Megalopolis Can Only Imagine Genius As a Brand

Photo: Lionsgate Films/Everett Collection

Cesar Catilina, the renegade architect played by Adam Driver in Megalopolis, may not be a direct stand-in for Francis Ford Coppola, but he’s certainly a repository for the director’s frustrations and philosophy. The new film can be looked at as a collection of decades of Coppola’s ideas — he’s been mulling Megalopolis over since the ’70s and working on it since 1983. He financed it himself to the tune of $120 million because he didn’t feel like he could achieve his vision via the studio system he’d begrudgingly worked within and warred with for decades. And architecture, as a pursuit, is a useful metaphor for filmmaking — the 85-year-old’s passion project is releasing a few months before another sweeping drama, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, that presents a similar parallel. Movies, like buildings, can’t be made alone. They require the help of a few to hundreds of other people, and, critically, the sort of capital that demands their production be a function of commerce as well as art. In Catilina’s swashbuckling conviction in the would-be utopia he’s trying to build, and in his clashes with mayoral nemesis Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the Establishment he represents, you can see a frustrated auteur railing against the business-oriented executives who want to deny him the resources and permission to make his masterpiece. There’s definitely a lot of Coppola in the character — though watching Megalopolis, the person Catilina really brings to mind is Elon Musk.

Coppola, who sold some of his Napa Valley winery to foot the bill for Megalopolis, remains ensconced across the Bay from Silicon Valley in Inglenook. He initially tried to enlist Amazon Alexa programmers to make the film interactive. The idea of tech-world DNA in Coppola’s conception of a visionary talent isn’t far-fetched, though it’s not the superficial commonalities — or the shared interests in partying and getting women pregnant — that makes Catilina reminiscent of the world’s most internet-poisoned billionaire. It’s more that Catilina is, like Musk, someone whose reputation for being a genius rests on his vibes and posturing rather than his output. Musk coasted on superficially resembling a sci-fi hero — the “real-life Tony Stark” — for an embarrassingly long time before his tenure as Twitter CEO forced all but his most hardcore devotees to accept that he’s just an increasingly reactionary fool. Catilina actually is a sci-fi hero, a collection of stereotypes about radical brilliance — brooding, brash, impatient, and masculine (the women in Megalopolis are cast as supportive helpmates or scheming bitches) — whose world-saving project is a blank space the movie can’t actually envision. This is genius as a brand, divorced from output, and all about reinforcing tired messaging about our need for great men, even if they can’t be expected to do the actual great things they like to talk about.

And there’s so much talking in Megalopolis, a film that recreates the experience of being trapped in a conversation with someone incredibly high on cocaine, even if the characters speak in mannered declarations that occasionally give way to bouts of Shakespeare. The film, which is Coppola’s first in 13 years, has been described by its defenders as gonzo, as highly personal, as a heartfelt cri de coeur from a filmmaker who’s as known for his critically acclaimed classics as his willingness to take risks. But the truth is that his self-described fable, for all its focus on a singular talent gifted with the ability to literally stop time, doesn’t end up being about the need for boundary-breaking ideas so much as it’s a plea for the continuing relevance and indulgence of men like his revolutionary hero. Whenever Megalopolis needs to explain what Catilina’s great invention, Megalon, is — a substance that at different points serves as material for a dress, reconstructive surgery, and buildings — or what it would be used for, the film instead lets the gold-toned light it’s suffused with reach blinding levels. The same thing happens when we finally enter Catilina’s eponymous city-within-a-city, which we only really get to see via conceptual sketches. Megalopolis can’t let us see the fruits of Catilina’s genius because it can’t actually figure out what they’re supposed to be.

Megalopolis, set in a New Rome that looks a lot like a futuristic New York City, is filled with classical references and absurd palace intrigue, with performances ranging from wildly serious (Driver) to sketch-comedy broad (Aubrey Plaza). It’s a film that, like its protagonist, is more concerned with vague, broad ideas than with saying anything of substance. In fact, when Catalina finally unveils his project, he placates the rioting masses who’ve gathered at its gates by saying something along the lines of a point that Coppola himself has repeated in interviews, that “we are in need of a great debate about the future.” It’s a laughably underwhelming statement — people talk about, fret over, and express hope for the future all the time. But it’s also, in context, a baffling one, because who onscreen is invited to participate in this discussion? In Megalopolis, the public is represented only as an easily misled mob until that final scene, when, in the gilded glow of Catilina’s creation, they’re transformed into a smudge-faced tableau of Emma Lazarus’s huddled masses. Megalopolis, which moves entirely among the wealthy and the famous on their elevated plane of existence, isn’t invested in the hoi polloi. Its most transcendent image, one of very few that spark to life, finds Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel embracing like unseen angels on the steel beams of a half-built skyscraper high above the city.

Catilina, in fact, inhabits the spire of the Chrysler Building and prefers not to communicate with anyone if he can help it. “Trust us,” Emmanuel, who plays party girl turned personal assistant Julia, pleads to her father, Cicero, long after she’s left his side to take up with Catilina. What makes Megalopolis’s strange conclusion about the need for dialogue so unsettling is that so much of the movie is about how someone like Catilina shouldn’t have to explain himself. Throughout Megalopolis, he angrily shrugs off media reports questioning if Megalon is safe, a concern that seems reasonable enough. He demolishes public housing without permission in order to clear space for his prize project, which later is seen straining the city’s power grid as it nears completion. That move fast, break things, apologize later attitude sounds terribly familiar, as does the feeling that what Catilina is making is a particularly grandiose form of vaporwear. But if Coppola’s latest film echoes some ugly tendencies in tech, its actual aims feel more personal and petulant. It is about all the forces trying to keep this great man silent, and yet here Coppola’s grand missive is, the one he spent years getting made, and it ends with nothing to say. He’s earned his place in film history a thousand times over, and deserves infinite credit for his willingness to back up his own ambitions. So let that man cook. That doesn’t mean anyone’s obligated to pull up a chair to his table afterward.