In Praise of ‘Megalopolis’
The oddity of Megalopolis is that it is neither as far-reaching nor as demented as its reputation suggests. The epic film, decades in the making, is a resounding commercial flop and a polarizer of critics everywhere. The median moviegoer has stayed away. Even if it weren’t for its manifold flaws and eccentricities, the film is probably too unclassifiable to do well in this cultural environment: No intellectual property is mined and no real events are restaged. The star-studded cast simply isn’t enough of a draw and the word-of-mouth is a muddle.
I can’t offer two thumbs shot straight up in the air. My praise is qualified, tentative even. Yet I do believe Megalopolis is more a success than a failure. It is a confirmation of Coppola’s moxie, and it contains ambition that is too often missing from contemporary artistic projects, whether they be films or novels. I saw glimmers of Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon in it, and this gladdened me. Here, at least, was an auteur who was going to leave it all on the field. The film’s poor showing at the box office doesn't bode well for the kind of expansive dreaming and gusto that it celebrates, at least when it comes to Hollywood, but the mad determination of both the director and his protagonist suggests that our cultural future may not be completely listless.
The narrative of the film, a takeoff on the Catilinarian conspiracy of Ancient Rome, is relatively straightforward. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, a brilliant architect who has the power to stop time. Cesar dreams big, like a mystic Robert Moses, and he has won a Nobel Prize for inventing a new building material called megalon. He belongs to the elite of New Rome, a barely disguised retro-futuristic New York City, and he is the bane of the existence of Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who possesses a much more banal vision for urban development. Whereas Catalina dreams of a shimmering utopia known as Megalopolis—he will build it, golden, from megalon—Cicero talks up a new casino to belch up tax revenue.
