I’ve decided I do think Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a good movie. I think that puts me in the distinct minority of reviewers. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a mess! Everything they say about it is right. I just don’t think it really matters. This movie is like nothing else; it is only itself.  

Let’s get through the description quickly—or as quickly as possible, because the 138-minute runtime is bulging with an impossible number of plot points, some of which are necessary for explaining why it’s worth seeing. Megalopolis is a pastiche of Sallust’s Conjuratio Catalinae set in a fictionalized version of New York called, for the sake of Coppola’s fiction, New Rome. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a scientist-cum-architect working for New Rome’s building authority under the administration of Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, cast in part, I think, because he looks vaguely like Barack Obama), who is deeply hostile to Catilina’s revolutionary ideas. Catilina wants to undertake a new building program, “Megalopolis,” which will be sort of ambiguously high-tech, ecological, and utopian, correcting the ills of civilization as it exists. Move over, Le Corbusier. He is also very rich—nephew to the richest banker in the city, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight in what may be the crowning performance of his weird life)—and a total party animal who may have killed his wife. Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), becomes Catilina’s personal assistant and, eventually, lover. Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), jealous of Julia, joins forces with the television personality Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), one of Catalina’s spurned lovers, to take down his tortured genius cousin.  

A lot of complicated and somewhat difficult-to-follow antics ensue—in this, Megalopolis not so far off from Sallust—but the upshot is, despite Clodio forming a fascistic street movement and Platinum messing with his bank account, Catilina wins over the losers and haters (including Hizzoner), has a baby with Julia, gets to build Megalopolis, and launches New Rome into a future where everything looks kind of like Hudson Yards, New York’s newish development around 34th and 8th.  

Coppola isn’t really doing a sci-fi “retelling” of the Conjuratio. He’s doing something older, medieval even—an allegory using classical characters.

Cinema-wise, Coppola is hunting large game, above all Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—massive cityscapes, dreamy double exposures, sexy art-nouveau brassieres made of copper, the works. There is also, of course, the name. I think Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 cut of Metropolis is a distinct strand of influence. But there’s also some Fellini in there, especially Satyricon and Amarcord; The Matrix is in there, too. (Catilina has the power to stop time, which is entirely unimportant for the development of the plot and of unclear symbolic import.) Brazil is in there. Perhaps most strangely, there is a lot of 9/11-era news footage upstream of Megalopolis. Most strikingly, Clodio’s address to his incipient mob-following is based on George W. Bush’s megaphone speech amid the rubble of the Twin Towers.  

Coppola isn’t really doing a sci-fi “retelling” of the Conjuratio. He’s doing something older, medieval even—an allegory using classical characters, something akin to the Matter of Rome romances. Hence he follows the classical models in conflating Catiline and Caesar in one character, he simplifies and enhances Cicero’s role, and so on. Allegories usually have a point, though, and it is here that Coppola’s project is most obscure. Metropolis ends, sappily, with a title card touting a new concord of the orders, that common kernel of fascism, social and Christian democracy, and New Deal liberalism: “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.” Megalopolis’s first intertitle declares that the movie is “A Fable,” and its final title card has a squishy “pledge of allegiance” to the concept of humanity. Democracy and discussion seem very important to Coppola. “When we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia,” Catilina says. There are references to Emerson and Rousseau and the usual vague atmospheric liberalism that goes with such citations, but what does it all actually mean? 

It’s hard to say. For one thing, weirdly absent from New Rome is any particular grievance among the lower orders—a difference from Sallust’s land-dispossessed, newly urban underclass or Lang’s brutalized factory workers. The greed of New Rome’s upper crust gets the workout, but the on-screen misery of the New Roman on the street is limited to a drive through an ugly neighborhood to a house where Catilina goes to pretend to visit his dead wife. (Don’t ask.) We get the obligatory garbage-can fires and some CGI’d statues of Justice writhing around in non-specific discomfort and/or illness, but there is no Dickensian plunge into the real life of the poor. Nor do the modern bugbears of climate, race, or sex make any explicit appearance; nobody is losing his home from a rising East River, nor is there any put-upon subaltern group whose wretchedness underwrites the system. The paupers of New Rome seem to be suffering from a sort of nondescript poverty and general bummed-outness about not getting dealt in on the debauchery of the wealthy.  

Sure, Clodio’s street gangs sport swastikas and Black Suns and Confederate battle flags (and red baseball caps, of course), but we don’t see a whole lot of racist action out of them—and, besides, they are in this telling the oppressed class. The New Roman bourgeoises, the putative “real” bad guys, seem free-thinking and agreeable, if kind of degenerate. Racism and fascism are of course bad—there are the obligatory film-reel excerpts of Hitler and Mussolini, and Clodio’s demise at the hands of his own mob comes upside-down, just like the Duce’s—but they have become symbols or markers of evil rather than names for substantive wrongs. A “fascist” is a popular leader who doesn’t have the juice to fix society, by Coppola’s lights. 

Instead, he thinks society must be changed by a genius hero-leader who brings his special insights into science and human nature to bear in building the society of the future, which will merge high technology, ecology, and ancient human social forms. (When asked what institutions he’ll keep in the future, he answers, “Marriage.” Curiously, there don’t seem to be any married gay couples in New Rome.) By pure force of personality, he overcomes his own weaknesses, charms the better sort of establishment characters, and, in the end, dazzles the people into ceding their power to him by acclaim. That is to say, Coppola’s idealized future scenario looks a lot like, well, actual fascism. 

I realize this is beginning to sound like a pan, even though I said at the outset that this review wouldn’t be. Sure, the message is incoherent, and the plot makes no sense. But the thing looks terrific, like nothing you’ve ever seen; the script is stilted and, in many places, very bad, but Coppola gets amazing performances from his actors. You just believe that this is just how people talk and act in this world. (Catilina’s first real lines are a recitation of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which sets an expectation for a different speech register.) They sound like the actors in a silent movie if you could hear them. That is a neat effect. Esposito delivers a translation of the First Catilinarian, and it is believable, even rousing. Who else is leading anything like a frontal assault on naturalistic acting and script-writing? No serious contenders come to mind.  

Coppola has reportedly been playing with the script for this thing since 1988; in the face of an uphill battle at the box office, he ended up having to fund it in large part from his own fortune. Is Megalopolis the movie I’d make in the winter years of my life, at my own expense, in the face of nearly four decades of adversity? Probably not. But I have also never made a movie, let alone The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Conversation, or Apocalypse Now. Megalopolis is flawed, maybe even failed, but I enjoyed it immensely, think it has some flashes of genius, and intend to see it again as soon as possible. It is certainly different. I also wonder whether, like Apocalypse Now, Megalopolis lost a great deal of footage to the cutting room, including a skeleton key for the interpretation. The entire point of Apocalypse Now is made in a French planter’s monologue about the relation of a people to a land, which did not make it into the theatrical release. Is there an analogous scene for Megalopolis out there somewhere?

That is to say, I earnestly hope there’s a director’s cut: Megalopolis Redux. I’ll watch that twice, too.