Francis Ford Coppola Gets ‘A’ for Effort in ‘Megalopolis’

Submitted by PatrickMcD on September 26, 2024 - 8:45am

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Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – You can say this for Francis Ford Coppola, he gets an “A” for effort. “Megalopolis” is a project which boasts loads of ambition, but winds up in a narrative cul-de-sac that Coppola never finds a way to create his way out of … he has so many ideas floating around he never manages to establish much momentum because he’s trying to do too much, too often, all at once.

“Megalopolis” is an ancient Roman epic set in a slightly futuristic New York (now dubbed New Rome). A visionary architect Caesar (Adam Driver) desperately tries to shed the decaying ruin of the present to fashion a city for the future, while his chief nemesis Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) wants to keep things decidedly as they are. Caesar has the curious ability to literally stop time, which proves useful in his quest to remake the city for the next millennia.

Megalopolis
Photo credit: Lionsgate

He’s bankrolled by eccentric multi-trillionaire uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who sees his nephew can do no wrong, which inspires seething jealousy in Crassus own son Clodio (Shia LeBeouf). The Mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a party girl socialite who takes an interest in Caesar as she seeks to ground herself beyond her superficial lifestyle. Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza is a financial TV host willing to stop at nothing to become one of the moneyed elite, instead of just covering them.

Adam Driver provides the film’s chief pleasures. Much like Christopher Walken, his unusual line readings manage to snatch pleasure from the swirling jumbled mass around him. The rest of the performances are admittedly a mixed bag, with Jon Voight looking dazed and Shia LaBeouf ranting incoherently as well as scheming for much of the time.

Coppola clearly doesn’t let any ideas go to waste and he stuffs every scene with an eclectic grab bag of directorial and editing tricks that yield mixed results, and he could have injected a little more narrative clarity for a project that he’s been reportedly thinking about since the early 1980s. When Coppola resorts to graphic violence to get himself out of a story jam towards the end, it’s shocking, yes … but also cartoonish. I nearly chuckled.

Adam Driver in ‘Megalopolis’
Photo credit: Lionsgate

Francis Ford Coppola’s best work communicated those high minded messages through the emotional power of cinema. He mortgaged part of his wine fortune in order to bring this particular vision to life. But for all its aspirations of greatness and references to Shakespeare, it’s a hard film to love or even really like. “Megalopolis” is for Coppola die-hards only, and even they may have a hard time getting through it more than once.

”Megalopolis” is in theaters on September 27th. Featuring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito. Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Rated “R”