I recently watched Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis, a film which is pompous by name and by nature. Unless I’m missing something – and the film positions itself as ‘misunderstandable’, inconsistently peppered with the hallmarks of satire to pre-empt criticism – I think it is stunningly flawed. 

To outline the plot: Nobel Prize-winning Cesar Catilina is an afflicted genius building a utopian citadel, Megalopolis, in the restless state of New Rome. He has somehow invented a magical new building substance, Megalon, which allows him to suspend time itself and to access the inner workings of consciousness. New Rome is governed in part by the unimaginative elected mayor, Franklin Cicero, and unelected patricians like the bank-owning Crassus III (Catilina’s uncle). Catilina’s reputation is fraught: recently prosecuted by Cicero for murdering his wife (who actually committed suicide), he has nonetheless secured federal permission to demolish buildings and build Megalopolis. Crassus’ other nephew, Clodio Pulcher, envies the charismatic Catilina for winning the attention of Mayor Cicero’s daughter, Julia. Julia and Catilina’s relationship provokes the ire of Cicero, but their love prevails – so too does Catilina’s Megalopolis, despite Clodio’s schemes (he whips up popular outrage against Catilina’s lofty ambitions in a time of scarcity) and the city’s partial destruction by a Soviet satellite. 

The film is four decades in the making, having been interrupted by catastrophes like 9/11 and Coppola’s failure to secure enough funding, and is styled as the director’s magnum opus. As this review in Roger Ebert points out, there are undeniable parallels between Catilina and Coppola himself. Like the film itself, Catilina’s project is exorbitant and sluggish, causing the artist serious frustration and recourse to alcohol. 

The parallels with contemporary politics are legion. New Rome is New York and, by extension, America. Maniacal oligarchic artists like Catilina are the good guys of Hollywood, even if their projects seem risky, exorbitant, and over-ambitious. For those reasons, the artists’ reputations are unstable, though they always have the people’s interests at heart. Pragmatic, closed-minded politicians (Mayor Cicero) are bad when they try to harness popular opinion to constrain the oligarchs. Hollywood is clearly aligned with the oligarchs; conservative-leaning governors are embodied by Cicero. The worst villains of all are those who win themselves clout by taking advantage of popular unrest and poisoning the rabble against the oligarchs by peddling populist rhetoric (Clodio). Clodio is Trump — lest the audience fail to grasp that incisive piece of cultural commentary, his followers wear red hats.

Several canonical literary references function as the trappings of an epic romp through human civilisation. But their effect is frequently one of bathos: Catilina’s opening speech is, of all things, Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’. At this point I assumed the film was a satire, but as events unfolded, I couldn’t be so sure. Adam Driver’s Catilina is messianic and self-serious and yet we are supposed to be on his side, because Megalon is the real deal. 

Julia’s character, too, is strange. For the first several minutes of the film, she is the scandalous ‘It Girl’ of New Rome, refusing to be boxed in by her father. She poses for risqué photoshoots and parties till dawn with Clodio and his coterie of sexually loose, peacocking women. When she first meets the intriguing Catilina, the frisson is undeniable: she is cocky, he is sardonic. She swiftly becomes his assistant, wedding herself to his project, and her sharp inquisitiveness and air of confidence vanish suddenly. For the remainder of the film her character is painfully one-note, resembling a female protagonist out of a lesser Dickens novel: a paragon of meek virtue, she is totally in Catilina’s thrall. Undoubtedly the fault of the directing rather than the acting, Julia reflects the inconsistency of the film as a whole. 

