Review: The tragedy of Megalopolis

During my first job in journalism, I was privileged to interview the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens regarding an ambitious multimedia project he had composed called The BQE.

Its inspiration was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, an infamous subsection of the interstate highway between New York and New Jersey often regarded as ugly, polluted and generally purgatorial by those forced to endure it. Stevens wondered if it was possible to take such an unloved edifice and transform it through art into something beautiful.

The BQE, as with so much of New York, was the brainchild of the urban planner Robert Moses; despite never being elected to public office, Moses exerted unprecedented power in his drive to redesign and rebuild the city to his own deeply personal specifications. He also, as Robert Caro detailed in his Pulitzer-winning 1974 biography The Power Broker, displaced hundreds of thousands against their will, levelled whole neighbourhoods, instigated the downfall of public transportation networks and redrew the map of New York to isolate and disfavour minorities and the poor.

Asked about Moses’ legacy, Stevens was less condemnatory. “He was in a position of power in post-war America, when there was incredible federal funding for reshaping the cities, so he was able to transform on a massive scale – more than anyone before or after him,” Stevens said. “And now, we’re living in the shadow of a building boom in New York, but it’s all private investors focused on capital, devoted to a very personal kind of corporate greed, so there’s been an interesting change of opinion about Moses. The people now long for a master plan.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, finally released in cinemas a little over two weeks ago after 40 years of tortuous development, is predicated on a similar hunger for a grand and transformative vision. Not coincidentally, its protagonist bears more than a little resemblance to Robert Moses, albeit idealised to an absurd and mythic degree; and much like the legacy of Moses, the movie has developed a strange appeal in some quarters due to the grimness of the alternative.

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Insomuch as it is possible to summarise the plot of Megalopolis, here goes nothing: In the city of New Rome – a retro-futurist New York, amalgamated with a Roman Empire in the throes of decadence and decline – the wealthy and eccentric genius Cesar Catalina plots the creation of ‘Megalopolis’, a utopian reinvention of the crumbling city aided by his Nobel-winning creation Megalon, an essentially magical substance that may or may not be based on his dead wife’s DNA.

Cesar’s plans are either opposed or complicated by a short-sighted mayor, a spurned and power-hungry lover, and Cesar’s envious failson-turned-fascist cousin. Cesar – for reasons which are never remotely explained – can stop time, though he never uses this power for any useful purpose. There are intrigues concerning control of a bank and the propriety of a vestal virgin/pop star. Eventually, a satellite falls on the city.

The legend of Megalopolis was well-known long before it ever hit the screens: Coppola, unable to find studio backing for his long-time passion project (I know, I’m shocked too) and in defiance of the cardinal rule “never put your own money in the show”, sold the wineries that had sustained him through his autumn years to personally finance the film’s $120 million budget, displaying the kind of astute money management that has seen the director go bankrupt three times over the course of his career.

The production – which had been delayed for slightly longer than I have been alive – could politely be described as ‘troubled’. Following media reports of inappropriate behaviour on set, Coppola has been sued by one Megalopolis extra for sexual harassment and assault, while Coppola has responded by suing Variety for defamation following its coverage of the allegations (“Some people are jealous and resentful of genius,” Coppola’s attorneys wrote in their suit, which is an interesting legal stratagem).

Pre-release screenings were unpromising, and did nothing to dissuade industry figures of the movie’s lack of commercial prospects; as one audience member reportedly whispered in the aftermath of the Cannes premiere: “What the fuck was that?”

A subsequent trailer which attempted to lean into the negative buzz by highlighting Coppola’s tumultuous relationship with critics in the past ran into more trouble when it transpired many of the quotes featured did not actually exist and were generated by injudiciously employed AI – an unfortunate development for a movie concerning the power of human creativity.

While it is true all this aroused a certain morbid curiosity about the film, its disastrous box office returns would seem to indicate more people are talking about Megalopolis than have actually seen it. Among those who have, opinions have been… mixed, to say the least.

“I’m telling you this not as a reviewer, but as friend: Do not see this movie,” warned Drew Magary in SFGate, as if doing so would causes audiences to die seven days later. Its less histrionic depreciators have dismissed Coppola’s would-be magnum opus in pretty much every way a critic can, but a consensus has nonetheless emerged: Megalopolis is an act of supreme folly and hubristic self-indulgence.

Reader, I loved every second of it. It might just be my movie of the year.

