I wanted to get this out about my experience of watching Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinary anomaly, “Megalopolis,” on September, 23rd, 2024, because it will likely never be repeated anytime soon. I’ll get to the actual film in a moment, but for now, I just want to write about the experience of it. I’ll let you know now that this is not a story of people behaving badly, a projector screw-up or any other kind of wrong-doing or freak accident. This has to do with a director who made a movie and then, in a way, kept making it before our eyes with just a small, momentary act of showmanship that made the movie come alive.
The screening took place at Regal’s City North IMAX, in conjunction with the New York Film Festival, who also hosted a screening of it simultaneously. Over sixty theaters nationwide would be showing the film that was paired with a pre-screening Q&A with Coppola, Robert DeNiro and Spike Lee, moderated by a visibly nervous (and who wouldn’t be?) Dennis Lim, who did his best to keep the interview from going off the rails, but was overwhelmed by Coppola’s need to pontificate over everyone else’s answers. Lee tried to keep everything lighthearted. DeNiro, sitting in the middle, took it all in stride and simply waited to be called on. Coppola made it clear he was the master of ceremonies.
Let me back up, though. Before the Q&A started, as people filed into the theater, Osvaldo Golijov’s bombastic and rousing score from the film blasted over the speakers, making it difficult for people to talk amongst themselves as they waited for the film to start. There were a few slides advertising the film playing in a loop, one of which stated “this screening will incorporate a live action element during the film.” We all noticed a mic on a mic stand, on the floor to the left of the screen. What could this mean? I learned from a colleague that Coppola conceived of this whole project decades ago and even wrote a 50-page booklet on how exhibitors should screen the film. This was getting really interesting. The music now took on an old-fashioned, epic roadshow quality that made it feel like the overture to what was sure to be a grand, cinematic symphony.
And those may be the best words to describe the movie. With movements, suites, crescendos and the actors speaking in grandiose, operatic volumes that are designed to penetrate everyone, including the back rows, “Megalopolis” is not a film to be taken at its words upon first viewing. It contains multitudes. Like a piece of classical music, it is designed to reach and linger on in wildly different ways, depending on the viewer. Coppola’s vision of the Roman Empire as a modern-day, American fable is a movie that makes its own rules about how a movie should be made and experienced. Many, sadly, will wait until they can watch it at home and see what all the fuss is about. Many of them will be checking their phones as it plays because this film asks way too much from casual viewers.
It's not a film that tells you how to engage with it. That’s up to you. It is an indescribable dream (although, really, how many dreams are easily describable?) and I believe the best way to approach it is to not try and attach meaning to every image, every character and every bit of prose. No, the best way is to let it just wash over you, to take in the astonishing imagery and the unpredictability of it all. That’s not always easy to do. Much of Coppola’s work is a head-scratcher. Other parts are deceptively simple. It is, ot once, absurd, overblown, hilarious, indescribably moving and (putting it mildly) audacious. It is the work of a director who has run out of fucks to give and has, once again, put his own money on the line to create this experience. If you hate it, that’s fine. It’s certainly not trying to be loved. For the first hour or so, the packed theater I was in had varying degrees of people who were willing to accept its challenges, while others showed up to try and be the loudest laughers in the place.
About half-way through, the film stopped, the lights went up and a man in a funky hat (that’s all I could really notice about him from where I was) moved the mic stand a bit closer to the screen. An image of Adam Driver’s character popped up at the bottom-center. The man read out a scripted question, making him sound like a member of the media during a press conference. Driver waited a few moments and then answered the question, giving a long, Coppola-esque monologue about his work, the future and its meaning. The lights went down. The man took his seat. The film continued.
I have since seen the film a second time in its nationwide theatrical run. This time, there was no live audience member participation. It was just a voice-over asking the same question and Driver responding. Remembering what I had seen just a few days ago, there was a part of me that missed that little stunt. That a director could still work in a small bit of showmanship so as to make his movie that much more of an experience, and an already memorable one at that, delights me to no end. It may not be much. It doesn’t make or break the movie. Coppola’s idea simply forces the audience member to engage in a way they’re not used to, with a film that already keeps many viewers at arm’s length. I’ll bet many viewers after that moment sat up a bit more and wondered if something else like that would happen again. You can’t get this experience at home.
Upon its opening weekend release, I noticed some friends asking how it should be approached: A bad movie? A so-bad-it’s-good movie? Was the hype around its tepid-at-best festival reception last summer justified? My answer is a big NO to all of those questions. You should go in expecting a director’s vision of the world he wants to see come to fruition, both as cinema and as a complex society made up of flawed people with the common goal for humanity. If that sounds too naive and high-falutin, perhaps it is, but it comes from an artist who continues to throw his own millions at personal projects for the purpose of leaving something in the world that maintains his voice, without a trace of compromise (although, let’s be honest, we all know we haven’t seen the final cut of this film). Many have called it over-indulgent. Of course it is. I almost wouldn’t want it any other way. The guy is in his eighties. The passion is still there. We should all be so lucky.
