‘Megalopolis’ Review: Empire State of Mind

For the first time in a great many years, I had a series of dreams about a film the night after seeing it. I dreamt about the Manhattan skyline, tinted in glowing amber, as if Gordon Willis were still trying to lens a Francis Ford Coppola film from the great beyond. I dreamt of the Roman Senate convening at Madison Square Garden. I dreamt of futuristic femme fatales sleeping their way into the gaudy mansions of the wealthy and infirm, of ghostly women pregnant with their phantom children, of riots against living marble statues too exhausted with humanity to put up another 2000-year fight, of the techno-organic future twisting its way around the heart of Manhattan like vines, of time stopping. I dreamt of empires.

These dreams were bizarre, fragmented, and incoherent, but they were also beautiful, ambitious, and hopeful. I’ve dreamt about movies before after watching them too late before bed, and those dreams were always abstract approximations of the movies I had seen. But my dreams of Megalopolis were absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s easy, then, to imagine Coppola having come up with his film’s fantastical scenes from his own dreams.

There’s a main story at play here, about Adam Driver’s tortured, preternatural urban planner, Caesar Catalina, trying to realize his grand ambitions for a City of the Future building brick by unnatural brick over the corpses of rich and poor alike. But there are also a dozen other stories, from Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Cicero accusing Catalina of murdering his wife, to the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), falling for Catalina anyway and giving up her former party-girl lifestyle to support him, to Shia Leboeuf’s hateful little genderfluid goblin, Clodio Pulcher, trying to manipulate the lower classes into tearing the city apart, to high-society gossip reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) power-screwing her way to the top. And so on.

Aside from maybe one plot thread about a virgin, Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal), being outed as less innocent as she seems during a performance, traditional escalation, structure, and payoff aren’t among Coppola’s concerns. It’s certainly possible that some of the film’s plots are vestigial leftovers from God only knows how many iterations of a script that Coppola has been toiling over for decades. At one point during the climax, Catalina screams from the top of one of his alien structures that it’s time to have a debate about the future, which is a concern that Coppola shares. But this is less of a debate than a TED Talk with a $120 million visualizer laid on top of it. We’re being talked at about the future through artfully indirect means.

There’s a hallucinatory beauty and admirable sentiment behind that talk. Indeed, the film’s biggest positive is its hopeless optimism—the kind of optimism that can only be espoused by someone who intimately knew post-war America, when anything was possible, and took its fearlessness to heart. Megalopolis is a film artful enough to fully commit and make good on the idea of America as the new Roman Empire, though it’s perhaps more accurate that Coppola conceives of his city as every empire, what with the production design taking cues from the rot of opulence across the centuries, from the marble, silk, and olive branches of Rome, to the Art Deco of the 1920s and ’30s, to the messy club culture-aesthetics of the present.

The film accentuates the failure of this particular empire by weaving in allusions to Shakespearean tragedy—myriad tales of good intentions, namely those of powerful men, failing miserably, even hammering it home with snippets of Latin dialogue and quoting Shakespeare directly. But whether willfully or not, Megalopolis just cannot square its bull-headed industrial optimism with the exploitation, inequality, and roiling intolerance that any well-intentioned savior would have to fight through at every stratus of American life. The film’s vision of how captains of industry could make life better for the rest of us is, to be perfectly frank, the conceit of someone who would sell off ownership of a winery to make a blockbuster-budgeted film about how the privileged are the only ones who can build a better nation.

There’s no malice on the film’s part in how it delivers that message. It’s more that it’s the byproduct of optimism in a cynical age. There’s an undeniable allure to Coppola’s willingness to say “fuck it” to logic and cohesion, basking in the feeling of a golden utopian future rather than conceiving of the mechanisms needed to facilitate it in lurid detail. Even beyond the film’s astonishing visuals, committed performances, and breathless staging, there’s worth in its willingness to crawl out of every hole that its bourgeois menagerie of characters dig for themselves into a better tomorrow, and does it while never once questioning the how.

And make no mistake, if Megalopolis, as many speculate, marks the end of Coppola’s career as a filmmaker, it flourishes in that finality, having held back or compromised nothing. It’s a film that operates without limits, and desperately believes that there’s a limitless world out there for us to explore. Certainly it leaves audiences just a tiny bit more willing to imagine a better world. Much like the child that we end Megalopolis focused on, it’ll likely just leave you confused at first. But, hopefully, at least you’ll go to bed after it’s over and dream.