The absurd optimism of Megalopolis Francis Ford Coppola has faith in human genius

Such an introduction to a movie, where show business figures try to wrap it in their show-business politics, and where its creator lays out the historical parallels it’s explicitly drawing, inclines a viewer to treat it as an argument, or a set of ideas, rather than simply as visual entertainment. This effect is reinforced by the movie’s subtitle: A Fable. You see this onscreen under the big title and you start ruminating about what it’s supposedly to be a fable of, and, if you’re an intellectual quibbler like I am, whether it’ll be a wise or plausible fable.

But Megalopolis works against this somewhat literal inclination in a couple of ways. First, the film is such a spectacular mess that its meaning as a fable is more elusive than it probably should be. Second, the fable’s big teaching turns out to be so perverse in its details, its underlying ideas so bad and dumb, that you can spend two-thirds of Megalopolis in a very odd state of movie suspense, thinking, “Nah, Coppola can’t be trying to tell us that.”

And yet, Megalopolis is kind of a cool film. Lee and DeNiro should have been able to muster at least a few gee-whiz adjectives about it, even if their ultimate take was a thumbs-down, as it will be for many viewers. They should have been able to call it “wild”, “beautiful”, “sexy”, “funny”, or just “inventive”. It says unflattering things about either their decency as friends of Francis Coppola or their cognitive functioning as aging men that they couldn’t.

Megalopolis is set, fabulously, in a city called New Rome, a baroque version of New York City with many details and accents imported, via CGI, from the old Rome. As Coppola let us know in the preview discussion, New Rome’s inhabitants are acting out an updated version of old Rome’s signal political drama, when a decadent Republic teetered toward the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Accordingly, New Rome is an arena of quarrelling elites, many of them related by either marriage or blood. The two principal antagonists are the city’s hidebound and corrupt, but also humble and dutiful, mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and a visionary architect with one or two magical powers named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Cesar wants to mold the city into the beautiful new shape it has in his extraordinary mind, while Cicero wants to serve the interests that give him his power and, thus, to keep the city pretty much as it is.

On the edges of this primary conflict scheme a multi-generational cast of entitled New Romans, including Cicero’s beautiful daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), an old and wealthy banker named Crassus (Voigt), and Cesar’s deranged and politically ambitious cousin Pulcher (Lebeouf), who hates him. Just outside of this tight circle of blood and money and power, striving busily to sleep her way into its centre, is sexpot finance reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza).

As Wow Platinum’s name should suggest, Coppola has overcooked pretty much everything in this movie. When, early on, Cesar arrives at a civic event MC’d by Mayor Cicero and then decides to make himself the centre of attention, he does so by yelling Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, in its entirety. In this political world, ceremony yields completely to power, and so everyone turns from Cicero and lends their ear to the younger, louder MC. Whatever you think of the narrative sense of this speech, you can’t deny that Adam Driver is exactly the man to give it.

In this scene we get two of the real, if unreliable, strengths of Megalopolis. (To be clear, every strength of Megalopolis is unreliable, amply mixed with folly.) The first is what you might call the movie’s sociology, how it shows New Rome’s aristocracy floating above the laws and manners that people of lower classes observe as a matter of course. Coppola does this casually, showing rich people wandering into and despoiling public events without even thinking. For them, the distinctions between stage and seating, performer and spectator, yours and mine, are erased with impunity, at their whim. These are chillingly bland and human-scale power claims. They feel politically sick in an intimate way, like being robbed on the street, in front of your kids.

Another real, unreliable strength of Megalopolis is its cast. Coppola encourages his actors to match the film’s overall atmosphere of chaos and excess in their performances, which mostly pays off. Megalopolis is filled with fantastic overacting. Adam Driver thrives, of course, in this madness, as does Shia Leboeuf, and Jon Voigt is a total hoot as Crassus. As the slurring, seemingly brain-damaged ringmaster at a Madison Square Garden chariot race, Donald Pitts steals that long and elaborate scene and gives the film’s funniest, most outré performance. As Wow Platinum, though, Aubrey Plaza doesn’t achieve as happy a balance between intentionally and unintentionally funny.

