On Monday night, critics and a few lucky fans in select cities across the country were invited to attend Megalopolis: The Ultimate IMAX Experience. For Nashville cinephiles, that meant trekking out to Cool Springs to get an early glimpse of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating epic.
The event, which took place in conjunction with this year’s New York Film Festival, began with a 30-plus-minute livestreamed Q&A featuring Coppola and fellow New York film luminaries Robert De Niro and Spike Lee. The Q&A went off the rails almost immediately, with Coppola and company venturing into rambling but well-intentioned asides about everything from hot-button political issues to their respective career beginnings. It was an apt preview of Megalopolis.
To say Megalopolis makes coherent, logical sense would be a lie. There were many occasions throughout the screening when I physically cringed at ham-fisted metaphors or exhausting experimental distractions. The movie is a mess. But it’s also so sincere and weird and all-caps GOING FOR IT that I had a hard time outright disliking the experience. Some critics have already lauded Megalopolis as a late-period tour de force from one of cinema’s masters. I wish I felt that strongly about something that was clearly a passion project for Coppola. But it never coalesced into anything more than a somewhat admirable mess for me.
Megalopolis takes place in a dying, New York-esque metropolis called New Rome, clearly a metaphor for modern America and its many cultural and political issues. The story centers on an architect (played by Adam Driver), quite literally named Cesar, who possesses special time-stopping abilities. Driver, perhaps the finest actor of his generation, is tasked with delivering Shakespearean prose and Latin quips. As usual, Driver gives it his all.
The rest of the cast is filled with fascinating selections. Giancarlo Esposito and Nathalie Emanuel, as members of the (eye-roll) Cicero family, figure heavily into the Machiavellian plot as Cesar’s chief antagonist and love interest, respectively. Figures as far-ranging as Dustin Hoffman (playing a fixer named Nush) and America’s Got Talent winner Grace VanderWaal pop up in supporting roles. And as always with a Coppola production, it's a family affair: The director's sister Talia Shire, nephew Jason Schwartzman (in a nearly wordless court-jester background role) and granddaughter Romy Mars appear in spots.
Megalopolis
Coppola, not without his own recent controversy, also made a few questionable casting choices. Shia LaBeouf is here, playing a bad villain from the Gotham TV series, while Jon Voight lands most of the movie’s biggest laugh lines as wealthy drunkard Hamilton Crassus III, Cesar’s uncle.
But it’s Aubrey Plaza as a sordid TV newscaster named Wow Platinum (!) who steals the show in a continuation of her 2020s hot streak. She may be the only one in the cast, Driver included, who fully understood the assignment.
For its two-plus-hour runtime, Megalopolis shifts back and forth between moments that inspire awe (including truly unique visual effects and a “live participation element”) and moments that inspire frustration (nearly everything involving the movie’s various political subplots). If reviews of the forthcoming The Brutalist are to be believed, this probably isn’t even going to be the best attempt at an American epic centered on an architect to come out this fall.
But the fact that Coppola — the director of no fewer than four of the greatest American movies ever made — finally cashed in on his vast wine empire to take a swing this big and bonkers in his return to filmmaking after a 13-year absence? It's something of a miracle, and worth checking out on a big screen — even if you end up hating it.
