Screens/Reviews

What: Movie, 138 mins.
When: Fri., Sept. 27
Where: In theatres
Genre: Drama
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled epic, Megalopolis, was infamous long before its premiere at Cannes this spring. After decades of development, funding challenges (Coppola consolidated some of his wineries to foot the production bill), controversial or simply questionable casting choices, and dispatches from confused critics, Megalopolis has finally arrived on our screens. And in some regards, it does not disappoint. It is a singular, uncompromising vision from one of modern cinema’s greatest directors and an uneven, sometimes incoherent smorgasbord that takes on more than it can reasonably carry. Whether this balancing act is thrilling or tiring depends on the viewer and, from experience, can change from scene to scene.

Megalopolis is set in New Rome, an empire on the verge of collapse and torn between an ineffectual mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), a powerful capitalist dynasty run by a bumbling titan (Jon Voight) and his unscrupulous journalist wife Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and a troubled, visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who wants to build a utopia named Megalopolis inside the city. That is already plenty of plot, but there is also a romance between Catilina and Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) the mayor’s party-girl daughter, a populist political uprising led by Catilina’s jealous, hedonistic cousin (Shia LeBouef) and a mystery surrounding the death of Catilina’s wife. The film feels like two Shakespeare tragedies stuffed into a sci-fi film.

This overstuffed approach extends to the film’s design, which draws from Ancient Rome, Art Deco and visions of the near future. The costumes and sets are sumptuous and beautiful, and the scenes shot in front of an LED screen have an uncanny beauty. But this retro-futurism extends beyond the design: While the film is innovative in many ways, it is retrograde in others (the gender critique in a subplot about a virginal pop star falls flat considering how invested the film is in the Madonna/whore dichotomy between Cicero and Platinum).

But if the film’s reach exceeds its grasp, at least it is grasping for more than most contemporary Hollywood films dream of. Coppola juggles themes of grief, corporate corruption, scientific progress, political polarization, the commodification of celebrity and sexuality, and gentrification among many others with tones that range from Elizabethan tragedy to sketch comedy.

Some of the images on offer are stunning: a sequence where Catilina pursues the floating ghost of his wife through a constantly shifting cityscape, trying to catch onto the hem of her dress looks like something out of a Georges Méliès film and is made even more poignant by the recent passing of Coppola’s wife, Eleanor. Others feel more run-of-the-mill, like Megalopolis itself, which looks like countless other sci-fi utopias that imagine that we all want to live inside a tree.

I can’t deny that Megalopolis doesn’t work or that its sheer passion and inventiveness don’t prevent the watching experience from being a little exhausting. But it can also be said that there is nothing else like it in cinemas today … whether you think that’s a good thing or not.