Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Written by Taylor Baker
76/100
In Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating “Megalopolis,” he imagines that the city once claimed by the Netherlands as New Amsterdam, which we know as New York, was instead New Rome—seemingly little changes with this rebranding outside the hairstyles. “Megalopolis” is at once a satire of the now and a dream for the future. It’s an octogenarian looking around himself at an America and a Western world that seem to be crumbling. He posits two solutions. One a substance called “megalon,” which is the sort of fantastic or magical solution that requires human ingenuity, labor, and collaboration, not unlike the Rearden steel or Galt’s engine from ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ The other leans against Socrates and the importance of public dialogue and reasoning. In Coppola’s mind, a utopia can exist, and his seeming definition is a world that features the open and free-spirited exchange of ideas and different beliefs in a public forum, though he does a pitiful job of depicting this theme within the film.
“Megalopolis” is a fable, not a grounded film in human relationships. You won’t see fingers pressed to stone, leaving fingerprint smudges where they’d rested. Coppola is chasing images of iconography and myth; unfortunately for the audience it feels pared down to nearly the nub. There are continuity errors, sequences shot on high buildings look bad, and the dialogue occasionally borders on the absurd. But this fable is charming. Coppola is excessively sincere in his direction, casting, and script.
In many exterior sequences, “Megalopolis” looks bad. The CGI jostles between abysmal and something not too dissimilar to the entrapping city graphics in the racing simulators of the mid-aughts, like “Burnout 3: Takedown” or “Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition.” Copolla’s restrained presentation of what would otherwise be exciting noir-ish gumshoe car tailing sequences is pitiful. The jump from plain speech exchanges to Shakespearean dialogues in iambic pentameter to Latin oration fumbles. One gets the feeling that there is more than enough left on the cutting room floor from the film’s three credited editors to re-cut the film to be more specific and enthralling than this shortened theatrical cut that hurdles through the magical device for which it is named.
The cast excels. Adam Driver as Cesar, Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero, and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero in particular stand out, and that’s no accident. These three hold the most screentime, and Coppola has long been an auteur known for the performances he conjures out of his players. It’s no curiosity that the ones with the most screen time become the most convincing and memorable. One is left wondering what character moments from Dustin Hoffman’s quickly dispatched character “The Fixer” Nush Berman are missing or what other scene-stealing segments Jon Voight’s delightful and despicable banker Hamilton Crassus III may have been cut to shave down the runtime.
It’s a shame that the 2-hour 20-minute film simply doesn’t have time to breathe. Like “Apocalypse Now,” we may need to hope for a director’s cut of “Megalopolis” to fully appreciate the sprawling fable of a falling civilization and how love, honesty, and a little magical plot device could help save us all. The film is a love letter to the world that Francis believes he knows. Though it reminds one of Stefan Zweig in his last days, longing toward a past Vienna he lived through as a child, that on reflection, perhaps never entirely existed in the way he remembers. Did the Western world ever value the Socratic method as much as Francis hopes? Do we miss it? I hope so.
“Megalopolis” Trailer
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