Megalopolis, or the Old Man’s Fever Dream

There is no getting around it: Megalopolis (2024) is an elderly man’s fever dream. Its psychedelic transitions, flat dialogue, bizarre acting, and milquetoast politics polymerize into a whole both mysteriously personal and entirely legible. It is a fable set in faux-contemporary New York with “Make New Rome Great Again” signs and superficial invocations of the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Characters have names like “Cicero” and “Crassus.” Signs for the New York Stock Exchange are still visible. Yet, none of these allusions go anywhere. They mean something to Coppola, something about utopia and the hope for a better future, the need to never give up. But what precisely? He has bothered to stage Cicero and references to Vestal virginity. But the plot, insomuch as it exists, is little more than a debased, futuristic Romeo and Juliet. It never quite comes together; almost everyone but my wife and I walked out of our screening.

Take, for instance, the early scene in which Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), daughter of the mayor of New Rome, quotes Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha while Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) momentarily holds the book up in front of the camera. It’s never mentioned again. Or consider that Cesar, as we learn from the first frame of the movie, can freeze time. Is this ability ever used to advance the plot? Does it have any role in the tension generated by the characters and their relationships? No. As best I can recall, Cesar uses the power once: to demonstrate that Julia’s love has healed him, has, in effect, raised his self-esteem.

The film’s self-presentation is saturated with theatricality. Characters give stylized readings of lines like “my Emersonian mind.” The mayor and Cesar argue as they give a press conference atop tall walkways, set high above some warehouse floor, filled with paparazzi. Each scene feels quite consciously staged, as, when, for example, Cesar’s rabble-rousing cousin (and a Trump analogue) rapidly whips into a frenzy a crowd of discontented, impoverished New Romans. It all happens so fast. They seem almost to be waiting for him; they are a potential mob, just waiting to be made whole.

Megalopolis never does anything with its Roman evocations. Cicero’s daughter marries a kind of tech-enamored idealist version of Caesar and Catiline, mixed into one. Psychedelic translations hold the whole thing together, which, when we consider how disjointed it feels otherwise, might be the one moment in which form and content come together during its two-hour-plus runtime.

Some of this bizarreness may be traceable to Coppola’s behavior on set, which actors report was erratic and at times even creepy. He would alter locations at the last minute, seemingly throwing the schedule out the window. Of course, Coppola has wanted to make this film since the 1970s. One could read at least some of his oddity as perfectionism—emphasis on “some.”

In any case, the term that keeps coming up among critics and viewers alike is “mess.” Even when people wish to speak of it positively (and here I am guilty too), they resort to the kinds of hedging language that always betray failure: Megalopolis is a “glorious mess.” That sort of thing. We all, whether we like it or not, understand that it is not, strictly or straightforwardly speaking, “good.”

Although I must confess I did enjoy the film. I really, honest to God, did. That may sound completely irrational given what I’ve said above. But what makes it worthwhile is much more ephemeral than what is so obviously wrong. Some moments, like when Crassus (Jon Voight) pretends the bow hidden beneath a blanket, is his “boner” only to turn it on his enemies, are genuinely funny. Others made me laugh, whether Coppola meant them to or not (“My name is Frank. Not like Franco. Like Francis”). The bizarre transitions do, at times, create a sense of foreboding and horror, often in juxtaposition with moments of hilarity. Megalopolis’s tonal variety is an asset; it makes for fun viewing, never knowing where you’ll go next. The fissures produce a ridiculousness that is a reward all its own.

And I do think there is more to it: the theatricality, the idea of Roman Republican aristocrats as a mixture of civic caretakers and unbelievable hedonists reflects the reality of class compositions far more than typical representations (in which they are glorious and selfless as opposed to the debased and materialistic elites of the empire). There’s always a glimpse of an idea, some notion of some greater idea, just out of view, even in the more absurd scenes. I think it only fair to ponder these ideas more. Coppola has made something wonderful here, a film both personal and superficial, deep and depraved in its shallowness.

Perhaps a re-watch is in order…