It’s been a week since I’ve seen Francis Ford Coppola’s latest epic sci-fi drama, and I’m still debating whether it was a masterpiece or not; but I’ve also been wondering if this binary way of thinking is really the best way to approach films. Maybe it’s less a matter of ‘good or bad’ and more a decision of whether or not a movie resonated with you. I keep hearing people say this movie might be getting panned now, but in a few years it’ll be considered a masterpiece. But what if, right now, we chose to appreciate this enormous swing from one of the best filmmakers to ever do it? What if a movie about an architect and a corrupt mayor fighting over whether to dare and build utopia or maintain business as usual is the earnest cure for a generation of moviegoers poisoned by irony and alienation?
I’m not saying the script is perfect, but I also don’t think it has to be. Coppola throws a lot at the wall, and what sticks is incredible. What doesn’t is still compelling. For a film with such a developed visual language, it’s actually written in a very theatrical, even Shakespearean manner. The tension stems mostly from expositional dialogue and characters betraying each other, playing with viewer expectations by creating what seems like a tragedy. There are even some monologues lifted directly from Hamlet. Each treachery these characters commit in their quest for power heightens the stakes just a bit more each time, until we grasp the real scope of the matter at hand, how the fate of society itself hangs in the balance. It reminds me of Baz Luhrmann’s films in that the movie itself is successful in what it’s trying to achieve, it’s just a matter of whether or not that works for you. I think a lot of viewers will find its earnestly utopian nature to be initially off-putting, but it’s wonderful to have a film wear its heart on its sleeve. Audiences are tired of films that refuse to take themselves seriously (or at least I am), and the way this movie is so ruthlessly optimistic about humanity’s ability to work together and overcome any obstacle makes it feel like Coppola’s being very vulnerable from behind the camera. I think this—along with all the Shakespeare baked into its DNA—is what made the fourth wall’s pliability feel purposeful, as though Coppola were taking a moment to address us directly from the bottom of his heart. It endears us even more to Cesar and his goals of improving the world, making us want to take part in that process, which is ultimately the goal. To paraphrase Donald Barthelme: the point of writing about the world is to change it. Coppola embodies that more here than perhaps anywhere else in his storied career.
This seems to have rubbed off on the actors, who each threw themselves into these roles with reckless abandon. Regardless of all that’s been said, there are line deliveries and physical performances here that I can honestly say I’ve never seen before, which is worth something. There’s been a lot of noise about how Driver serves as a kind of grounding character in this work, his role being a lot less colorful than everyone else, and I think that’s true on multiple levels. This lack of exuberance, at least in comparison to his co-stars, makes Driver’s Cesar a kind of everyman, someone who we can all project ourselves onto and identify with. That being said, I feel like Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum really stole the film for me. She brings a kind of cold edge shown in her leading role as Emily the Criminal (2022) that works when her character is scheming behind the scenes; but when the TV cameras are on she also commits to being a technicolor personality that doesn’t seem out of place in the society of spectacle Coppola is building onscreen. All these hammy performances, along with the over-the-top choices in set design and lighting, create a sense of the hyper-real, allowing us just enough distance from today’s society to de-familiarize our problems, hopefully making them more open to constructive critique. With such an obvious and earnest message, I’m surprised to see so many spectators and seasoned critics seemingly missing the point.
Despite decades of being ahead of the curve, and over forty years of working on this picture, people somehow think there are parts of this film that Coppola somehow overlooked or did on accident. I’ve even heard people say this might be ‘the worst blockbuster in history,’ an incredible statement to make in the same year as Deadpool & Wolverine or, more recently, Joker: Folie à Deux. Again, what the film is trying to do might not work for you personally, but to say that makes it a ‘bad film’ (whatever that means), is simply dishonest. So much care was put into the visuals here, with Coppola exhibiting his trademark use of dissolves much in the vein of Sergei Eisenstein, and the script is so direct that I really don’t see how one could misinterpret his intentions so cynically. Society is clearly still recovering from the Marvel-induced haze that has apparently wrecked our ability to think critically about visual texts. Maybe that’s why I’ve heard people call a certain scene in this film ‘grotesquely misogynist,’ despite everything from the logic of the movie itself to the camera angles and music used in said scene to explicitly be deriding the sexism shown. These reviews matter, because they largely shape how audiences will receive this movie. To choose this self-financed passion project from one of the best filmmakers in history as the one to pan feels irresponsible. These are the same critics that will continue complaining that no one is funding original movies anymore. Maybe this need to say whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ along with studio pressure to have a sure-thing at the box office, is why that is.
Fredric Jameson famously said that the reason art matters is because before revolution can manifest in reality it must first crystallize in our imaginations. By making a film so sure of our capability to positively enact change on a dying society, Coppola is making an important contribution to this process. The campiness of his delivery seems to deconstruct the very fabric of the filmic medium while still making full use of all the tools the artform has to offer. Society is at a point where, to quote Cesar, “we are in need of a great debate about the future,” and I think movies like this can be a great way of starting that conversation. Leave your cynicism behind. You might like it, you might hate it, but I can promise you’ve never seen anything quite like the titanic patchwork that is Megalopolis. It’s now in theaters nationwide, and I encourage you to go see it and form your own opinion, critics be damned.
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