For what it’s worth, Megalopolis is frequently beautiful, dreamlike, camp, operatic and deeply funny (often intentionally so), a loving showcase of techniques much of modern filmmaking has either forgotten or abandoned, and – at the risk of joining a chorus that has already become repetitive – entirely unlike anything else to be found in the cinema in many years.

Its structure is oddly novelistic in a 19^th century way, whereas the dialogue at its best has a musicality to it. It is stuffed with wild swings and eccentric notions and populated by a cast that seems to have fully absorbed Coppola nephew Nicolas Cage’s acting philosophy of “nouveau shamanism”, swinging from soap opera to Shakespearean and back, often within a single scene. It is never, ever boring.

I could devote many thousands of words trying to win you over to my side, adding to the millions that have already been written by its devotees and detractors, but that would probably be pointless – it is the ultimate exemplar of a movie about which you need to make up your own mind.

Besides, believe it or not, that’s not why we’re here. The febrile discourse surrounding the movie has already proven the impossibility of separating what Megalopolis is from how it was made, and the context from which it emerged. All this raises more pertinent questions than those of one movie’s quality.

The film critic Matt Zoller Seitz this week wrote that Megalopolis “only seems ‘indulgent’ by the impoverished standards of American popular cinema, which has been so degraded by anti-intellectualism by this point that even films by directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson are mocked as pretentious, arty or just plain weird by mainstream viewers (in comparison to Marvel, anyway)… Movies like this only seem ‘indulgent’ because we’re so deep into unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it, or else it’s considered a waste of time – or worse, a form of acting-out by some bratty person who thinks they’re an artist rather than what they presumably are, an employee of whomever bought a ticket.”

Variations upon this argument undergird the enthusiasm so many of Megalopolis’ acolytes felt for the film even before they laid eyes upon it: the idea that it is a repudiation not just of “American popular cinema”, but the entire grubby, profit-driven system that produces it – an idea that Coppola himself has explicitly and shamelessly sought to disseminate.

Some have bucked against this, arguing that there are many reasons other than anti-intellectualism one might dislike Megalopolis, which isn’t so much a ‘marmite’ movie as a ‘limburger, pickled egg and anchovy sandwich’ movie – there are those who may enjoy such a thing, but trying to compel others to do so against their will, particularly out of a sense of obligation, will always be a doomed gambit.

Film geeks will be debating the merits of Megalopolis or lack thereof for years to come. But Megalopolis was, if you believed the hype Coppola spent four decades breathlessly spinning, supposed to be more than that: an exploration or even a demonstration of the power of utopia, and the role art might play in bringing it about.

That, unfortunately, is the tragedy of the Megalopolis.

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Coppola’s inspiration for a film exploring the creation of a utopia took root around the same time he was attempting to build one himself, albeit on a small scale. Founded in 1969, Coppola’s private studio American Zoetrope was to be his triumphant escape from the Hollywood studio system and the constraints it placed upon not just him, but all artists working within the film industry.

As Sam Wasson details in his book The Path to Paradise, Coppola planned to sign famous directors to serve as artists in residence, developing their own dream projects while acting as mentors to the less experienced Zoetrope artists, who would in turn mentor high school students interested in filmmaking. He would share the profits of the whole studio with his employees, whose families could eat for free in the Zoetrope restaurants he planned to open; he would “open the lot to the greater community, like a museum or public park, and host film festivals, dance festivals, and drive-ins… He would nurture a creative ecosystem that would keep everyone happily employed forever.”

Once upon a time, Zoetrope tried to provide many of those things which many of us might agree should be freely available, not just to workers by right, but for the cultural health of society as a whole. Then again, your average socialist – along with any other honest observer – could tell you what happens when private entities attempt to provide those things – there’s always a catch, and it never lasts.

Though the blame was often laid upon One From the Heart – a small, beautiful, heartbreaking movie that nevertheless ran outrageously overbudget and has been unjustly maligned as another example of Coppola’s hubris ever since – one does not need to be an industry expert to guess that Zoetrope was doomed from the outset. Just as landlords collude to keep rents high and corporations lobby to keep regulation low, Hollywood was never going to tolerate Zoetrope’s vision of the industry as a place of artists indulged, workers treated with respect, and shiny, happy people holding hands.

With his dream of creating a utopia for all artists dead in reality, Coppola devoted himself obsessively to the story of a single artist who could emerge triumphant in fiction, and perhaps inspire us to fashion our own utopia.

“Do we have to live in this kind of pay-per-view world, asked Coppola in a 1990s interview, “in which everybody’s going into debt and a few people own whatever the key resources are?”

