Megalopolis Review – Francis Ford Coppola’s Epic Failure | drama films

YOne might think that Francis Ford Coppola supposedly first came up with the idea for a film that had been in development for so long Megalopolis Began in 1977 and began writing in 1983 – and at such considerable personal expense – Coppola sold a vineyard to partly finance it himself – would have something significant to say. But for all its impressive visual ambitions, philosophical window dressing and choice literary references, this is a work of glaring emptiness.

The film is a flashy retro-futuristic madness that combines Ken Russell-esque kitsch with arrogant smugness. He presents his central conceit—that modern America is following the template of ancient Rome—with a reverence that the idea doesn’t really deserve. Coppola carves his opening speech on a stone tablet in a classical font, and then he has Laurence Fishburne deliver the words, sounding as much like God himself as possible. America, Laurence rumbles meaningfully, is, like the Roman Empire, destined to fall through the greed and hubris of a few power-mad men.

The story’s setting is recognizably Manhattan – the Chrysler Building gets more screen time than some of the supporting characters – but in Coppola’s version the city is renamed New Rome and features a cast of characters affixed with vaguely imperial-sounding names and as such dressed up when they stumbled out of a fetish toga party. The town’s mayor is Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) – Francis to his close friends – but although Coppola shares a name with the character, it is likely that Coppola will be more closely aligned with the film’s central figure, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). , identified. Cicero is a small-minded skeptic who is more concerned with increasing his power and influence than embracing radical changes that could improve the lives of the townspeople. Cesar, on the other hand, is a radical dreamer and visionary, a restless genius whose ambition to create Megalopolis is too wild and brilliant for mere mortals to understand. Megalopolis is a futuristic, shape-shifting metropolis built from a newly synthesized, sustainable material that promises to fundamentally change the fabric of society. Not least because large parts of the existing city would have to be destroyed. Oh, and – small detail – Cesar also has the ability to stop time at will.

Cesar and Cicero are sworn enemies; A central point of contention between them is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter. When we first meet her, in a Studio 54-style nightclub full of gyrating hotties licking cocaine off each other’s tits, she’s a party girl who’s always just one nipple tassel incident away from a public scandal. (If Coppola could stop time, he probably would have done so back when it was still acceptable for 70% of a film’s female cast to be gyrating uber-girls in Bacofoil bras.) Julia is played by Clodio (Shia LaBeouf, minus the eyebrows and without self-respect), the obscenely rich scion of the Crassus banking empire. But she is fascinated by Cesar, who happens to be Clodio’s cousin. Meanwhile, Cesar has an on-off relationship with an ambitious Wall Street reporter named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, whose vampire-comic femme fatale is one of the film’s more entertaining elements).

One of the biggest challenges for a filmmaker is to convey genius in a cinematic way. Megalopolis avoids the most old-fashioned clichés (a flurry of scribbled equations and diagrams on walls, windows and other flat surfaces), but Coppola’s approach is hardly better: Cesar’s free jazz brainstorming session with zany antics about human pyramids is so humbling that it’s a risk Chewing your fingers off because of second-hand embarrassment.

The film is not without merits. The design departments – production and especially costume – did their best, reveling in an opulent, lush color palette of regal dark reds and forest greens. And there is the sheer scope of the ambition on display: I would rather look at a picture that shoots into the sky and misses than one that advances cautiously in the safe zone. However, this fails on many and different levels.

The performances are wildly uneven, with Driver and Plaza bravely doing their best, while Jon Voight as bank owner Hamilton Crassus III mugs like a panto villain, and Dustin Hoffman is barely present in the film. But the main problem is an incoherent script that seems in thrall to the very monstrous elite the film is trying to skewer. Case in point: At one moment in the picture, a satellite falls from the sky, hitting the city directly and causing, as we can imagine, untold devastation and misery. Kind of a big deal, you would think. But the event is dismissed in some scenes as a passing aside and, like everything in the story, viewed from a critical position in the corridors of power. For a film constantly concerned with the common good and a new utopian future, this may be the least egalitarian piece of storytelling I’ve ever seen. The film goes out of its way to describe them as rednecks, but we only see the town’s common people when they’re either staring through a fence in silent, uncomprehending awe or when they’re rioting.

For viewers looking for a Coppola-directed story about power struggles in New York within an Italian-origin dynasty, let’s just say there are better options.

In British and Irish cinemas