Megalopolis is an Ambitious Art Film So Bad It Made Me Hate Ambition, Art and Film

I hated, hated, hated this movie.

I recently wrote a blog post about how Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed one hundred and twenty million dollar comeback film Megalopolis is the kind of risky, audacious provocation that I was born to write about. 

That might seem hyperbolic. It’s not. I’m tempted to write that I have spent the last seventeen years writing about movies like Megalopolis for My World of Flops. That’s why I’m confident that I can vent my rage at Coppola’s unforgivable insult at length here and still have thousands more words of condemnation left when I cover it for My World of Flops in the near future. My rage will be even more informed and granular then. 

But the truth is that I have NEVER seen a movie like Megalopolis, though it does often feel like a failed attempt to recreate the surreal magic of Southland Tales. Even more devastatingly, the Godfather director made a version of Atlas Shrugged that’s more pretentious than the recent trilogy but every bit as heavy-handed. 

Megalopolis is unique. It’s original. It is audacious. It’s risky. It’s personal. It takes wild chances. It’s also unwatchable. Coppola made it for himself and himself alone. 

To put things in Roger Ebert terms, I hated, hated, hated this movie. I had to resist the urge to stand up and dramatically declare, “Fuck you, you stupid fucking movie. Fuck you, Francis Ford Coppola, for making this stupid fucking movie. Fuck you, capitalism, for making it possible for a man to waste one hundred and twenty million dollars on this horseshit. And fuck you, wine drinkers of the world, for giving Coppola a chance to realize his crappy dream.”

Coppola pretentiously presents Megalopolis as a “fable,” but it’s really a crazed hagiography about a towering figure it depicts as a God among men and an obsessive genius single-handedly creating a better world through his ferocious will. It’s actually about a dude who fucking sucks: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). 

I haven’t seen a protagonist lionized this shamelessly since Reagan a month ago. Reagan merely depicted its protagonist as Christ-like in his selflessness and unerring moral compass. Megalopolis portrays its protagonist as better than Jesus. Jesus wishes he were Cesar Catilina. On his best day, Jesus wasn’t half the man or God Cesar is on his worst day. 

As a heroic, obsessive, Nobel Prize-winning individualist at war with a soft society corrupted by compromise and cynical calculation, Cesar is also unmistakably and obnoxiously a surrogate for its writer-director-financier. It’s easy to read Megalopolis as a self-aggrandizing metaphor for its own creation and its creator’s famously prickly, complicated, and fraught relationship with the Hollywood establishment. 

In a moment that, remarkably, isn’t more pretentious or ridiculous than the rest of the movie, the mother of Cesar’s baby (who I’m pretty sure will be a messiah of some sort) says that if it’s a boy, they’ll name it Francis. 

An eighty-five-year-old man has created a bizarre fantasia where he would be symbolically reborn as the baby of a man-god clearly modeled after himself. 

But there’s also a lot of John Galt in Cesar and Ayn Rand in Megalopolis. So, so much, Ayn Rand. There’s even a fair amount of Twitter’s current owner in this travesty. 

Though Musk and Coppola are not aligned politically, Musk could watch Megalopolis and think, not without reason, that its ultimate message is that, if anything, Musk is not powerful or wealthy enough, considering his single-minded obsessiveness and fever to kick-start evolution himself. 

One of our greatest filmmakers has seemingly taken inspiration from one of our worst authors and philosophers. Usually, impressionable souls fall under the sway of Objectivism when they’re sophomores in college who don’t know any better, not when they’re octogenarians who’ve won five Academy Awards and every other accolade known to man. 

Cesar doesn’t just have God-like powers metaphorically. He is literally as powerful as God in that he can stop time. He’s in a furious hurry to not just change the world but save the world with a miraculous building material that won him that Nobel Prize. Also, the film doesn’t come right out and say it, but the dude must have an absolutely massive dong. 

Cesar is at war with an establishment epitomized by Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Coppola has coaxed career-worst performances from some of our greatest actors. The performances often seem intentionally bad for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Esposito’s corrupt stooge is every bit as cartoonishly evil and misguided as the collectivist arch-villains in Ayn Rand’s novels. 

The Mayor hates Cesar. And, of course, envies him because he’s so better than him in every way. We know that the Mayor is a bad guy because everywhere he goes, people boo him. 

The mayor’s gorgeous daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) can’t resist what the film delusionally insists are its protagonist’s James Dean-level charisma, Einstein-level genius, Steve Jobs-like gift for business and technology and Francis Ford Coppola-like drive and obsessiveness.  

