Film review: Gird your loins – after a 13-year hiatus, Francis Ford Coppola is back with his four-decade labour of love, Megalopolis, and if you’re committed to seeing everything the legendary director produces, you’re in for a bumpy but bracing ride.
The film is explicitly subtitled “A Fable”, and 85-year-old Coppola’s fever dream about celebrity, corruption and the importance of dreams over commerce deserves to be regarded as such.
This helps mitigate the over-the-top performances and repetitive, rambling dialogue about the ills of society, while you embrace the gorgeous, gold-leafed aesthetic. But in terms of message, unfortunately the great director is no Aesop.
Daubed in chocolate browns, liquorice blacks and golden hues, the story (blatantly and heavily inspired by Roman history and Shakespeare) takes place in a futuristic New York now coined New Rome. Visionary architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is grieving his wife while carrying on an affair with Aubrey Plaza’s vacuous TV personality named Wow Platinum. The earnest Catilina is attempting to rebuild the broken city using a magical material called Megalon, but he’s up against the city’s obstructive mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). Meanwhile, Mayor Cicero’s daughter Julia (Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel) develops a professional fascination and a personal fondness for the emotionally tortured Catilina.
Coppola assembles a stacked cast, which includes a doddery Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne (mostly in voiceover). Then there’s the film-maker’s nephew Jason Schwartzman and sister Talia Shire, who delivers the film’s strongest performance as Catilina’s derisive mother.
Scene-stealer Shia LaBeouf camps it up in golden toga, plucked eyebrows and feminine curls as Voight’s depraved grandson and Catilina’s jealous cousin, Clodio. LaBeouf is either fantastic or insufferable, depending on how much rope one gives the polarising actor.
Throughout, a seemingly unassociated score soars at all the wrong moments. As the kids say, it’s all a lot.
In its quieter moments, such as when Catilina is gliding through a dark, rainy night in his limo, Coppola’s vision is clear and stunning, if only aesthetically. The usually excellent Driver does his damnedest to provide a calm centre in all this stormy nonsense, but this will not go down as one of his heralded movies.
Megalopolis has received mixed reviews since its Cannes debut, but it’s neither entirely awful nor entirely great. Actually, initially, it’s intensely irritating, but you get used to the fantasy as Coppola weaves his cinematic mess.
If you are a Coppola-ite, Megalopolis is essential viewing, but even with an open mind you may find yourself more bewildered than beguiled.
Rating out of five: ★★★
Megalopolis, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is in cinemas now.
