Megalopolis

★★★★

Nothing you may have learned about Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project “Megalopolis” can prepare you for what the experience of watching the film is really like. In fact, try as I might, the words herein contained in this review of the film, which I just saw at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, will not do the experience justice. Truly, it must be seen to be believed.

I might tell you that Aubrey Plaza plays a mischievous news reporter named Wow Platinum, or that Shia LaBeouf is in full drag when he mutters through gritted teeth, in the cadence of rhyme: “Revenge tastes best when you’re wearing a dress.” I could mention how Adam Driver spends a portion of the film with a glittery CGI effect across half his face, or how Jon Voight conceals a crossbow in his pants under the guise of an erection. Certainly, I could bring up the already-infamous live theatre element of the film, in which a real human person in the auditorium converses with Adam Driver through the screen. I can say these things, but I cannot do justice to what it is like to really see them.

No, “Megalopolis” is a cinematic experience meant to be devoured, fully lived and breathed, not simply explained. The legend Francis Ford Coppola strives with this film to mark a new stage in the evolution of cinema as a medium, delivering a wholly singular, if more than occasionally bewildering, monument to hope and art that is both freshly innovative and brimming with a lifetime of storytelling experience.

The premise of the film, as I understand it, is as follows. In an imagined present-day blend of contemporary New York City and Ancient Rome, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a Nobel Prize winning architect, a genius of his time, who dreams of creating a new utopian society he calls Megalopolis. He aims to achieve this through an element he…invented? Or discovered?…called Megalon, as well as his supernatural ability to control time. In his pursuits, he clashes with the city’s mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), forms a relationship with him. Meanwhile, Cesar’s conniving cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) conspires to steal Julia for himself.

A self-described fable on power and greed, “Megalopolis” is superficially baffling and incoherent, but surprisingly textured and layered at its core. As the future of the motion picture medium grows ever more uncertain, Coppola positions himself here as the architect of tomorrow, a figure of change who will liberate the crumbling empire of today for a better world to come. Megalopolis, the city and the film, is Coppola’s answer to a civilization on the brink of collapse; his new tomorrow, his beacon of hope. He aims to save cinema from those who have morphed it beyond recognition. Clashing with studio execs his entire career, it is no shock that Coppola pits his self-insert protagonist against a stuffed-shirt elite that’s happy to watch New Rome crack and decay if it is to their benefit.

That this is buried underneath a head-scratching science fiction epic in which Madison Square Garden serves as a gladiatorial colosseum is precisely what makes “Megalopolis” so confounding in its brilliance and entrancing in its stupidity.

Much of the dialogue is incoherent blathering and awkward thematic declarations, and the performances, even at their best, give the impression the entire script was rewritten at the top of each take. Unintentional laughter accompanied many of the film’s strangest non-sequitur phrases and the fearlessly committed readings they’re given by some of Hollywood’s top talent, but Adam Driver, by his very nature, comes away unscathed with a toweringly magnetic performance. The rest of the ensemble gets by on their sheer dedication to Coppola’s vision, some merely squeaking by and others passing with flying colours.

And what a vision it is. “Megalopolis” is a garish VFX-heavy spectacle of hallucinatory, dreamlike imaginings, conjured with the panache and overdrawn flair of an image-maker desperately trying to invent the next era of cinema in real time. Its gold-bathed digital look is home to overlit made-for-TV flatness, but also surrealist CGI wonders and strikingly inventive compositions. Visual storytelling at its most expressive, informed by feeling over logic. It’s entirely unbound by convention or practicality, sometimes for worse but usually for the better, and is Coppola at his most artistically liberated. Comparisons have been drawn to “Spy Kids” and the work of Tommy Wiseau, but these reductive parallels eliminate the intent behind the images. “Megalopolis” houses some of the most transportive and wondrous frames of Coppola’s career.

In a post-screening Q&A, the legendary director likened his film to that of Fellini’s “8½,” which is motivated by allegory first, and plot second. It takes some time, but it’s hard to watch “Megalopolis” and not feel it begin rewiring your brain to engage with it in this way. The incidental details, strange as they are, ultimately do not matter. It is the cumulative effect of these moments, the meaning they represent and the emotional force they possess that Coppola directs his energy towards. And his world becomes absorbing. At a point, it feels ordinary for the characters to speak like this, its outlandish visuals become familiar, the strange performances feel entirely normal. Well, perhaps not entirely. “Megalopolis” is an expressionist tapestry of pure, unfiltered cinema if you allow yourself to engage with it at its level.

But did Francis Ford Coppola invent the New Cinema? God, I hope not. “Megalopolis” works because it so rarely does: it’s a whirlwind of ideas and big swings and everything the maestro of cinema loves about the form, and it only comes together because the beating drum of its insanity grows to such volume and pace it eventually mellows out into a steady hum. Coppola may not be the architect of tomorrow, but if the man who built yesterday wants a crack at inventing the future, perhaps the attempt itself can be a beacon of hope.

This film was reviewed as part of the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival