About 45 years ago, the Cannes Film Festival He invited Francis Ford Coppola to bring his latest project underway for a special “work in progress” screening. The film’s production had already achieved mythic status in terms of Murphy’s Law: last-minute actor replacements, catastrophic storms, real-time script changes. Coppola had invested much of his own money in the project, as the major studios had been reluctant to finance something that seemed so crazy. The director had staked his reputation and his fortune on it. If he won the bet, he would have proven his detractors wrong. If I lost, well… I lost everything.
So, reluctantly, after many exchanges and a personal plea from the festival’s general delegate (and future president), Gilles Jacob, Coppola agreed to premiere his film at Cannes. And he walked away with the Palme d’Or. The film was Apocalypse Now.
History long ago passed its verdict on Coppola’s war film, and that enthusiastic reception at the French festival is a key part of its legend. Now we have to see if Megalopolis, the latest film that the 85-year-old director has brought to the recent edition of Cannes, will or will not deserve the same impact once the rest of the world sees it. What is evident is that Megalopolis It is no less ambitious, extensive or impressive than that seminal work by Coppola. In any case, it could even be considered a bigger bet.
Megalopolis traces what would be the last gasp of a fictional empire loosely based on ancient Rome and strikingly similar to America’s contemporary, crumbling Circus Maximus. It’s a conceptual dream project that the filmmaker has pursued for almost half of his life. And in 2024, this deeply personal, perversely optimistic film about moving toward utopia, with a self-financed budget of $120 million, looks like a fucking unicorn.
It’s the kind of film that Cannes loves to premiere, exhibit and reach out to. Red carpet. It is the work of a genuine artist who seeks the truth of it in the most extravagant way possible. Say what you will about this grand gesture of filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a dark lens, but that’s exactly the film Coppola set out to make: uncompromising, exceptionally intellectual, unashamedly romantic; satirical, but remarkably sincere in his idea of fighting for a world not only new and happy but also better. Does it seem at times as if you’re distilling decades of readings and coffee conversations into two hours of film? Yes. Was the result worth waiting so long for? By God, yes.
It all begins on the skyscraper-dotted streets of New Rome, an Art Deco metropolis that seems destined to surpass Old Rome in terms of decadence. There is a fight for the soul of the city between Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the visionary Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver). The first wants to keep the rich rich, the powerful in power, and the elite ruling over and over again. Cesar, for his part, is an architect who believes that change is not only inevitable, but also beneficial (for him, of course, but for society in general). Catilina is a cross between Robert Moses, Howard Roark, some of the less toxic tech billionaires, and Caligula. Given Driver’s cadence and the character’s dogged pursuit, we’d say there’s a lot of Coppola himself in there, too.
Both characters are embroiled in family dynamics that complicate their ability to advance their intentions without sensationalist talk or political scandals; but, of course, to paraphrase a wise man: he never takes sides against the family. Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuelunconditional of the franchise Game of Thrones/Fast & Furious), is a fixture in the city’s nightclubs; His after-hours activities are the cream of New Rome gossip. Franklyn and his wife, Teresa (Kathryn Hunter), they love her, but they are also a little embarrassed. As for Caesar, he is part of a clan that includes a troublemaking cousin named Clodius (Shia LeBeouf, which provides a first-rate scandal) and his uncle, the famous banker Hamilton Crassus III. This veteran industry titan is hesitant, rude, sex-obsessed, conservative to a fault; He loves wrestling and sports a strikingly blonde hairstyle. Who could he be inspired by? We’ll just say that he is poetically fair to be played by Jon Voight.
Thanks to a material he has developed, known as Megalon, Caesar is ready to give New Rome its shining paradise: Megalopolis, “a city that people can dream of.” The mayor and his cronies, including Jason Schwartzman and a grumpy Dustin Hoffman who desperately needs a pill, think this genius must be stopped. Julia, on the other hand, believes that he is the future and agrees to work as her publicist, her assistant, and eventually, be something more.
Clodius, who also desires Julia and is envious of Caesar, circulates around all this like a vulture. And there’s also Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a vapid Wall Street reporter who used to be Caesar’s mistress, is now Hamilton’s wife and is ready to destroy her ex by any means necessary. And Vesta Sweetwater (Grace Vander Waal), a pop star who is auctioning off her virginity for charity. And the irritated barbarians at the gates of New Rome. And the spirit of Caesar’s late wife, who many believe was poisoned by her husband and whose death torments him. And the fact that Caesar has the ability to stop time. And, and, and…
Coppola fills both the screen and the narrative with Megalopolis to the limit, throwing in references of all kinds, from Plutarch to Emerson and Dingbat News (the handmade newspaper that Sofia Coppola and some friends created, as teenagers, for the employees of her father’s production company). Every screening of this film should include a short course on the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and The Shape of Things to Come (the book that inspired Coppola to pursue this cinematic white whale for years) and the director’s own book, Live Cinema and Its Techniques from the director. Megalopolis It is, in that sense, a kind of intellectual free buffet from which to serve the content you want from a wide variety.
Coppola is, above all, a storyteller, followed closely by the filmmaker. And in this project he clearly uses a lot of visual effects to convey the idea of the artist seeking a kind of aesthetic renaissance. Laurence Fishburne’s Greek Chorus sneaks up on you in a blue-tinged flashback, straight out of DW Griffith; dazzling state-of-the-art effects coexist with rather classic cinematographic tricks. César can digitally freeze everything around him for a second and a second later look lovingly at Julia through a shot reminiscent of silent cinema. During the press screening in Cannes, a “live” actor interacted with a filmed Driver, in front of the auditorium. There are nods to almost all of the author’s previous works, from gangster dramas to gothic shadow plays. Form begets content. Coppola sees this “man from the future possessed by the past” not only as a hero but, probably, as a kindred spirit.
There are those who will appreciate the intoxicating feeling that Megalopolis generates and its constant change. And there are those who may consider Coppola’s insistence that the Garden of Eden can exist by dialectical will to be naïve (“As long as there are questions and a dialogue… that’s utopia,” Caesar says at the end of the film). However, we cannot consider an 85-year-old filmmaker who has suffered great loss and experienced great love, who has spent his entire life thinking about the heroes of history and villains and thinkers, and who is willing to risk everything for one last masterpiece. Perhaps they are simply clinging to the revolutionary concept of not being cynical or giving in to the idea that it is already too late. Maybe we still have hope to find our collective best version. Perhaps there is life in the art forms we pursue for enlightenment as well as entertainment.
Coppola ends his film with the sounds of a baby and the ticking of a clock, signs that suggest both rebirth and the passage of time that doesn’t stop, whether we like it or not. Then, for good measure, he adds a Capra-esque coda, which runs the risk of being cheesy, but somehow seems oddly appropriate. Coppola has already said that he is developing another idea for another project, but one almost expects him to say goodbye with this swan song. Because it is a final statement, a synthesis of the dreams of a lifetime. And what is cinema if not a canvas for dreamers? Yeah Megalopolis make a billion dollars or nothing, it doesn’t matter. As long as there are people who love movies that are really about things and think about the last 6,000 years of civilization, there will be an audience for works like this.
