare or Goethe (“Time, stop!”) and will be right in thinking that Driver’s character is always one step away from making the wrong move, like so many of the characters found in their works. Being materially responsible for the future is no small feat for a widowed man who only appears to reject love and connection—see the extended sequence of his trippy self-destruction—but what he seeks is salvation in female form. Julia fits the bill perfectly and it has to be said that her character depth fluctuates between a genuinely self-assured entrepreneur and a wish-fulfillment with various degrees of success. In terms of filmmaking, Megalopolis is classically framed and meticulous: New Rome’s skyscrapers are always shot from a low angle (a gesture that feels both democratic and spectacular), while the people in the frame abide by the rule of thirds without it seeming cheap or routine.  

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the film, formally speaking, is how Coppola approaches the screen. In a rather covert metaphor, the megalon material is made out to be both a marker of life and of death, and so is cinema. On screen, the dead come alive. Even without positioning Megalopolis explicitly as a film about filmmaking, Coppola still includes some bits that seem to address that ambivalence through visual aesthetics. There is a frequent switch between the full screen and a TV screen in the next scene and in one decisive sequence, Plaza’s character appears as a silhouette overlay atop of the action, as if she is blocking a projector beaming at a screen. Most notably, in our press screening at Palais de Festival’s Debussy hall, there was a moment that radically broke the fourth wall: at one point, a person came on stage carrying a microphone stand, and addressed the screen. The screen addressed him back: a scaled-down version of Adam Driver spoke, as if directly to the unnamed figure, enacting a performance version of the press-conference happening in the film. Whether that bit is going to go down in history as a gimmick or not, it expanded the world of Megalopolis widely enough to make up for its occasional flimsiness. That and the hearty laughs; it’s a rare thing to see an old generation filmmaker embrace silliness and still deliver a poignant take on the eternal battle between the past and the future.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Megalopolis has yet to secure U.S. distribution.