Review: 'Megalopolis' is Francis Ford Coppola's gloriously contradictory and very messy epic parable of America at a crossroads

Say this for “Megalopolis” — it’s never boring.

Francis Ford Coppola’s parable of American political decay dressed up in Roman finery is many things — ambitious, grandiloquent, grandiose, self-indulgent, gorgeous, thoughtful, silly, overstuffed and over the top — sometimes all at once. But it all engages the eye, the heart and the mind, though sometimes in ways I don’t think even Coppola has under his control.

Coppola — who wrote and directed (and, he says, sold off a winery to make the budget) — imagines New York City as a 21st century Rome, approaching its decline as wealth, decadence and debauchery have overtaken the nobler ideas of a republic. What we see at first is a power struggle between two men: Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s trying to bring jobs and casinos to the city’s population, and Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the visionary urban planner who imagines the city as a potential utopia with moving sidewalks and endless parks.

Standing between Cesar and Cicero is the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who we meet first as one of Rome’s hedonistic young ladies — a cohort that includes Clodia Pulcher (Chloe Fineman), whose brother, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), plays the fool to Rome’s richest man, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). But Clodio’s hopes of being the automatic heir to Hamilton’s fortune are threatened when the old man marries Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), the scheming “Money Bunny” host of a financial talk show. 

When Julia and Cesar begin a romance, Cicero sees the move as a power grab by Cesar, attacking the mayor through his family. But others see that this is a meeting of minds, bodies and souls, and that Julia is becoming the muse that fuels Cesar’s grand designs for a better Rome — something that Clodio, launching a faux-populist uprising, wants to defeat. (If the metaphor isn’t obvious, there are men in Clodio’s mob carrying signs that say “Make Rome Great Again.”)

Driver’s Cesar is sketched out by Coppola as a hybrid of the powerful New York planner Robert Moses and the idealist architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” He utters deep pronouncements like “don’t let the now destroy the forever” or “It’s time to have a debate about the future,” leaving the viewer to wonder if he’s naive or smarter than everyone, or both.

Cesar touts a miraculous new building material, megalon, which he says is stronger than steel, more durable than concrete, and can even be made to appear invisible. Cicero is dubious, preferring to trust in the materials that have stood the test of time for decades. The two men also disagree on the strength of their fellow Romans — whether they can aspire to the better angels of their nature, or descend to the depths of greed and depravity.

The cast is sprawling — I haven’t even mentioned Laurence Fishburne as Cesar’s driver and the film’s narrator, Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, Kathryn Hunter as Julia’s mother, Jason Schwartzman as an officious mayor’s aide, and Dustin Hoffman as Crassus’ fixer — and Coppola’s design team has created opulent sets with room for all those people. But even more scattered are Coppola’s ideas for how this story should be told.

There are dream sequences, frenzied montages, moments where Cesar can stop time — and even a press conference where a live actor in the movie theater asks a question. (This reportedly happened at the movie’s premiere at Cannes, and was replicated for the preview screening I attended in Orem. Lord knows if they’ll keep that up for a regular theatrical run, or have edited that moment for a screen-bound questioner.) It’s as if Coppola, at 85, knows he might not have another movie left in him, and he wants to put it all out there one last time.

The problem, though, with bankrolling your own dream project is that you don’t have anyone to tell you you’re doing something wrong. Coppola could have used an outside voice, particularly when writing dialogue, which here is ponderous and predictable, and borrows too heavily from Shakespeare. (Driver enters one important scene reciting a fair chunk of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy.) With this cast eager to deliver on the master’s vision, it’s a shame Coppola didn’t trust anyone enough to workshop it a little first.

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‘Megalopolis’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence. Running time: 137 minutes.