Julia goes to work for her powerful father’s biggest enemy and falls hopelessly in love with his idealism and unstoppable will to remake the universe in his own image. 

As a preeminent super-genius, Cesar must endure a world unworthy of him and enemies within and without his own family. 

Shia LeBeouf plays Clodio Pulcher, Cesar’s resentful and envious cousin, as a shape-shifting trickster and the film’s Jar Jar Binks. The disgraced former child star’s performance is wildly inventive. We never know what he’ll look, sound, or act like. We only know that it will be so unbelieving irritating that it will make us want to punch him in the face, hard, and just keep punching. 

Clodio, Cesar, and Clodio all have amorous relations with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a Warholian celebrity famous for being famous and for her ferocious sexuality. The sensuality here, alas, is that of a horny grandpa lusting after a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. 

Wow comes off as a pale imitation of Krysta Now, the enterprising porn star/pop star Sarah Michelle Gellar unforgettably played in Southland Tales and taught us all that teen horniness is not a crime. Wow, and Krysta Now’s name even rhyme, after a fashion.  

LeBeouf should be re-cancelled for his performance here, which is a crime against art and consequently very much in keeping with the rest of the film. 

Coppola has made an ambitious art film that made me hate ambition, art and film. 

The similarly out of favor Jon Voight contributes to the amateurish insanity with a feeble, confused performance as Hamilton Crassus III, the head of a huge bank and  a Donald Trump-like apogee of rancid wealth and privilege. 

Voight has a hard time saying words that are not worshipful praise for Donald Trump these days. That helps explain his buffoonish performance. 

There are many more characters and subplots but none of them matter. Megalopolis is a fearless, inventive and fearlessly inventive film. If I might paraphrase from Roger Ebert’s pan of Pootie Tang, it’s one of those experiments where the room smells like swamp gas and all the mice are dead.

Jon Voight and Shia LeBeouf enjoy a laugh about being unemployable due to their terrible personalities.Coppola never stops introducing new ideas. He’s manic in his mania to do something different and bold and new. The law of averages would seem to suggest that something in Megalopolis would succeed. It does not. It’s one hundred and thirty eight exhausting minutes of audacious ideas that individually and collectively never work. 

If Coppola wasn’t able to make Megalopolis I’d think it was a shame, if not an outright tragedy, that an artist of Coppola’s stature wasn’t able to make a deeply personal labor of love he’d been working on for decades. 

Unfortunately, Coppola was able to make his movie in violent defiance of God’s will of the will of the universe. Now, I think it’s a shame that an artist of Coppola’s stature was able to make a deeply personal labor of love he’d been working on for decades.

As an unmade project Megalopolis radiates infinite promise. It’s quite possibly the most audacious, wild and ambitious film Coppola has ever made. That includes Apocalypse Now. 

It’s what I like to refer to as a shitty miracle in that everything had to come together in a very specific way to result in an unwatchable embarrassment of a film with no redeeming facets whatsoever. Coppola has made a maximalist epic where nothing works. 

Suffering through Megalopolis made me appreciate the wisdom and judgment of every studio executive who rejected the script and Robert Evans. 

I can see Kid Hollywood up in heaven chuckling with delight at his frenemy’s epic folly, thinking, “Francis, you got to cut it with artsy fartsy crap! That plays in Europe, maybe! This is Hollywood, not Cannes! Put on a show! Give the people what they want: some laughs, a little danger, a lot of sex! The sulky broad with the gams, her I like, but the rest is a total clown show!” 

I don’t know what Dustin Hoffman is doing here. He does not seem to know either, other than giving one of the worst, most mannered performances of his career. I’d rather be locked inside Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium for life than have to see this turkey a second time. I will, however, see this a second time when I write it up for My World of Flops. Please honor my sacrifice by subscribing to this newsletter. Become a paid subscriber, and you can keep forcing me to watch movies like this and Reagan.

Coppola’s dialogue is defiantly stylized and non-naturalistic. No actual human being in the history of the universe has ever talked like the characters do here. It’s not supposed to be naturalistic, but everything isn’t supposed to land with a thud and a clang. 

It takes a great filmmaker to make something this awful. Megalopolis is a product of the same relentless drive that led to the creation of Apocalypse Now but instead of great art, Coppola’s relentless determination has resulted in a disaster of historic proportions. 

Here’s the thing: making movies is hard. It takes a lot out of you. It’s not for everyone. Mr. Coppola is primarily a vintner these days. It saddens me to say it, but his ultimate destiny at this point might be making sparkling wine for Karens to drink at brunch and not manic movie manifestos. 

Half Star out of Five