Megalopolis – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Mega­lopo­lis – first-look review

16 May 2024

Words by David Jenkins

Man in a suit pointing a gun at the camera in a dramatic, cinematic setting with yellow lighting.
Man in a suit pointing a gun at the camera in a dramatic, cinematic setting with yellow lighting.
Ignore the haters – this is the kalei­do­scop­ic, enrich­ing, Well­sian vision of a grand old mas­ter with noth­ing to lose.

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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.