Megalopolis sees Francis Ford Coppola go full Neil Breen

Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of Megalopolis.

It’s a great time for Old Man Cinema. Legendary filmmakers are leaning into their late eras in order to reckon with their own complicity (Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon), their influential upbringing (Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans), their futile grasp at ever-slipping time (Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes), their action-spectacle death drive (Tom Cruise’s continued stuntwork), and their melancholy persistence (David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds). Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis fits alongside this self-reflexivity, but with a liberating, damning caveat. Fully financed through his personal wealth, Coppola’s film doesn’t have to pretend to be anything it’s not, or answer to anyone. It doesn’t need a coherent plot, airtight ideas, or even a selling point beyond “Francis Ford Coppola’s latest movie.” It’s one from the heart, and nowhere else. The captivating, cloying result is like a Z-grade vanity project from a grade-A filmmaker. In some ways, Megalopolis fits alongside Neil Breen’s seminal 2012 so-bad-it’s-good piece of egosploitation Fateful Findings as a companion piece.

Megalopolis is the story of New Rome’s Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an idealistic architect playboy with a heart and mind (and eventually face) of gold, trying to build a utopia despite the corrupt, banal fools around him. He can literally stop time and has a monopoly on a nebulous super-material called Megalon, the latter of which helps him survive an assassination attempt and is the bedrock of his sci-fi urban renewal project. He’s won the Nobel Prize before we’re sure what’s going on. At least Coppola doesn’t deign to play Cesar himself.

Breen, a real-life architect who’s taken up Tommy Wiseau’s mantle, tends to cast himself as messianic mega-men raging against corruption in his self-funded fables. In Fateful Findings, he plays valiant truth-teller Dylan, who also has supernatural powers and a magic rock that helps him survive an attempted assassination.

These films’ heroes also share a love of grandiose vagueness. “We are in need of a great debate about the future!” cries Cesar near the finale of Megalopolis. During a pre-screening Q&A, Coppola quoted this half-thesis, an optimistic rallying cry putting its faith in whatever human ingenuity could probably come up with if everyone just talked it out. It is a line delivered with the same import, specificity, and intonation as a speech in the epic, bloody conclusion of Fateful Findings: “You now have all the truths, the real truth. Act now! On your own! Outside of the corporate systems and these incompetent politicians. Act now. It’s our only hope for the future.”

Fateful Findings gives that sermon a diegetic round of applause. Megalopolis merely insinuates that this would be the correct response. The path forward is left up to the viewing audience, as long as they listen carefully to their betters.

But beyond the superhuman Übermensch leads, their wives who couldn’t hang and took their own lives, the otherworldly substances, the stiff performances, and the didactic deliveries (the Megalopolis scene where a live performer stands up in the front of the theater with a microphone and asks Cesar a question is an inventive excuse for Cesar to preach directly to the audience), the link between these movies is one of personal esotericism, freed from outside obligations.

That intimate, sincere, inscrutable individuality is what makes these guardrail-less films endearing. You don’t feel like you could connect all their dots even if you’d spent as much time thinking about them as the auteurs willing them into existence. Breen and Coppola had the necessary funding to platform their idealistic yet vague viewpoints with soapboxed directness. When money is no object, what do you create? The answer, it seems, is something in your image, using the skills and styles at your disposal. Breen’s films are crudely hewn from stock images and free sound effects. Coppola puts a kaleidoscope up to his soul.

Megalopolis colors Coppola’s mastery of form with signifiers of his age. A restlessly inventive visual style pulls from diverse inspirations throughout cinema history. Coppola is clearly bored with classicism, jazzing things up with triptych split-screens, garish CG symbolism, and Méliès-like theatricality. At times, it’s shockingly beautiful. At others, it’s just hard to look at. Like Coppola’s previous movie Twixt, some of Megalopolis is so disarmingly flat it looks like the amateurish green-screen so often deployed by Breen. Around these eclectic stylistic swings, Coppola weaves his rambling narrative (obsessed with the Roman Empire and moving sidewalks) from half-remembered tangents and his personal values. Coppola’s villains are gold diggers, family in-fighters, corrupt officials, Trump surrogates, sex tape deepfakers, and moral hypocrites. His heroes quote the classics, prize beauty, love children, and dispense platitudes. The jokes are lowbrow and the emotions are Romantic. When the credits roll, it feels like you’ve just had your ear talked off by Coppola at a long dinner. It’s a dizzying experience, at times incoherent and not always enjoyable, but a valuable one nonetheless.

So-bad-it’s-good movies reach that “good” threshold not just through sheer incompetence, but because in their incompetence, they reveal something human. That something could be off-putting, or silly, or so alien from what you expect that it’s hard to understand, but it shocks your system rather than panders to it. It’s the reason purity and sincerity are required; moviegoers can sniff out calculation a mile away. Though both are frustrating and absurd, Megalopolis and Fateful Findings are, first and foremost, pure and sincere expressions from artists making art for its own sake. So many movies are misers of imagination, merely covering their cynical templates in whatever IP is lying around, looking to capitalize on built-in audiences and wide-spanning demographics. Megalopolis and Fateful Findings are gluttonous hedonists, aimed at pleasing only one person apiece. Financially independent, recklessly self-sufficient, and thematically obsessive, these films might not be dramatically cogent or philosophically substantive. But they are hypnotic, raw expressions of a singular perspective.