Saying how we’ve been looking at a fascinating crossroads in the evolution of cinema often comes along with the many underlying challenges artists would potentially face. While many experts have echoed this fear, only a few veteran filmmakers have openly embraced the possibilities that the future holds. Among these is director Francis Ford Coppola, who’s always been notorious for challenging the conventions of the art form to tell effective narratives. His stories often invoke different epochs and inundations of the complex time around us, laced with the kind of entrancing imagery that successfully confounds images into ideas.
Like some other postmodernist filmmakers in their late moviemaking careers, Coppola, at 85, in his latest feature, attempts to question our civilization’s present ethos by transfixing to a metamodern lens. After over 40 years of idly fantasizing about this passion project, “Megalopolis” hits the screens at a moment when his chosen medium is figuring to find a way forward. Naturally, the multiplicity of the world around, which increasingly seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse, is swaddled into it. It’s no wonder, then, that he channels the very philosophy he’s upheld through his filmmaking career through Adam Driver’s lead.
He plays Cesar Catalina, basically a dark and jittery hodgepodge of a Silicon Valley guru and Robert Moses. The film opens with him on the brink of an imposing clock tower. The catch, however, is that he can control time – a kind of altruistic variation of the ancient Cataline that enables the filmmaker to reverberate his own mind map. This Cesar dreams of constructing a utopian ‘city-school’ through his much debated newly discovered technology atop the ruins of New Rome (essentially Manhattan). However, he struggles to put his trust in that promise, which amplifies when challenged by the city mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Furthering the conflict is the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a hard-partying med-school dropout who insists Cesar give her a job.
There’s also Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a gold-digging seductress and part-time news anchor who’d do anything to (re)direct her sexual attention to a different member of New Rome’s volatile ruling class. As Julia becomes Cesar’s closest personal advisor and soon his intimate muse, the city must find its footing before the sociopolitical upheaval out on the streets sinks it down.
Pouring from countless great thinkers who’ve found their way into the rich index of Coppola’s most influential films, “Megalopolis” mulches them together into its hyper-vivid reimagination of a utopia, but not without reflecting on where it ceases to become one. Instead of building upon genius, the movie merely draws upon its influences. Just like it tosses around quotes from Marcus Aurelius at several key points – letting the characters be the voice of the writer’s philosophy instead of informing it through the narrative – the film refuses to provide any substantial beats to stave off the cynicism and despair its characters (and potentially we) so indifferently bathe in.
The multiple directorial choices here underline the same. The sheer amount of static experimentation Coppola toys with the camera makes it even more so fascinating, even if the characters never really seem to behave beyond their allegorical presets. The string of excellently put-together montages consumes the film’s second act, which also becomes reminiscent of someone like Godard and the kinds of films he made late in his career. The flip side of this is because the film remains so enveloped in the Americana of it all (like his films often do) for so much of its runtime, the ultimate call for humanism by the end rings hollow. As mentioned earlier, Driver’s Cesar Catalina becomes a vessel to echo the maker’s concerns and striking optimism regarding what the future entails. But the fierceness comes without any conventional storytelling structure baked into the film’s DNA.
Like the protagonist, Coppola has often been consumed by the catastrophic setbacks he’s endured as an artist. The scale “Megalopolis” functions on, then, becomes more of a canvas for imbuing personal statements than anything. One would, however, be wrong to dismiss it as a case of hyper self-indulgence, not because veteran experts like him somehow get a license for it after a point in their career. But because making art for oneself requires fearlessness and prowess more than anything. Self-financing the 120$ million budget of the movie comes across more as a testament to the viscerality and cathartic quality of the medium than as a pretentious outroar.
Coppola’s numerous interviews emphasize how his films pick acclaim decades after their release. But attempting to put “Megalopolis” in the same category would be reductionist to his early filmography. That’s because it lacks any sort of provocative vigor that made those movies so striking and fascinating to ruminate upon. Most of those films left people spellbound and confused, not because they were shabbily put together. It was the audaciousness of those films that left critics back in the day puzzled, not necessarily the lack of a coherent storytelling narrative that was so inherently built into the template.
While billing itself as a fable, “Megalopolis” enabled itself to adhere to the narrative simplicity and dialed-up moralizing the medium requires. But it ironically tramples down its vision of moribund civilization into a magnum fiasco. The point of any fable isn’t whether it ages well or not. It’s that they remain relevant, not despite but because of how they’re bound to make narrative and thematic sense in a continuum. This one doesn’t.
![Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive [2022] Netflix Review: A stunningly-shot documentary about a freediver](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Hold-Your-Breath-The-Ice-Dive-2022-768x480.webp)
![Inside Llewyn Davis [2013] Review: Wings of folk singer’s desire](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/insidellewyndavis-012.jpg)
