Review: Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" is a joyously messy paean to creativity

And I wouldn't have it any other way

I had such a big smile on my face when the credits rolled on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and hours later, it hasn’t faded. I don’t know whether I’d call this movie ‘good’ or ‘great;’ I don’t know what ‘star rating’ I’d give it, were I to succumb to that idiotic exercise; I don’t have any sense of where it will rank on my year-end Top 10 list, or how I will even attempt to compare it to other films from this (or any other) year; and I don’t know how, exactly, I would recommend it to others. But I know that if you put a gun to my head and forced me to verbalize whatever I’m feeling when I think about this movie, I would probably say “I think I loved it, and I really want to see it again.”

I want to approach this review with some humility. Megalopolis is, without competition, the strangest and most forthrightly avant-garde movie I have ever paid money to see in a for-profit corporate multiplex, let alone an IMAX theater, and if that is true for me – someone who goes to movies at least once a week, has been writing about them professionally since age 10, and is on the cusp of earning a Ph.D. in Film Studies – it will be doubly true for a lot of audience members walking in attracted by the presence of Adam Driver or Aubrey Plaza, or thinking of Coppola from past classics like The Godfather. Even had I not observed at least a dozen people walking out of my screening and never returning, I would feel confident predicting general audiences are going to despise this movie. Frustration is not an unnatural – or even unintentional – reaction to Megalopolis, and I absolutely believe that, had this come out when I was 20, I would have been one of those people reacting in confusion and anger. It is not an inexplicable or unfair reaction to describe Megalopolis as a hot mess, narratively disjointed and tonally scattershot, and I know it would sound insufferable to anyone struggling with the movie for me to say “yes, that’s pretty much right, and it’s also why the movie is beautiful and maybe even kind of great.” The 20-year-old me would have rolled his eyes at the 31-year-old me of today for saying that.

But here’s the thing: I don’t say that from a holier-than-thou place of “I get it and you don’t, because I know more about movies.” I say it from a place of “I have expressed that kind of frustration about movies before, and I’ve come to realize with time and experience that those kinds of frustrations are often what lead me to learning from a movie, and ultimately loving it.” Many of the films and directors I hold dearest today – David Lynch, Yasujirō Ozu, Tsai Ming-liang, and even, believe it or not, Hayao Miyazaki – are ones I really struggled with when first encountering them, and even dismissed in bouts of youthful arrogance. Movies can make us uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes those reasons are perfectly valid and will not change with time; but sometimes, they make us uncomfortable because they are opening doors we did not know existed, and stepping through them can be scary. It can also be vitally meaningful and life-affirming. The experience of coming to love films that initially alienated me is part of why I now like to say that I care a lot less about whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and care a lot more about whether or not it’s interesting. I’ve also noticed, with reflection, that a lot of my favorite works – films, TV shows, video games, books – aren’t perfect, and that those imperfections are, far from being a barrier, a crucial part of why I love them. I thought about that a lot watching Megalopolis. This is a decidedly, joyously, and even intentionally imperfect work of art, and those rough edges are a major part of why it makes me smile so hard.

Megalopolis is, as I said, avant-garde; it cost over $100 million, it’s playing in IMAX theaters nationwide, and nearly every actor with a speaking role is a recognizable face, but it is, unapologetically, a piece of experimental cinema. There is a ‘story,’ so to speak, and there are ‘characters,’ insomuch as each actor has an individual part with a specific fictional name, but those are not the levels Coppola and company are meaningfully operating on at any point. Nothing that happens in this film can be taken in any way ‘literally,’ as part of a coherent or stable reality, except for those moments and images that are so fulsomely and nakedly symbolic that they are, in fact, ideas made literal. If you are not accustomed to watching movies that truly cannot be engaged with at the level of ‘plot,’ Megalopolis will be a shock to the system, and that’s okay. Calling a movie ‘avant-garde’ can sound scary or alienating, but I wouldn’t call this experiment an abrasive one; it wants to engage, and it wants to entertain, and it’s generous and open-hearted in a way that doesn’t feel like Coppola simply wants to narrow-cast to the most adventurous cinephiles in the audience.

That’s really the first thing to understand about Megalopolis, and it’s why the film feels as ‘weird’ as it does: It is both powerfully, at times uncomfortably earnest – optimistic and heartfelt and truly affectionate in how it envisions love and art and human potential – and deeply, absurdly playful and tongue-in-cheek. It is a movie that wants to overwhelm the audience with a great big bear hug of artistic excess even as it winks at us about just how silly the act of performing and making art can be. The film is actively negotiating an extremely stark push-and-pull in tone in each and every scene, and for every moment of discordance or discomfort that creates, I think it’s also a productive tension that, at the film’s best, results in a real joy radiating off the screen and into the audience.