Coppola’s method of unrelenting excess, his overall willingness to flirt with self-parody, enables a good deal of crazy fun, as well as some visually beautiful cinema, but it also enables self-parody. Now, self-parody at this advanced level can be entertaining, too, but the lack of storytelling discipline in Megalopolis becomes a more fundamental sort of drag. That the movie is often confusing is to be expected, and, for me anyway, tolerated. The bigger problem is that it’s so disjointed, with so many scenes so disconnected from those around them, and with some of those scenes dissolving so fully into psychedelia, that one’s sense of narrative movement sometimes goes dead. It’s weird to feel mired in chaos, bored and impatient amid so much visual and dramatic novelty, but that feeling threatens to dominate the latter half of the film.

The biggest problem with Megalopolis, though, was an ongoing drama inside my own head about the meaning of this fable. I will come out and say the thing I couldn’t let myself believe, because I think Coppola means it to be obvious from the beginning and not a plot point or object of suspense, as it was for me: the movie’s hero really is Cesar Catilina. He’s the only one brave enough to tackle the future, creative enough to make it beautiful. My own resistance early in the film stemmed from the fact that Cesar’s grand vision for New Rome seemed to involve tearing down scores of large buildings with people living in them and turning the vast acreage of newly vacant land into, like, parks and civic centre, which would be linked by magical conveyors, functionally identical to the moving walkways in airports, and cute little bubble-cars like in The Jetsons. It’s true that all of this would be made from magic leaves that Cesar can create, and so it would be in some way “ecological”. But, still, I couldn’t help wondering where all the people would live in a city being redesigned by a visionary architect who didn’t consider them at all, except sometimes to resent them for their obstreperous complaining about him blowing up their homes.

My problem, to put it in historical terms, was that Cesar Catilina seemed a lot like Robert Moses, the unelected planner who sought to pave over greater New York City in the Fifties and Sixties, and that Cesar’s vision for New Rome bore an ominous resemblance to the great disasters of civic modernism, especially the planned city of Brasilia. I couldn’t believe I was watching a fable about how one of the great, unappreciated geniuses of our civilisation was this guy who almost ruined New York City, and how one of its great, unappreciated achievements was that haunted skeleton of a city, Brasilia. But I was wrong in my disbelief. Coppola really did model Cesar Catilina on Robert Moses. He really is telling us that the grand disasters of civic modernism are something for us New Romans strive for. He really is hopeful we’ll come to see this ourselves.

Here is my dilemma in dealing with Francis Coppola and the message of his Megalopolis. I find his optimism not just admirable and likeable but also wise, especially in contrast with the political panic of his famous interlocutors on that New York stage. In trying to turn a film discussion into an emergency forum on the November election, Lee and DeNiro resembled the radicalised teenagers of social media, who see themselves as the Main Characters in a drama of ongoing crisis, in the light of which everyone is obliged to listen to their hysterical takes, and art must be reduced to a subordinate branch of crisis politics.

Coppola, on other hand, isn’t all that worked up about things. He seems to think that we humans are pretty smart, pretty good at solving problems, and so, while there are no guarantees, there’s a good chance we can handle whatever challenges the future will cast before us. I think this attitude is not only healthier, more conducive both to everyday happiness and to addressing the problems themselves, but sounder and more accurate in its picture of the world. It’s hard to reconcile my fond appreciation of this outlook with the character he’s created to embody it in his strange new film. I don’t think I’ll ever see another movie that so energetically expresses such a healthy and admirable outlook via such undeniably bad ideas. I’m all for a can-do approach to the world’s problems, just not the can-do approach of Robert Moses.

Still, now that I’ve accepted that its lesson is what I couldn’t believe, I’m eager to see Coppola’s movie fable a second time. Perhaps like Nietzsche after facing his “most abysmal thought”, that the idiot facts of the world are going to keep repeating themselves forever, I’ll experience Megalopolis with fresh eyes, gain an even fuller appreciation of its absurd spectacle. Despite our disagreements about Robert Moses, I can’t help being touched by Francis Coppola’s surprising optimism, and so I kind of expect to like his film at least a little more the second time than I did the first.