Many will also have issues with the casting of Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf and Jeffrey Tambor, four actors who have been culture canceled for one reason or another. During the Q&A, Coppola said he cast it that way on purpose, as a way of demonstrating the film’s themes of harmony, forgiveness and grace, that people with wildly different political views and troubled pasts can work with one another to create something beautiful and worthwhile. Again, naive and high-falutin for many people. Again, I have to admire the courage Coppola has for sticking his neck out like that. It sure seems like stunt casting, but with an eye toward a positive view. He’s not sticking it to the younger generations or people who think he should be canceled. He doesn’t care what they think. He just wants who’s best for the roles, canceled or not. As it happens, no one here is mis-cast.
“Megalopolis” is quite a movie and I’m struggling where to start writing about what is on screen and what it’s all about. Coppola’s vision takes place amid skyscrapers with giant clocks under the characters’ feet. There is a ballet-like sequence where Cesar Catalina (Driver), a Nobel-winning entrepreneur who wants to turn this city into his own creation through his discovery of a translucent material called the megalon, has a moment of reflection with Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) one of the few people he considers his equal, and who happens to be the daughter of his opponent, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). There are musical interludes, none more memorable than the vestal virgin sequence in Madison Square Gardens, which, of course, also encompasses gladiator fights and chariot races. That entire sequence feels like its own stand-alone epic.
There are flaws in its design, such as a story thread involving a Russian satellite that may or may not destroy the planet if it comes crashing down. The result may not shift the movie’s orbit, as one would expect, but it does make for some of Coppola’s most breathtaking imagery, as fearful human shadows dance along the sides of skyscrapers. There are, perhaps, a few too many times when Laurence Fishburne’s character, Funi Romaine, Cesar’s loyal assistant, acts as the lone Greek chorus, telling us what might already be obvious. And having Julia tell her parents that she and Cesar might name their baby Francis if it’s a boy is a moment that takes me out of the film and feels like a bad joke told badly.
Nevertheless, flaws and all, I remain mesmerized by this film. It has often been compared to Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales,” another ambitious, music-minded, indulgent, multifaceted piece that also confounded audiences and had trouble finding distribution after disastrous festival screenings. Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” also comes to mind, with the entire city being a playpen for corrupt leaders, militant fringe candidates, and unlikely heroes peering out through the chaos, all boldly told in verse. I would also throw in the Coen Brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for reasons too abstract to get into here, but you’ll know it when you see it (it has to do with clocks).
This is not to suggest Coppola made a derivative movie. On the contrary. “The Rain People,” the “Godfather” movies, “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “The Rainmaker” and the like show Coppola’s incredible range as a director, but the more expressionist films, like “One From The Heart,” “Rumble Fish” and “Megalopolis” show who he really is as an artist (it could be argued that “Apocalypse Now’ represents both). It might seem, upon first viewing, that he is trying to make a statement on the world as it is today, with Cesar, Julia, Mayor Cicero, Clodio Pulcher (LaBeouf) and Hamilton Crassus III (Voight) representing today’s leaders, candidates and entrepreneurs in all their greed and excesses. If it’s confusing as to “who is who?”, keep in mind that Coppola had this idea in his head decades before we had an authoritarian, fringe presidential candidate.
Perhaps someday there will be more direct parallels, since we are on the precipice of choosing what happens to our own democracy in November. What will be fascinating for “Megalopolis” is not how it will be perceived after it becomes a box office fiasco, losing an ungodly amount of money, but how it ages as a statement on humanity regardless of what happens to America in the future. In the documentary, “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” Coppola says in an interview that he hopes filmmaking becomes more democratic in the future, with unlikely filmmakers picking up a home movie camera and making the next "Citizen Kane." “That is my fondest wish,’ he says at the very end. “Megalopolis” ends with a pledge of allegiance for the whole world to recite, one that feels like Coppola’s fondest wish for us all.
But my favorite take so far was one I saw on twitter/X. I wish I took a screenshot of it, because I couldn’t find it later. “Megalopolis” is a love letter, from Francis to his deceased wife, Elanor, without whom he cannot stop time, much like Cesar and his muse, Julia.
Movies can’t stop time either, but once in a while, they can make you believe that time has stopped so that one person can ask a question that, as time resumes, uncovers multiple possibilities for answers.
