It feels like the right thing to do when reviewing MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE is to wait for the director’s cut. It’s an impulse as fractured as the film itself considering that Francis Ford Coppola sank his own money into making this film and thereby had final cut. Still, for all the disjointed execution this frustrating film has an undeniably hypnotic quality that refuses to let me completely dismiss it.
Coppola makes no pretense here of trying to recreate reality (hence the fable part of the title). This is an oneiric world in which the Roman Empire never fell, it just moved to New York City. The comparisons are apt, what with patrician families running the government, and their dissolute offspring living lives of decadence to a house music beat, and the plebians following anyone who tells them what they want to hear while amusing themselves with the patrician funded bread and circuses designed to distract them.
The tone is set to perfection in the opening, with Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) stepping off the ledge of the Chrysler Building, stopping time, and then reversing it. Time is one of the many philosophical conceits discussed within a story that uses ancient Roman writers, Shakespeare, and the bra worn by Theda Bara in 1913’s CLEOPATRA to make its points large and small. Easter eggs, cinematic and not, abound. The visuals are as lushly decadent as the ci-mentioned dissolute offspring, echoing the excesses of the Roman Empire used here to comment on current events, and this is the true artistry of the opus. The opalescence of the Chrysler Building against a cloudy sky. A glowing city made of dreams from which Catalina delivers a sermon on the mount. A flower stand lit aetherially in contrast to the vice and degradation around it. The design as a whole evokes the timelessness of eras coalescing with costume, décor, and the occasional lapse into Latin itself.
The storyline falters again and again, alas. It finds Catalina relentlessly destroying the old city to create a utopia named Megalopolis using his discovery, Megalon (should we associate it with the angel Metatron?) as the medium. Megalon is not just good for building, but has many other applications, such as rendering a virginal popstar (Grace VanderWaal) invisible. Or at least her clothing, which reveals not her supple form but what is behind it. Opposed to him is Francis Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New York who scoffs at Catalina’s idealism in favor of dealing with the present in practical, prosaic terms. Between them is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) Cicero’s winsome and wanton daughter (for history buffs, think Caesar Augustus’ daughter of the same name), who falls for the brooding Catalina. For his part, Catalina is surprised enough by Julia’s hidden nature to take her on as an aide-de-camp, causing jealousy among Catalina’s legion of teenybopper fans, and stoking Cicero’s animosity even further.
As is only right for a story evoking ancient Rome, there are plots and sub-plots, conspiracies and more conspiracies, as the first families, i.e. the ones with all the money, make power grabs as they try to oust each other with a nefarious lack of conscience. Leading that is Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), as the totemic image of dictators from Caligula to Mussolini to someone all too current. He is the slimy grandson of the richest man in the world, Harrison Crassus III (John Voight), who has succumbed to the hard-boiled charms of Wow Platinum (Aubery Plaza), a gold digger of a financial show host whose heart of stone belongs to Catalina.
Yes, it’s a lot to keep track of, and Coppola digresses bombastically and constantly with such antics as Clodio dressing in a wig, gold heels, and diaphanous white stola while sabotaging Catalina’s reputation, and an interlude revealing Catalina’s obsession with his dead wife that is never quite resolved beyond bringing home to Julia just what she is up against when trying to get him to return her love.
When MEGALOPOLIS makes direct parallels, it can be striking. No politician is named, but when Clodio spouts populist jingoism, there is no mistaking the contemporary candidate for President to whom Coppola is alluding. LaBoeuf does some excellent work here, particularly when hatching a conspiracy with Wow that distills sex, politics, money, and power into its most essential elements. Less successful are the obvious jabs as the media and the fungible image of pop stars turning scandal into even greater success (and more money).
As though realizing that we in the audience are in need of annotation, the stentorian tones of Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine, Catalina’s chauffer/amanuensis, narrate the proceedings. It makes little difference as characters act precipitously in a series of vignettes that never quite gel into the comfort of cohesion or even internal logic. Instead, it plays like a thesis statement that never gets around to resolving itself into an actual thesis. The actors are passionate and committed, particularly Driver who is given dialectics instead of dialogue, but, against all odds and reason, imbues them, and his character, with humanity.
If this were a silent film, it might have been a monumental achievement, a potent fever dream referencing history, philosophy, and pop culture as a syllabus on the limits of civilization and the potential of humanity. Heady stuff, despite losing the mellifluous tones of Mr. Fishburne. There are so many elements that work, from the way ancient Rome is subtly suggested in them toga-esque pleats of a suit jacket to the melodramatically vulgar displays worthy of both DeMille and Petronius. Perhaps we would need that further suspension of belief when the spoken word is eschewed for MEGALOPOLIS to work, not to mention the intertitles that could navigate the script’s many chasms and dead ends.
MEGALOPOLIS is a ravishing schematic of a failed intellectual epic. Coppola tries to jam in too many ideas, and makes the cardinal cinematic mistake of telling, too often with the murmurings of a crowd, rather than showing. There are moments of pure poetry here, but as a whole it can be summed up in one scene where Driver performs the To Be or Not to Be soliloquy. He does so magnificently, breathing life into words that have dulled with familiarity, but the reason why those were the words that were needed at that moment and in that place is never established. It is an interesting idea with neither purchase nor foundation. Kudos to Coppola for wanting to create a film that asks hard questions and leaving it to the audience to ponder them. If only his grasp had not exceeded his reach.
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