In the Flesh: Megalopolis

Take Shakespeare’s Roman plays, a double handful of modern politics run through a blender on pulse for about half an hour, a dash of transcendental psychedelica, and a few decades of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and you’ve got Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Sprawling, messy, fantastical, oddly hopeful, naive, pointed, insightful, it’s a fitting capstone for such a long and wildly uneven career, which ranges from the generationally influential to the instantly forgettable. Megalopolis contains elements of both Coppolas, from the befuddling decision to give his protagonists the power to stop time to the outlandish scene in which Crassus (John Voight), pretending to have suffered a stroke, turns on his duplicitous wife, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) and grandson Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) and shoots them full of arrows. But it’s kind of wonderful, too, the uninhibited weirdness of it. 

Visually indebted to everything from Metropolis to Night of the Hunter, Megalopolis is bathed in soft, warm golden light and drenched in shadow. Coppola plays with reflections with as much finesse as he ever has, from pop sensation Vesta Sweetwater’s (Grace VanderWall) fractal performance at Crassus’s wedding to Cesar’s (Adam Driver) soliloquy between a pair of mirrors, his reflections echoing his words just out of sync. There are pinhole wipes straight out of Citizen Kane, breathtaking panoramas of a biomechanical city of the future unveiled in the film’s final act, shadowy noir close-ups and campy double exposures of Wow dancing sinuously against a backdrop of events unfolding as her plans to usurp Crassus’s bank come to fruition. In short, Coppola is going for it, and with a frankly astounding cast behind him that counts for a lot more than perfect execution. Where else are you going to see Aubrey Plaza dressed like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra getting shot in the heart with an arrow?

Megalopolis is a movie about the crucial importance of having a vision for the future, of rejecting the libidinal appeals of Trumpist populists and the stuffy, fearful institutionalism of career politicians. It’s about dreams and aspirations, about vision, about generosity and the old relinquishing the world to the young. The push and pull between Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) and her father, mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), and mother Teresa (the magnificent Kathryn Hunter) is some of the best onscreen familial drama I’ve seen in years, poignant without being saccharine, pointed without being preachy. Megalopolis is likely Coppola’s last film, a bomb of titanic proportions both critically and at the box office, but mark my words: in five to ten years, it will be reevaluated as one of his most ambitious and interesting films. It rejects dogma, it rejects mob rule, it rejects fascism, and if its own vision of paradise isn’t quite coherent, it is at the very least big-hearted and exquisitely beautiful.