The world is in tough form. The longer term seems bleak. One thing must be accomplished. However what?
Francis Ford Coppola isn’t fairly positive. However he’s sure one thing must be accomplished. So why not take the $120 million he earned promoting his vineyard and use it to make a film about how one thing must be accomplished?
That seems to be the animating impulse behind Coppola’s Megalopolis, a mission the fearless auteur behind The Godfather, The Dialog, and Apocalypse Now spent many years dreaming about earlier than lastly financing it himself. The top consequence, in spite of everything that conceptualizing, is really probably the most idiosyncratic movement photos of the twenty first century.
Megalopolis feels each overcooked and half-baked, jammed with equal quantities of daring concepts and whole nonsense. Components are jaw-droppingly beautiful; others look shockingly shabby. It’s deeply private and often borderline incoherent. It’s pleading with the viewers — with the entire world! — to come back collectively for the sake of a brighter future. However how?
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Coppola isn’t so egomaniacal as to suppose he has the solutions. As an alternative, he presents what the onscreen subtitle phrases “a fable” conflating up to date America with historic Rome. In a model of New York Metropolis renamed “New Rome” (the squad vehicles even learn “NRPD” on the aspect), the corrupt and old school Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) clashes with a visionary architect named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) over the latter’s dream of tearing down previous buildings so as to put up high-tech ones made out of “Megalon,” a constructing materials of Cesar’s personal invention that may cease time and possesses different vaguely outlined magical skills.
Like a classical delusion from antiquity, the turf conflict between Cicero and Cesar spills out into their respective households, together with the mayor’s lovely socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who takes an curiosity in Cesar’s daring architectural concepts, and Cesar’s power-hungry cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who craves his household fortune, which is managed by growing old banker Hamilton Crassus III (a wide-eyed Jon Voight).
At a surreal press convention held on catwalks above an infinite mannequin of New Rome, Cesar lays out his imaginative and prescient for “Megalopolis,” a futuristic utopia that he needs Cicero to let him construct. Just a few scenes later, although, Cesar tells his mistress, the amoral cable information journalist named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), that the precise type of Megalopolis itself is meaningless. All that matter is that individuals take the thought significantly and have interaction with the questions such a spot raises.
This is likely one of the many instances in Megalopolis when Coppola seems to be talking on to the viewers by way of Driver. The New York Movie Competition’s particular presentation of the movie was preceded by a panel dialogue that includes Robert De Niro, Spike Lee, and Coppola, who earnestly recited a few of Driver’s dialogue from the movie verbatim. He instructed the viewers in attendance that he firmly believes that mankind holds the answer to making a brighter tomorrow, if we can simply get our act collectively and construct it.
Past that laudable however extraordinarily nebulous sentiment, although, Megalopolis doesn’t say a lot, or provide any concrete steps towards reaching this grand imaginative and prescient of a utopian tomorrow. (The movie does recommend it might positively be useful if the man stumping for this utopia was an architect as good-looking and charismatic as Adam Driver who additionally invented a substance that defied the legal guidelines of physics. If somebody might get on that, that may be nice.)
Megalopolis’ story is equally ill-defined. It goes down a number of blind alleys to no discernible objective, introduces extraordinarily acquainted faces for what quantity to walk-on cameo roles (Dustin Hoffman exhibits up for a pair pointless scenes; Laurence Fishburne performs the narrator and in addition Cesar’s right-hand man — till late within the movie when he simply form of vanishes and by no means returns.) The entire movie hinges on Megalon, but what it may do, the place it comes from, or the way it connects to Cesar’s much-discussed late spouse and her demise (or homicide?) is rarely defined in any respect.
That’s to not say the movie is boring; there may be at all times one thing shocking round each nook in Megalopolis. In a single scene, characters begin talking in Latin. Jason Schwartzman performs the drums at one level! Aubrey Plaza engineers a company takeover whereas straddling Shia LaBeouf on a convention room desk! A virginal pop star (Grace VanderWaal) performs in a costume made out of a Megalon that turns her physique invisible!
And but sprinkled all through this story that’s typically foolish are some genuinely beautiful visuals. In a single scene, Cesar and Julia fall in love at magic hour excessive above New Rome on a whimsical development website. They talk about an artist’s potential to metaphorically freeze time by way of their work, then Julia implores Cesar to actually cease time. Once they kiss, that’s precisely what occurs. It’s a beautiful sequence.
Later, Coppola shifts into an elaborate montage that mixes historical past and fantasy, with the body cut up into three vertical sections, every biking by way of totally different interconnected photographs. It’s like one thing Dziga Vertov may need made in case you gave him entry to an IMAX digicam and Remaining Reduce Professional. I beloved it. That’s why, as a lot as I used to be baffled (and infrequently irritated) by elements of Megalopolis, I gained’t totally dismiss it.
Nonetheless, I can’t totally perceive why some scenes, just like the one on that rooftop with Cesar and Julie, look beautiful, whereas others appear like rejected animatics from Jurassic World sequels. Regardless of the quotations from and allusions to nice artistic endeavors and literature — at one level Cesar performs Hamlet’s “To be, or to not be” soliloquy as a result of, like, that’s the query, man — the filmmaker I considered repeatedly throughout Megalopolis was Neil Breen, the eccentric unbiased who’s spent years making oddball films he writes, directs, and stars in himself. (Lots of his heroes possess Cesar-like intellects and magical powers too.)
Breen’s films usually are not good in any standard sense, and they’re not often lucid. However they do appear to come back from a spot deep inside the person, who’s earnestly talking from his coronary heart about no matter bizarre crap he has rattling round in his head any given level. And since he pays for this stuff himself, nobody can cease him from doing regardless of the heck he needs. You may name his films dangerous, however you can’t deny they’re additionally pure.
The identical goes for Megalopolis. It’s a Messalopolis of story tangents, verbal digressions, and unforgettable photographs. However no matter different worth judgments I need to assign to its screenplay, its performances, and its total readability, I discover it very arduous to dislike one thing that an artist sacrificed his fortune to make.
Further Ideas:
-Earlier than the New York Movie Competition Megalopolis screening started, an onscreen disclaimer warned “This Presentation Incorporates a Reside Participant Ingredient in Theater.” At one level within the movie, a person from the viewers (I don’t know the place he got here from or who he was) approached the display screen and requested a query to Adam Driver, who appeared to hearken to the question and provides his response. It was very transient, and I’m not fairly positive it served a lot of a objective past underscoring Coppola’s message that we have to break freed from the previous and dream up the brand new — however I appreciated the novelty of it anyway. (I imagine the interactive scene can be repeated at particular IMAX screenings across the nation through the movie’s vast launch as effectively.)
-After ending my evaluate, I glanced at Megalopolis’s Letterboxd web page to see what different viewers thought. Among the opinions had been five-star raves, praising Coppola’s audacity and imaginative and prescient. Others eviscerated the film for its illogical narrative and a solid the place nobody appears to be on the identical web page. I discovered that I agreed with each single factor in each single evaluate, each good and dangerous. It’s that type of movie. And it deserves that type of ranking.
RATING: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Gallery Credit score: Emma Stefansky