Megalopolis is, at its essence, about the act of making art. It is also about architecture, and city planning, and politics, and the nature of civilization, and the concept of ‘utopia,’ and much of it is rooted in love and loss. But every theme Coppola introduces is ultimately collapsed into a central set of multivalent metaphors where protagonist Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) strives to create a new, self-sustaining, utopian city called ‘Megalopolis,’ from a new transforming material called ‘Megalon.’ Cesar wants to make things: new buildings, new clothing, new technologies, new opportunities. Everybody in Megalopolis is making things, for good or for ill: They’re making money, or making spectacle, or sewing chaos to make societal unrest. Sometimes, they’re making love, which leads to the literal making of life. Coppola is 85 years old, and there’s an old man’s perspective at work here that sees it all as one and the same, or perhaps as opposite sides of one big coin. We exist on earth to make things, whether or not we’re aware of it; the question, in the end, is whether the things we’ve made are good, and whether our creations – our buildings, our societies, our art, our children – can continue spurring further creativity after we are gone.

The metaphor is the movie. Megalopolis is a deeply reflexive work that is almost less ‘about’ the events in the fictional diegesis as it is about the act of its own creation. It is a film reveling in the vast possibilities that exist when a bunch of individuals get together to make some art: all the images that can be conjured, all the tones that can be invoked, all the styles of performance an actor can tap into, and all the unique interactions that can arise from an ensemble actively challenging themselves and each other. There is an extremely loose and improvisatory quality to the film, its episodic structure constructed from scenes that frequently feel like acting workshops or rehearsal exercises. Driver’s first big scene of spoken dialogue sees him reciting Shakespeare’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in its entirety, and in a later sequence, he and Nathalie Emmanuel pretend to play tug-of-war with an invisible rope; both were, apparently, rehearsal drills that Coppola filmed and ultimately chose to leave in the movie.

In my first year of my Ph.D. program, I took a course with a Professor who is a world-class filmmaker; she taught us about working with actors, and we studied all kinds of approaches to performance and rehearsal. Megalopolis feels like a primer in everything I learned in that class. The performances are uniformly inconsistent, both individually and as an ensemble, but at no point does that feel like a mistake to me. These are actors playing parts, quite literally; they are experimenting with tone and style and their own boundaries and limits, challenging themselves and one another before our eyes. We aren’t watching the kind of polished, finely-considered acting we usually see in movies that make it to theaters, where the director had a clear uniform tonal vision and every performer dialed in their work to the same overall wavelength. This is an experiment. This is a director creating space for his actors to try things out, standing back and letting the unevenness and unpredictability be the substance of what everyone is working towards.

Maybe that sounds pretentious, but I found it exhilarating. How often can you say you are surprised by acting choices in a movie? In great films, you usually will be, at least once or twice. But Megalopolis aims to surprise in every scene, and it constantly produces big laughs, or moments of unanticipated pathos, in letting the cast bounce off each other in this way. Some performers are ‘better’ at this than others. Laurence Fishburne is second-to-none at delivering straight-faced, mythical dialogue with his booming, beautiful voice while also feeling a little sly and playful; he did it in Hannibal and John Wick and he does it here, too. It’s a joy to behold. Driver himself is at once totally serious and a little bit silly; the same qualities that make him such a great guest performer on Saturday Night Live – an ostensible straight man who never overtly plays things as a joke but is riotously funny anyway – are on full display here, and I doubt there’s another actor in his age range who could pull off what Coppola is asking for. And I would shed blood to get Aubrey Plaza an Oscar for her work here, as the spectacularly named ‘Wow Platinum.’ She is the best part of Megalopolis, because she is the artist who most fulsomely embraces Coppola’s objective, swinging for the fences and constantly trying on new voices, styles, and techniques, and at every turn finding increasingly surprising depths of comedy and pathos. It is one of the most flat-out exciting performances I have seen in years, the kind of work where you lean forward in your seat every time she shows up, because you truly have no idea what she’s about to do, but you know it’s going to be amazing.

