Megalopolis review: Francis Ford Coppola goes unchained in one-of-a-kind epic

The legendary New Hollywood director of The Godfather movies is back with Megalopolis, a long-planned, self-financed, all-star epic with Adam Driver that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. 

Just when you thought you were out, he pulls you back in… OK, paraphrasing The Godfather Part III’s key line is a little bit of a stretch, given that its director, Francis Ford Coppola, unlike his ‘Movie Brat’ contemporaries Spielberg and Scorsese, with whom he helped reinvigorate American movies in the 1970s, has long been missing in action from mainstream moviemaking. 

But the shadow cast by Coppola’s unprecedented run of masterpieces that decade – magisterial crime sagas and Best Picture Oscar winners The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, paranoia thriller The Conversation and hallucinatory Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now – still looms large over most subsequent US cinema.

And so, Megalopolis, some 40 years in the planning and his first feature of any kind since 2011 indie Twixt, is big, indeed mega, news for cinephiles everywhere.

New Hollywood’s Godfather is back with Megalopolis

Coppola’s “fable” as the opening title card presents the film, is ostensibly a state-of-the-nation address, modern America as Ancient Rome just before that Empire’s decline and fall. New York City, sorry, “New Roma” is a mess of corruption and inequality, caught between two opposing forces: on one side, Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), aligned with Big Business and keeping the status quo. On the other, legendary architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), who has invented an indestructible, organic building material, Megalon, and aims to rebuild and regenerate the city, much to the mayor’s anger. 

Cicero’s rebellious daughter Julia (Natalie Emmanuel) attempts to bridge the chasm between her father and Catalina, a move that pulls her into professional and personal entanglements with the renegade designer. Meanwhile various schemers, from Shia LaBoeuf’s demagogue-in-waiting, to Aubrey Plaza’s gold-digging journalist Wow Platinum (yes, really) are on hand to further (over-)complicate Megalopolis’ headlong dive into fantasy, science-fiction… and utter insanity.

Unsurprisingly for something he has been working on for literally half his life (he began working on it in the 1980s), this is Coppola going for broke in the wildest swing of his already larger-than-life career. As with many of his projects the off-screen drama rivals anything in front of the camera. there’s the legend of script table reads in the early 2000s with Paul Newman, De Niro and DiCaprio; New York City location filming that even captured the seminal events of September 11, 2001; and, naturally, for the ultimate cinematic gambler, the mythic self-financing, Coppola selling a piece of his wine business to jump-start the project and keep artistic control.

It’s a fascinating case of an older artist assessing his diminishing lifespan and legacy, and the future for generations to come. Driver’s Cesar can literally stop time around him. The opening scene is of him, precariously out on a ledge, a clock ominously ticking away, trying to (and succeeding) to freeze the world around him. As opening metaphors go, for a veteran filmmaker approaching the end of his career with a huge personal gamble, it’s hard to top.

Coppola is a gambler betting on himself

American Zoetrope

Yet try to top it Coppola does. At one point, a character says. “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.” Megalopolis is Coppola Unchained. There are pop concerts and literal chariot races; invisible dresses and face transplants; split screens and freeze frames. Ruminations on time and civilization, love and destiny, studded with quotes from Rousseau, Marcus Aurelius and Shakespeare. There are performance ranging from the sublime to school play histrionics; poetic aphorisms side-by-side with tin-eared dialogue; scenes of stunning imagination — a hand emerges from clouds to pocket the full moon from a night sky — that veer into shoddy green screen visual effects. And also, Shia LaBoeuf getting shot with an arrow in his bum. Truly, all life is here.

If you go into Megalopolis expecting logical plotting, convincing characters and coherent tone, boy are you in the wrong movie. At times it’s as if sober James Cameron-style world-building is constantly getting ambushed by Baz Luhrmann’s camp aesthetics. This, to be clear, is not a criticism.

Megalopolis is impassioned, exasperating and exhilarating. I’d struggle to defend anyone who called it an outright masterpiece, but I couldn’t really trust anyone who would dismiss it out of hand. It’s Coppola looking both outside and deep within himself, a self-reckoning of his own reckless creative impulses and its casualties, but an insistence on the attempt to change our destinies. It demands that we see human beings as “a great miracle” despite all increasing evidence to contrary surrounding us on a daily basis, and insists on a future worth saving. If it’s a folly, it, and he, are going down fighting.

Megalopolis review score: 4/5

The first line of The Godfather, the film that made, and still defines, Coppola’s reputation as a thirty-something tyro is, “I believe in America.”

The sincerity of an artist in his ninth decade, putting it all out there on this scale, with his own money, is incredibly moving to those who can surrender to the experience. It’s unlike anything else you’re ever likely to see, made by a complete one-off filmmaker, and how often can we honestly say that? It’s Coppola’s city, not field, of dreams, and to paraphrase another, very different movie, if he built it, you should come. I believe in Megalopolis.

Megalopolis premiered at Cannes on May 16, but it doesn’t have a release date right now. In the meantime, you can find other new movies to stream this month.