Megalopolis Has Already Won

At long last, after decades of development, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is meeting its public. But who, or what, constitutes its public? The movie doesn’t seem poised to do well at the box office, and one could argue that thanks to its festival screenings and fancy preview events, much of its intended audience — namely, film geeks — have already seen it. Critics have been mixed on the $120 million epic since its Cannes premiere. Maybe mixed isn’t strong enough a term. Let’s say wildly divided. Sometimes, they’re wildly divided within the same review. Not long ago, I talked to one filmmaker who said that they watched Megalopolis alternating between gazing at the screen with awe and holding their head in their hands from secondhand embarrassment.

That’s pretty close to how I felt when I saw Megalopolis at Cannes in May. The movie has genuine passages of great beauty but often falters at basic storytelling. It has some wonderful set pieces, but just as many scenes feel overlit and flat, uninspired and awkward. Its conceptual peculiarities — the dialogue in verse, the neo-Roman hair and costume design — can be endearing, but the performances are all over the place, and not every actor appears to have gotten the memo. Of course, critics will not agree on what that memo even was. Is Aubrey Plaza’s self-consciously vampy, campy performance a sly part of the film’s nutty design? Or is it just misguided overacting? Does Jon Voight know he’s there?

That might explain the weirdly confrontational way that Megalopolis has been rolled out. A few weeks ago, Lionsgate caught flak (some of it from me) for releasing a trailer featuring fake quotes from some of history’s most notable film critics. Whichever knucklehead decided to have artificial intelligence make up negative quotes from people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris about movies like The Godfather certainly stirred up controversy, but they also took everyone’s attention away from the most interesting aspect of the trailer: In advance of the movie’s release, Coppola & Co. were targeting critics for failing to appreciate the maestro’s work. Their thesis seemed to be this: “The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were all huge hits, and, jeez, if critics hated those movies, then how can they possibly be trusted about the new one?”

Never mind that this was not an accurate reading of history — or the present. Because critics, for all their mixed responses, have been kinder to Megalopolis than average audiences likely will be. I count myself among those critics. I was never bored by Megalopolis. For all its many flaws, it’s too crazy and alive to ignore, or dismiss, or forget. In fact, earlier this month, I revisited Coppola’s picture at the Toronto International Film Festival and came out of it pretty sure that I’ll watch it again before it leaves theaters. (Admittedly, I might have to act fast.) Megalopolis will never be a normal movie, but it plays infinitely better on repeat viewing. And while it would be easy to dismiss as the bizarre rantings of an out-of-touch, over-the-hill artist lost in his own ideas and surrounded by yes-men, the intensely personal nature of the film, the way it mixes raw sincerity with an unabashed goofiness, forces one to look deeper. And in this case, it helps to have some familiarity with its creator’s life and career.

“I grew up in a family that moved every six months,” Coppola said to me in an interview years ago. “I went to 22 schools before I got into college. I was always the lonely new kid. And that kind of impression when you’re really young you never can quite shake. Why did I make a movie like The Conversation, a film that features a lonely older guy who lives by himself and eavesdrops on people? There’s got to be some aspect of that in me.” But a filmmaker by nature must have some extrovert qualities: It’s hard to make dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people do what you want otherwise. As a director and mini-mogul, Coppola was always trying to create collectives, cooperatives, partnerships. He surrounded himself with other filmmakers, and in some cases helped fund their passion projects. He longed to have a studio like the early days of United Artists, a company founded and run by artists.

Still, there was something aloof and solitary about him, too. Watch his wife Eleanor’s great documentary, Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Apocalypse Now, and you’ll see, at the center of that legendarily chaotic, multimillion-dollar epic, someone who is, at that moment, the loneliest man in the world. In later years, Coppola was famous for prepping his productions by inviting the cast over to his home for home-cooked meals and collegial rehearsal sessions. But on set, he was reportedly often confined to his famous Silverfish, the state-of-the-art Airstream trailer from which he could direct the action like a solitary god. This has always been the paradox of his career. He longs for connection, but he also lives inside his own head.

That paradox is also at the heart of Megalopolis. It is a film of big ideas, and while it doesn’t always pay those off, it does prompt one to wrestle with them. “Is this society the only one that’s available to us?” Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina asks during a press conference about halfway through the film. “And when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” These lines are all over the trailers, too; they’re clearly important to Coppola. It’s also significant that this scene is where the film’s “live cinema” element takes place: When, at some showings, an actual person will stand at a microphone to “ask” Cesar a question. (The audio, alas, is prerecorded.) Coppola had reportedly hoped early on that this could be a full audience-participation moment. He asked Amazon to develop voice-recognition software that would allow viewers to interrogate Cesar. The director’s notion that utopia isn’t a fixed state but a conversation about the future reflects his approach to filmmaking itself. “I’ve always felt that when you’re making a movie, you’re essentially asking a question,” he said in our aforementioned interview. “And when you’re done, the film you have is the answer.”

But Megalopolis itself doesn’t contain much of a debate about the future of the city or the world in which it takes place. There’s some general language about “the now” and “the forever,” but little actual specificity. Cesar, a visionary but self-absorbed architect, spends much of the movie monologuing, and the substance he’s pioneered, Megalon, has vague, undefined properties; it’s more magic than science.

And yet, the conversation about the future that the film lacks may well be provided by its very existence. Coppola has created a movie that we can fight over, and make great claims over, and hurl accusations at each other over. In another era, a film like this might have caused riots at screenings; nowadays, it’s more likely to play to empty auditoriums. But that won’t stop us from talking about it — whether it’s about form, or the wild risks of spending one’s own money on a crazy dream project, or the feasibility of live cinema, or whether the director has lost his marbles, or if critics can be trusted. In that sense, maybe Coppola has in fact achieved his dream. For one shining moment, he’s created in the world outside his head the conversations he’s apparently been having inside it. The audience-participation element of Megalopolis isn’t some poor zhlub standing in the dark with a dead microphone. It’s us.