The film’s most bizarre paradox is that members of the Crassus Elite are ridiculed for their decadence and self-indulgence, faults which comprise the film’s own primary flaws. An overacting Aubrey Plaza plays ‘Wow Platinum’, vulgar newsreader and jilted lover of Catilina, whose character is an entertaining but not particularly intelligent parody of climbers and grifters in the celebrity world. She marries Crassus to get back at Catilina and obtains control over the Crassus bank, teaming up with Clodio to freezing Catilina’s accounts. To the film’s credit, Wow’s sordid sexual affair with Clodio, her husband’s nephew, and her eventual assassination by Crassus makes her subplot particularly Roman. Crassus and Wow’s wedding is a carnivalesque affair, celebrated in a Colosseum and disrupted by Clodio’s plot to undermine Catilina by broadcasting a deepfake depicting him in bed with the city’s pop darling, the virgin ‘Vesta’. It is a highlight of the film’s action but encumbers itself with stylistic overkill. The scene is punctuated by dizzying shots of Catilina in the midst of a drug-induced psychotic episode. Catilina repeats several lines of earlier dialogue concerning ‘Time’ and ‘Consciousness’ in his mania; he sways, sweats, and merges into his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. The episode recalls the physical theatre techniques which earn secondary school Drama its unserious reputation. It seems to last an hour, repeatedly stressing its point: that the elite class of New Rome is over-the-top. It is itself a bloated, over-the-top mess. 

To be fair, in casting Catilina as the victim of false allegations, the film cleverly plays on the historiographical controversy around the Catiliarian conspiracy, whose historic records are probably biased in favour of Cicero and against the coup-leading Lucius Sergius Catilina. The themes of tech-driven misinformation and cancellation are handled quite creatively. Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio is a great mixture of buffoonery and villainy; his many costumes, from Grecian goddess to Revolutionary patriot, are exquisite. And, on the surface of it, messages like Catilina’s “don’t let the now destroy the forever” are perfectly wise. Political short-termism is the scourge of the West: policies designed only for the re-election of democratic parties end up stagnating economies in the long run and threatening the integrity of public institutions. Bold new ideas are probably necessary to reverse decline. Creativity without partisanship or provocative platitudes would be welcome in the political sphere.

But the premise of the film is itself utopian (as someone points out in a rare moment of clarity, utopias are but a hair away from dystopias). The substance Megalon is a vague, unreal salve for the political troubles plaguing New Rome. The film asks that we trust creative visionaries but it is magic, not natural human achievement, behind Catilina’s fame. He hardly even seems responsible for his invention: it is never explained how he produced the material or became capable of stopping time. I appreciate that my critique demands literalism from a metaphor: Megalon is a stand-in for creative genius, itself a mysterious phenomenon which eludes clear scientific explanation. But the film’s heavy-handed political commentary blends uncomfortably with its element of fantasy. Both confused and didactic, sincere and parodic, Megalopolis reminds me of Sir Philip Sidney’s remarks in The Defense of Poesy on the ‘mongrel tragicomedy’ which trended on the late Elizabethan stage: 

“. . . all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clown not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragicomedy obtained.”

The film’s problems don’t stop at style. Its warning against populism is fair enough, if a bit hysterical, but its utopian disavowal of pragmatism vitiates its own wisdom. So too does its narcissism. Mad artists with good intentions (a fact which can’t possibly be clear to the public) are to be trusted; suspicious, closed-minded governors are too uncultured to understand the artists’ visions; normal people are sheep, easily manipulated into blaming the state-subsidised artistic elite for their problems; populist leaders are pernicious, on their own side rather than that of their flock. This latter message might seem the most valid in the litany, but as I sat in discomfort in the cinema, I couldn’t help but feel myself siding with the populists. 

In the end, Catilina delivers on his utopian promise of a magically interconnected citadel, proving wrong his mean-minded detractors, especially the mayor. The film is gracious enough to grant Mayor Cicero forgiveness. Wary until the end, he is finally carried away into the molten heart of Megalopolis along with the dumbfounded rabble. In that moment of redemption, too, Catilina – and by extension, Coppola – is figured as nothing less than the Redeemer of mankind. Having survived an assassination attempt, a fabricated sex scandal, and false accusations of murder, Catilina’s triumph marks a cosmic rebirth: the film’s final shot focuses on his newborn daughter (named Sunny Hope!) wriggling happily at his feet. Evidently, the film is confident that it is a gift to posterity.  

After four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, Catilina-Coppola presents to the public the fruits of his labour – a magical city made of golden light, an immersive epic film about the very nature of human civilisation – and the public must be grateful. If Megalon is a metaphor for artistic genius and Megalopolis is a metaphor for Coppola’s film, then the audience is told to forgive Catilina-Coppola of all his quirks, because his innate brilliance is bona fide. Going off the film’s reliance on overblown style over coherent substance, it seems that Coppola’s creative genius is imperfect, after all.