MEGALOPOLIS is everything most Big Budget Hollywood movies aren’t

When I was thirteen years old, it was a rite of passage for all film dorks to fall down the MEGALOPOLIS rabbit hole; reading every Coppola interview and every detail of the film that seemed doomed to never be. I read so much about MEGALOPOLIS that I felt like I had already seen it. When it was announced that the $100 million dollar budgeted MEGALOPOLIS was being self-funded by Francis Ford Coppola, it felt like the only way MEGALOPOLIS could be funded, both in that it was a hugely ambitious anti-commercial film and in the spirit of the film itself. Of course the great architect of the film would have to fund the film himself.

All of this makes MEGALOPOLIS that much more special. Selling a portion of your winery to self-fund a $100 million dollar film is a big enough swing, but Coppola doesn’t stop there. Every single creative decision in MEGALOPOLIS is a big swing, as if the act of creation should be enough to be celebrated, regardless of if the choices made make cohesive sense. In a world where our big budget films are made in board room meetings to sell action figures and keep stocks high, one could argue Coppola’s assessment is correct and MEGALOPOLIS’ audaciousness and maximalist experimentation should be celebrated.

MEGALOPOLIS works best when it’s leaning into the maximalist formal choices, reaching near advante-garde levels. Sequences like the use of irises instead of close-ups, all the time stopping moments; the shadows on the buildings as the satellite crashes; the statues moving in the slums; Caesar’s drug-induced montage; Cicero’s nightmare regarding the moon; Wow Platinum’s deceitful shadow hovering over Clodio and Crassus’s argument over the contract; and the use of three imaged-split screen during crucial moments of the climax are when the film is at it’s best. Many of these maximalist formal choices incorporate many styles from the silent era while giving them new life with modern technology which goes in line with the very themes of the film. Similar to Jean-Luc Godard’s sixties era, these maximalist choices are in service to on the nose dialogue that are mostly monologues discussing the film’s themes. Unlike Godard, Coppola is a traditional dramatist, though. Therefore, MEGALOPOLIS tries to mix all of these things in a traditional plot.

One could argue the plot is TOO traditional, especially considering the swings being made everywhere else. However, again, I’d argue it fits right in line with the themes of the film; take the roots of tradition’s past to make something new. The plot is disjointed, but easy to follow(perhaps because I’ve literally read Coppola talking about it for twenty years). This is where you can feel the limitations of self-funding the film. It feels we get the cliff notes version of the plot, as there was not enough funding to get the full epic, so we get the “fable” version. Never-the-less, it works and I expect it to be even smoother on multiple viewings.

Likewise, the performances are all big, but many feel on different wavelengths than others, sometimes different wavelengths than their own scene partners. With the “creation should be celebrated” approach, I suppose Coppola may have given each actor quite a lot of room to cook. It takes some getting used to, but once you get with it, I actually find most of the performances to be quite good. Driver, Plaza, LaBeouf and Voight are all great.

Visually, the film is frustrating because large portions look absolutely amazing, but there are also portions that look like a Hallmark movie. I’m assuming budget constraints played a role, but I also think the intentional artificial look ala matte paintings of the silent era may have been difficult to keep consistent, so the scenes without that artificiality were lit to give off a similar feeling, but it looks bad. The scenes that look good are all CGI-heavy embracing the artificiality or they are night scenes, which are often lit very artificially anyway.

Obviously MEGALOPOLIS fails at becoming a “new kind of cinema” as Coppola envisioned, nor will it lead us into a new era of peace(this movie is going to make five bucks at the box office and any general audience members who mistakenly see it are going to HATE it). This is not the first time Coppola’s belief in cinema changing the world led him to self-finance a film. Coppola informed John Milius that they would win the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE for APOCALYPSE NOW and it would end war as we know it. I admit this sounds a bit silly(a less polite person may say delusions of grandeur), but what’s wrong with attempting to make art for such grand intentions? Isn’t that better than making films to sell action figures or Disney Land tickets? Isn’t that greater than making films to appease stock holders of a conglomerate?

MEGALOPOLIS ends in hope for the future. It’s a much happier ending than the closing of the office door in THE GODFATHER. However, this hope is not new for Coppola. This is the man who refused to end APOCALYPSE NOW with a big battle and ended it with a ceremony that, in his words, represented the end of war and the beginning of enlightenment. Maybe these works of art can’t solve the world’s problems. They do not have the answers…but they do question. As Caesar says in MEGALOPOLIS, the questions lead to the future.