But even when the actors feel a bit less comfortable with the freedom Coppola has given them, it all works out anyway, because the clash of tone and technique is basically the point. It’s hard to tell how in on the joke Jon Voight is, for instance; he looks a little bit bewildered every time Coppola cuts to him, but he also produces enormous laughs every time he shows up, as an old rich patriarch who may or may not be a doddering fool (in his last scene, he’s dressed as Robin Hood and wielding a literal bow and arrow). Voight is one of several actors Coppola cast here not in spite of their controversial status within the industry (Voight is a MAGA lunatic and election denier, while Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman have both been credibly accused of assault and abuse), but because of it, out of a desire to actualize the film’s themes of people with different backgrounds and beliefs working together to create something. There is a larger debate to be had about the morality of hiring these specific people, but I see where Coppola is coming from; his intentions have been misreported as a pushback against ‘woke’ culture, but that’s not it. These casting choices are a provocation, but they’re a provocation that gets us thinking about the film’s vision of utopia as one where deeply imperfect people work together towards a more powerful world. These actors in this setting add to the kind of unwieldy creative cacophony Coppola seeks to create, and there is a real self-awareness to how he deploys these figures. LaBeouf is, frankly, playing the part he was born to play, a performatively ridiculous and deeply abrasive failson trying desperately to get attention any way he can, and who ultimately becomes a demagogue encouraging the citizenry to embrace the worst in themselves; it’s a pastiche of LaBeouf’s public behavior over the last decade and a thinly-veiled Donald Trump stand-in rolled into one, and it’s probably the best professional use of Shia LaBeouf I can imagine at this point in time.  

The city Cesar Catilina dreams of building is still a work in progress when the movie ends, and in every glimpse of it we see, the ‘Megalopolis’ of the title is a sprawling, awkward mess, a mass of oddly shaped metal and strange circuitous paths that seems a bit incomprehensible. In that way, it is a potent visualization of utopia, of a post-capitalist world – something we can only imagine, and which we have never actually seen, and which must therefore be messy – but it is also a synecdoche for the film itself. Megalopolis the film is also a sprawling, unwieldy mess, a mass of oddly shaped characters and plots and relationships that take strange circuitous paths, and are often incomprehensible. But just as Cesar urges the citizens of his world, Coppola’s film encourages us to shift our way of thinking away from considering a perfect, unified, stable state of ‘completion,’ towards the inevitably messy but also beautiful and profound act of making something new, of imagining an unknown future; and if we can do that, there is a whole other layer of beauty and meaning we realize we miss out on, in seeking the comfort and predictability of what is ‘finished,’ familiar, and stable.

Cesar’s ‘Megalopolis’ and Coppola’s Megalopolis are both, in short, projects about shifting the locus of meaning away from the finished product towards the act of people working together to get there. And just as a society cannot be engineered without its citizens, art cannot be made without an audience. We are part of the equation that is Megalopolis. There is a much-hyped moment in the film where Cesar is giving a press conference, and a person physically walks into the actual auditorium, steps up to a mic, and asks a question to the screen, to which Adam Driver then responds; it’s brief, and my theater kind of messed it up to the point that most of us hadn’t realized it even happened, but this quick bit of transmedial live theater tells us so much about how to engage with the film. The whole work is a gesture of participatory creativity. Cesar’s answer to the fourth-wall-breaking question is about how a ‘utopia’ only exists when people of all walks of life get together to share in an active, open discussion about the future. That describes the creation of art, too, which doesn’t exist unless someone is around to engage with it. The act of watching Megalopolis, and being bewildered by it, and sharing a confused glance with the person sitting next to you, and noticing how many people are getting up and leaving, while also feeling the silent camaraderie that develops in the ether between everyone who stays and sees it through – that is all part of what Megalopolis ‘is,’ too, as much as anything happening on screen.

When I consider why Megalopolis makes me smile, this is why: because the deeper it goes, and the stranger it becomes, the more I found myself aware of the basic, easily taken-for-granted act of watching a movie. Of laughing at it, and being moved by it, and tilting my head in confusion, and leaning forward in excitement, and opening my eyes wide in awe at a particularly spectacular image. There is a real, palpable magic in the fact that a film, any film, exists, and the fact that we get to sit together in a dark theater watching it unfold; but it’s a magic we can so easily forget about when we’ve done it enough times. The highest praise I can give Megalopolis, I think, is that in splattering creativity across the screen the way Jackson Pollack tossed paint against a canvas, we are reminded anew of the magic that fuels all levels of filmmaking, including the part we play as audience members.

Cesar Catilina can also control the flow of time, stopping it in its tracks with a simple verbal command to freeze the world around him. If we were judging this movie on the level of forward-moving narrative coherence, it would be a problem that this literal superpower goes unexplained and never enters into the central action in any meaningful way, such that I can get away with mentioning it nearly 3000 words into this review. But that’s not the kind of movie Megalopolis is, and the scene that really snapped the whole film into place for me comes about halfway through, after a trauma leaves Cesar unable to stop time, and he talks to love-interest Julia (Emmanuel) on the roof of the Chrysler Building-esque skyscraper he inhabits. Here, it becomes clear that controlling time is not only another metaphor, but a central part of the same grand metaphor that rolls through the entire movie: Making art – be it a painting, an architectural blueprint, a film, what have you – is, in some way, about stopping time, freezing the world in its place to observe it, internalize it, and represent it in some personalized fragment of its larger, endless context. Cesar losing his ability to stop time makes him the same as any artist experiencing a creative block. And like any frustrated artist, opening up to another person pries that block wide open. Taking Julia’s hand, and accepting her love, gives him inspiration, and lets him freeze time again, and even pass that ability on to her, because inspiration is contagious and art is, at heart, communal. I found this scene almost overwhelmingly beautiful; in its visuals, yes, that city expanse and orange-cast sunset sky criss-crossed by the steel beams Driver and Emmanuel walk across are incredible in composition and form. But it’s in the idea, and in its presentation, and in the context of uninhibited, celebratory creativity the film has thus far embraced, that I found this scene positively staggering.

