Mega­lopo­lis – first-look review

The word ​“opus” feels cus­tom-designed as a descrip­tor for a film such as Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s self-con­scious fol­ly-to-end-all-fol­lies, Mega­lopo­lis. It’s a rare bird indeed in that it’s a work of art that active­ly prac­tices what it preach­es, a cel­e­bra­tion of unfet­tered cre­ativ­i­ty and far­sight­ed­ness that offers a vol­canic fusion of hand-craft­ed neo-clas­si­cism while run­ning through a script of toe-tap­ping word-jazz that mer­ri­ly dances between the rain­drops of log­ic and coherence. 

Even though it has now been seen by the pub­lic, the film’s blue­print, its code key, still remains buried in the brain of its cre­ator, per­haps nev­er to be revealed. It’s like an incom­plete man­u­script found in the dusty cup­board of a genius artist who nev­er quite found the mate­r­i­al to glue this thing togeth­er, to make all of its con­stituent parts stick. This is Cop­po­la cast­ing him­self as the unknow­able sage, Charles Fos­ter Kane, plac­ing him­self in the snow­globe. He is try­ing to say the unsayable, con­struct a the­sis from ideas that have yet to be for­mu­lat­ed by him­self or any­one else. Threads are left to dan­gle. Some ideas are still­born. But this is a unique city sym­pho­ny that pounces on the vast dynam­ic range of cinema.

It’s a film from the man who made The God­fa­ther. And it’s a film from the man who made Drac­u­la. And it‘s also a film from the man who made One From the Heart. And it’s def­i­nite­ly a film from the man who made Twixt. On a macro lev­el, there should be no sur­prise when it comes to dis­cov­er­ing what this film end­ed up being, but on a micro lev­el there are images and ideas that are com­plete­ly sur­pris­ing and new. And very weird. And even its emo­tion­al reg­is­ter seems to be on a dif­fer­ent scale to the norm. Humour is dif­fer­ent. Vio­lence is dif­fer­ent. Sad­ness is dif­fer­ent. It’s an expan­sion of real­i­ty rather than a reflec­tion of it. Mega­lopo­lis is a work of high trans­gres­sion, of aes­thet­ic plun­der and a sneak-peek through the look­ing-glass of possibility. 

It’s about noth­ing less than the act of ded­i­cat­ing your life to cre­ate some­thing of neg­li­gi­ble val­ue and obscure appli­ca­tion, but then glean­ing plea­sure from the fact that peo­ple will adapt to it and find their own way to use it. What if films aren’t com­plete works of art, they’re just the mat­ter, the mate­r­i­al, the Mega­lon, that can be pressed and forged into some­thing else entire­ly? Mega­lopo­lis is, in many ways, any­thing you want it to be. 

Yet to a lit­tle con­text, the film plays like a mel­liflu­ous mon­tage through the lives of var­i­ous bick­er­ing power­bro­kers in the crum­bling utopia known as New Rome. The ancient and the mod­ern coex­ist in the same frame, and this tee­ter­ing empire is being held up by the pil­lars of com­merce (John Voight’s horn­dog bank­ing mogul Hamil­ton Cras­sus III, who looks like the old Drac­u­la), inno­va­tion (Adam Driver‘s syl­ph­ic, ani­mé-like celebri­ty archi­tect, Cesar Catili­na, who can also, btw, stop time) and pol­i­tics (Gian­car­lo Esposito’s loathed, mealy-mouthed may­or, Franklyn Cicero).

Else­where we have Shia LaBeouf as cross-dress­ing fail­son and errant cousin to Cae­sar, Clo­dio Pul­cher; there’s Aubrey Plaza as the gold-dig­ging TV econ­o­mist Wow Plat­inum; and Nathalie Emmanuel as par­ty girl turned muse, Julia Cicero. Lit­tle attempt is made to flesh out the intrigue that exist between these war­ring par­ties, instead we just sweep through and are giv­en a sense of the space in which they exist. The per­for­mances are very odd, some­times com­ing across as a lit­tle stiff, and oth­ers almost too loose. But that all feeds in to the film’s aggres­sive­ly eccen­tric MO, its ambi­ence of pure freedom.

At this point, on the back of a sin­gle view­ing, there’s not much more to say about the film, as a major part of its plea­sure is the joy of see­ing some­thing that’s unlike any­thing else out there. To offer some com­plete­ly banal and ill-thought-through cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence points, it sits at a mid­point between South­land Tales and Inland Empire, while also nod­ding to Felli­ni and Lang and von Stro­heim and Mur­nau and Tati and, and and… It is an epic out­pour­ing from an artist who gen­uine­ly DNGAF whether you like or loathe what he’s done. In the wine indus­try, it’s what insid­ers refer to as ​“the good stuff”. I now need to catch my breath and ready myself for anoth­er ride.