My notes on Megalopolis
The object of such splenetic critical odium in some quarters that I was predisposed to like it, Megalopolis really isn’t terribly good – but it’s not wonderfully terrible, either.
In a strange paradox, it also isn’t mediocre – its 85-year-old auteur went though his mediocre midlife in the 1990s with Jack and The Rainmaker, and here is working in the tertiary nutso phase which yielded Youth Without Youth and Twixt (films worthy of setting beside Dementia 13 and Rumble Fish in a certain strain of the filmmaker’s work). Megalopolis refers (a lot) to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but mapped onto the future – though I suspect Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t know from Isaac Asimov – with footnotes in Latin and more quotes from Marcus Aurelius than James Tiberius Kirk could manage in the worst patches of Gene Roddenberry. It’s also a knowing gloss on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and HG Wells’ Things to Come in its future history – and Coppola probably does know that those films, like Just Imagine and Blade Runner, were costly flops on first release only to prove massively influential on our idea of what the future will look like. A cursory sub-plot about a dead, idealised wife feuded over by antagonists Cesar the Architect (Adam Driver) and Cicero the Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) possibly only makes sense as a reference to a once-deleted, now-restored thread of Metropolis about the woman once loved by mad scientist Rotwang and master of Metropolis Joh Frederson … just as the togas and speechifying about man’s destiny evoke the windier ending of Things to Come.
In Coppola’s filmography, this is basically Tucker: The Man and the Dream with a happier ending, and that was an allegory of Coppola’s attempt to create his own alternative to Hollywood. As science fiction, it’s so rooted in the past as to suggest alternate history – though there’s a flash-drive for one vital (if thrown away and barely explained) plot development, this is a future without anything remotely cyber- (punk or otherwise) in which a New Rome gladiatorial circus (possibly not inspired by Lucio Fulci’s Rome 2033 The Fighter Centurions) is just a glitzy wrestling match and Vegas Ben-Hur tribute show, a satellite falling from the sky is set up as a big thing but amounts to nothing (though one shot of dancing human shadows on skyscrapers is a visual coup), parallels with contemporary American politics (plus the bad guy teaming of Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf – and you can imagine the green room chatter about current events between those three being livelier than anything in the script) could perhaps have been imposed on something initially drafted decades ago.
I wonder what was left on the floor of Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, James Remar and Jason Schwartzman’s roles (Hoffman, especially, is in and out in a bewildering trice) and note how much better Coppola is with Kathryn Hunter and Talia Shire (his sister) as elder women of Rome (both, however, playing wives/mothers who only reflect on their husbands/sons) than he is with the idealised heroine (Nathalie Emmanuel) or numbers of anonymous showgirls crammed into orgies and opera opening gala spectacles. Given the general high tone – besides Roman quotes we get a lot of undigested Shakespeare – I presume that Megalon, the miracle substance Cesar wants to use to create the city of the future, is not a reference to one of Godzilla’s goofier foes from the 1970s.
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