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Megalopolis’ definition of utopia is nebulous, and that may be intentional – if one is feeling generous, Coppola perhaps understands that each of us might envisage our own utopia, and allows us the opportunity to do so (though given how every other facet of the movie megalomaniacally adheres to only one man’s vision, I wouldn’t blame you for finding this dubious).

This is not to say that Megalopolis somehow transcends politics – no art can, no matter what the intentions of the artist or what they claim – but more that the film is such a politically incoherent endeavour that attempting to discern anything explicitly ideological within its bloated framework is a doomed endeavour.

Many have detected traces of every libertarian nutjob’s favourite bad writer Ayn Rand, but Megalopolis lacks the visceral ugliness of her ideology, and instead seeks to marry her favourite themes with Coppola’s fuzzy boomer liberalism, the result of which is not exactly peanut butter and chocolate. Insomuch as it ever approaches explicit politics, Megalopolis is a magic-eye picture that almost everyone can squint at and perceive a vague something, but eventually one does wonder if it is worth the effort.

“The film is such a politically incoherent endeavour that attempting to discern anything explicitly ideological within its bloated framework is a doomed endeavour.”

The Marxist critical theorist Ernst Bloch posited that utopian fiction is useful because it emphasises the distinction between the realities it invents and the one we inhabit. In its own weird way, Megalopolis attempts to do this also, asking as Cesar does if the world we live in is the only one available to us. Unfortunately, in doing so, the limitations of Coppola’s own imagination become all the more apparent.

The bitter irony of Megalopolis is that Coppola, having finally broken free of the money-men with whom he has spent his life grappling, has produced a movie about how only a rich man can save us. Cesar, the artist-hero who Coppola does not even pretend is not his avatar, is only able to affect change due to the wealth, power and resources at his disposal. This is far from surprising: everything Coppola has ever achieved, or sought to achieve, has required money. He can imagine utopia, but not the end of capital. He is at least honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

The tragedy of Megalopolis is that it had no hope, none at all, of forestalling or reversing the current direction of the film industry – a direction controlled by those with far more resources at their disposal than Coppola at his wealthiest. The critical drubbing of Megalopolis has nothing to do with this; the people hard at work on the next Sonic the Hedgehog movie are not exactly swayed by reviews. Even if it had been an unprecedented and improbable success, there is no version of this world that would permit more movies as bold, ambitious and unhinged as Megalopolis to be made, because artists who can reach into their pocket and pull out $120 million are in short supply.

The film imagines that one might act as saviour to the many, but whatever victory Megalopolis represents is a lonely one – it belongs to Coppola, and no one else.

Meanwhile, the untold thousands who labour within the American film industry, the indignities and limitations of which set the tone for the business on an international level, are concerned less with transformation than survival; they understand, no matter how furiously some may deny it, that artists are workers, and that it is impossible to defend the first identity without recognising and organising around the second. The strikes that have riven Hollywood over the past year have little to do with pursuing any dream except the ability to sustain a livelihood, which the studio bosses and the snake-oil salesmen of AI work unceasingly even now to render not just into a dream, but an impossible one.

Writing in a Vulture article entitled ‘Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis Has Already Won’, Bilge Ebiri argued that “Coppola has created a movie that we can fight over, and make great claims over, and hurl accusations at each other over… For one shining moment, he’s created in the world outside his head the conversations he’s apparently been having inside of it.”

I wish I could believe that, I really do. But it would be more accurate to say that Coppola has already won – when you get to the point where you can happily blow $120 million on your dream and still not have to worry about paying rent, you have by definition won at life – while the conversations left in the wake of Megalopolis have been dispiritingly free of any debate about how we can craft a better world, or even make it easier for anyone to exist within the one in which we live. If Coppola’s intention was to provoke a “great debate about the future”, he has instead left us engaged in another conversation altogether – one which feels distinctly tired. But it is hard to blame Coppola for that. The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

It will no doubt seem a stretch for Heckle readers to summon much empathy for a figure of Coppola’s wealth and stature – I’m certainly not suggesting they should. But as Coppola once understood and as others need no reminding, he is not the only one – artist or otherwise – ever to have suffered within a seemingly inescapable system. Writing from Scotland, I need not look far to see proof of this.

Megalopolis tells us that a different and better world is possible, and this I believe to be true. But it will not tell us how to bring it about. The movie, in the end, is just a movie.

That is the tragedy of Megalopolis.