This article appeared in the November 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Months after the premiere of Megalopolis at the Cannes Film Festival, and several weeks into its dwindling theatrical release, we seem no closer to resolving the many peculiar paradoxes of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project. Is it a requiem for a faded empire, either ancient Rome or turn-of-the-millennium America, or a utopian vision of the future? Are its formal strategies and lavish special effects state-of-the-art or old-fashioned? Is it a critique of fascism’s oppressive pageantry, or an example of it? Is Adam Driver the boldest American actor of his generation, or the most overrated? Is it a camp curio from a once-vital presence in American commercial cinema now drifting into senescence, or a work of inspired naïveté from an octogenarian enfant-terrible entrepreneur who, in spite of it all, is still invested in the art form’s capacity for spectacle and fabulation? And is it really, as its subtitle claims it to be, a “fable,” or is it actually a satire, or—even inadvertently—a tragedy?

It’s perhaps fitting for a film released in 2024, a time of empire-collapse in both the American film industry and the nation’s political arena, that a work would emerge whose internal meanings, authorial intents, and significance in a broader cinematic and social landscape would be so full of contradiction. Critical reaction has been a mess: even its most ardent admirers have mounted only wan tributes, rushing to their bookshelves to dust off their Adorno in order to invoke the notion of Coppola’s “late style.” Meanwhile, dismissals came quickly online, as they are wont to do. See Jashan Ramjee’s blockbuster Letterboxd critique: “That shit sucked Megacockolis,” which to date has racked up 23K likes—some measure of film criticism’s own immiserated status in the wider discourse. The film is both deeply personal and strangely unmoving; epic in scale and narratively inert; extensively researched but curiously short on ideas; and the apotheosis of its director’s career-long engagement with innovative cinematic technologies, while still more or less looking like a compilation of Linkin Park music videos from the early 2000s.

In Megalopolis, the time is, in every way, out of joint. Coppola’s film is very loosely based on the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE, in which politician and soldier Lucius Sergius Catilina’s attempted coup was thwarted by statesmen Marcus Licinius Crassus and Marcus Tullius Cicero. This tale of ancient political intrigue is set in a heavily stylized contemporary and/or fantasy version of Manhattan, here redubbed “New Rome.” Uncharacteristic of most accounts of the historical conspiracy, Adam Driver’s Catilina (first name “Cesar”) is presented in the film as the hero—a visionary architect, bad-boy inventor, rumored wife-murderer, and chairman of something called “the Design Authority” that’s in the process of reshaping New Rome. He’s part Robert Moses and part Elon Musk, with all the charm such comparisons might imply. While flattening whole swaths of the city to make way for his grand ideas, Catilina must vie for power with a slew of ancient/modern mash-up caricatures: Giancarlo Esposito’s tired-looking Mayor Cicero, Jon Voight’s doddering and grotesquely wealthy Crassus, Dustin Hoffman’s wheel-greasing politico Nush “The Fixer” Berman, Aubrey Plaza’s deliciously conniving financial-news-show host Wow Platinum, and Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio, a mercurial villain who morphs over the course of the film from nonbinary nepo baby to Nazi ne’er-do-well to Corey Feldman impersonator.

Temporal disjunction is a theme the film takes every opportunity to ram home, most notably in the banal musings of Laurence Fishburne, Megalopolis’s chauffeur-chorus, and in the opening scene, in which Catilina displays his entirely unexplained capacity to freeze time just as he’s about to plunge from the spire of the Chrysler Building, the location of his swank boudoir/office. In the film’s most energetic sequence, Madison Square Garden becomes a full-fledged Roman coliseum, complete with chariots, gladiators, and vestal virgins, while a location of the now-defunct fast-food chain Nedick’s, a Garden-adjacent landmark until 1968, is still situated next door. At one moment, enormous floral CG structures designed by the artist Neri Oxman overtake downtown Manhattan; at another, Catilina coasts through rear projections of Times Square shot in 2001, in which one can spot billboards still advertising Phantom, Les Mis, and Ruby Foo’s. The sense of futurity is atavistic and awkward, yoking two divergent types of artifice: the digital and the theatrical. CG dross frequently clutters the frame, with backgrounds rendered using bleeding-edge virtual-production tech that looks, as usual, utterly flat, and hued in a consistently off-putting shade of shiny brown. But the film also occasionally evinces a sense of staging and costuming that suggests a Broadway adaptation of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), with scores of extras clad in boxy coats, fedoras, and capes.

Megalopolis’s peculiar assemblage of the material and the artificial, its unique concoction of digital spectacle and human craft, is also a reflection of its weird attitude toward “the people.” The film ends with a painfully sincere “pledge of allegiance” to “our human family,” and yet its actual regard for people is deeply equivocal. There is much contestation between Catilina and Cicero about the people of the city and what’s best for them, but the actual unwashed masses are portrayed as either the spectral traces of pixels or an indistinguishable horde of extras. In one scene, we get CG crowds of ghosts from architectural renderings; in another, dirty-faced urchins peering from behind a chain-link fence, and later, mobs of ruffians in leather jackets and reversed, MAGA-red ballcaps. In truth, Coppola’s film is much more concerned with the internecine struggles of a mega-rich elite, and we are apparently meant to sympathize with one of them more than the others. The film sustains a conspicuously ambivalent notion of humanity as a whole that owes quite a bit to Ayn Rand’s 1943 proto-libertarian novel The Fountainhead (and to King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation). Even Megalopolis’s stance on the cult of the individual versus the evil straw man of socialism is muddled.

Those members of humanity who happen to be women fare even worse: Megalopolis has very little for the ladies of New Rome to do but grub for cash (like the unscrupulous Wow Platinum, called “The Money Bunny” on her cable news show), go back to the “cluuuub” (like Clodio’s sisters, whom he may or may not be having sex with), and die (like Catilina’s late wife). Much of the film follows, quite unconvincingly, the romance between Catilina and the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero (played by Nathalie Emmanuel, trying on a New Yawk accent). It turns out that she can stop time too, but, despite that remarkable talent, she becomes little more than a muse for The Great Man’s physics-defying imagination. Her fate is to become the one woman who gets him and his self-described “Emersonian mind.” And, oh yes, to bear his child.

This child, a daughter, is apparently named Sunny Hope, one of many indications that Coppola’s grand project is, if nothing else, heartfelt and even optimistic. This bold lack of cynicism is to some degree infectious, even if the film—so crammed with incident, so incoherent in its propositions, so unpleasant even to look at—offers little in the way of a convincing vision for a bright future. And it’s a pity, too: such things are in short supply. This is not, of course, Megalopolis’s fault. But the time is long overdue to stop expecting visions from tycoons and patriarchs.

Leo Goldsmith teaches screen studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and serves as a programming advisor for the New York Film Festival.