Anytime you compare a film to Joyce’s Ulysses—as Francis Ford Coppola did of his newest film, Megalopolis, in theaters tomorrow—you’re setting yourself up for a fairly polarizing reaction. Ulysses is nothing short of a novel that resists easy readership. It’s bold and experimental and ambitious and archetypal all at once. So, too, is Megalopolis.
One good thing: the comparison, at its heart, all aligns with the desires of Coppola’s protagonist, Cesar Catilina, who’s recently discovered a new super-element called Megalon. Played with every bit of self-serious boorishness by Adam Driver, Cesar’s primary force of purpose is an unrelenting desire to build a new Rome (gee.). It is, at its most fundamental, a story about the desire for a new utopia.
Whether you deem it tone-deaf or optimistic—or neither, and perhaps see it as just plain imaginative—that Coppola’s channeling his narrative efforts (and own money!) into the desire for societal idealism during a time when plenty of the theater-going public feel as if the American experiment is in some sort of post-truth/post-reason state—that’s up to you.
Regardless, this is a heavy architectural load to level on top of whatever narrative foundations Coppola et al. have put in place. Will the structural integrity withstand its most outlandish cinematic elements?
Premise
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, who has discovered a new super-element called Megalon. The story revolves around the idea of building a utopian city—the muses it requires, the funding one must secure, and, more broadly, the course-corrections a society might want to make—in the aftermath of a devastation. Catilina’s plan is to rebuild New York City as a utopia, guided by the core tenets with which every well-intentioned utopianist seems to come equipped: science, reason, philosophy, law, beauty, etc.
But, also, a guilty taste for hedonism, right? Right. No one surrounded by that much gold can resist the baser temptations of the flesh. And that’s where so many of the supporting characters come into play: In his quest to build a city on a hill, Cesar himself must endure—woe is him!—the burden of being an emperor figure to the republic in Coppola’s universe. For example: Nathalie Emmanuel plays his love interest, who acts as, unsurprisingly, Cesar’s muse.
It’s a story in which man has attached himself to empire, so a narrative arc that covers an epic rise and fall is precisely what we’re paying for, here. There’ll be plenty of parallels between the Roman Empire and the United States, if erecting a new Rome on a desecrated New York City wasn’t already enough a telling sign.
And, to be honest, it looks like there’ll be a heck of a lot of partying—at least for a while.
Outlook
One thing’s for sure: the film should be fairly rife with orgiastic, Babylon-esque, Fellini fever dream sequences during the golden age of this new empire. And then there’s the suggestion of an Andrew-Ryan’s-Rapture-in-Bioshock fall from grace. The heads of decapitated statues crashing to the streets; animated cherubs falling to their knees; hellfire raining down from above. The darkest anxieties of all happy and historic times.
Knowing Coppola, there will be plenty of eccentricities. Some of them will frustrate. Others will delight. Not all will seem aligned with the narrative. But this feels less like a narrative experience than it does a sort of world inhabitance. I’m not sure I’m going into Megalopolis with any expectation of or demands for narrative straightforwardness; indeed, there is nothing straightforward about anything orgiastic. This film might be bananas with every intention of being so, bacchanal such as it is.
Which is to say, I suppose, I’m ready to go into Megalopolis with a wildly long leash before I get exasperated, overstimulated, or frustrated. Why? Bringing it back to Ulysses—it’s entirely possible Coppola protected himself a bit with this comparison. Ulysses is a legendary work of fiction, prismatic insofar as any one stream of interpretation casts a refracted and beautiful kaleidoscope of adjacent interpretations, such that the object in question retains some enigmatic charm. Give me a director I trust betting on himself ($120 million!) for a project that looks like an absolute hoot, and I’m in.
I don’t whatsoever expect this to be Coppola’s finest work. But I wouldn’t be overly surprised if it was one of his most fun.
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