There are several sequences like that over the course of the film. Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s large-format cinematography is stunning, and if ever a movie were made to be enjoyed in IMAX, this is it. The scope and clarity of the imagery is often overwhelming, and there are breathtaking compositions throughout, especially whenever the film abandons even the loose pretense of internal reality and goes for pure expressionism (like a shot with Giancarlo Esposito’s embattled Mayor Cicero sitting at his desk while it sinks into quicksand, or the scene where a nuclear-armed satellite falls into the city and casts vast shadows of interpretive dance onto the skyscrapers). Megalopolis is an incredible, and quintessential, big-screen experience, and as episodic and inconsistently paced as the film is, it continually crafts purely imagistic sequences that express complex ideas in such compelling fashion. A centerpiece stretch in the ‘Coliseum’ is its own avant-garde, plotless short film about the rich ruling class throwing a party of bodily excess and debauchery for the masses to enjoy, and it climaxes with Grace VanderWaal, as fictional teen pop star ‘Vesta Sweetwater,’ performing in mid-air, her bodily multiplying into several identical forms as the masses below bid on her virginity. The whole sequence is a startling encapsulation of the deadening excesses of late-stage capitalism, and this last bit in particular is an incredibly potent visualization of the way our culture treats famous young women and wars over their sexuality.  

In the pre-show discussion livestreamed from the New York Film Festival, moderator Dennis Lim asked Coppola “how it feels to finally be putting this film out into the world.” Coppola responded:

I had made a number of films when I was younger, which were in very different styles. One was very classical, one was very wild … and one was very theatrical, so I began to wonder ‘well, what is my style? Do I have one?’ So I took a period, after making the [The Rainmaker], just to think about the cinema and experiment, and also about acting … I took a period of just trying to learn about movies and what I was like, because I had started out in the theater, and eventually I came to the conclusion of what I wanted to do. And that was a Roman epic set in modern America, as Rome. And that's how it came about for me.^[1]

There is something deeply touching to me about a filmmaker as old and celebrated as Francis Ford Coppola approaching what will very likely be the last film of his life with the experimental spirit of an amateur. Megalopolis doesn’t so much feel like a ‘capstone’ to his career as a return to his roots, a film made to learn more about what it means to make films in the first place; coming from someone who has taught the world an immeasurable amount about the art of cinema, that feels humbling. The answer Coppola comes to, trying to figure out what ‘his’ own voice is after all this time, is that having a singular ‘voice’ is a lot less important than searching for that voice, and making one’s cast and crew active participants in that exploration, and inviting the audience to search along with him, to ask us to go back to our own roots as viewers and think about why we watch movies in the first place. There is a humility and a grace to that I find really powerful, one that actualizes the themes of this already deeply earnest movie in a way that makes it feel all the more heartfelt.

So yes. Megalopolis is, absolutely, a ‘mess.’ But I truly believe there’s beauty in that mess: in watching the actors trying on different tones and styles in real time, and in watching Coppola and his craftsmen think through big ideas imagistically without a clear end or obvious takeaway. If Megalopolis weren’t a mess, I don’t know what it would be, or what it would have to offer. I think a lot, when analyzing film, about how form matches function, and while I can imagine a more stable, coherent version of this story, where we spend more time digging into Cesar’s motivations, and learning about the mechanics of Megalon, and where there are fewer subplots and narrative dead-ends, I don’t think that version of the film would reflect the story’s thematic ambitions nearly as well. It would be giving us something neat and tidy when Cesar, and by extension Coppola, keep telling us that there is meaning in the mess, in the uncertainty, in the unpredictable fog of creative exultation. There is no formula for art. There is no objective ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Movies aren’t great because of how well they fulfill the expectations we bring into the theater with us. And there is no possibility of a ‘utopia’ ever existing if it is based on human experiences up to now. I don’t know if the Megalopolis Coppola finally made, after decades of trying, is the best possible version of the movie; but I am 100% sure it is the most honest expression of the ideas the film wholeheartedly believes in, and getting to be a participant in this creative experience is, to me, a gift in and of itself.

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^[1] From the official transcript of the event provided to press afterwards, with my own edits for clarity.