There is hardly a moment in Megalopolis that sets up another moment later in the film. Things just happen. They are all of a piece – they belong together somehow – but they do not seem to cause one another. Watching Megalopolis is like passing from surprise to surprise, some delightful, others confounding, but always interesting.
I’ve written before about the two main kinds of narrative films, dream movies and memory movies. Memory movies relate events in a cause and effect sequence, usually with the nonessential moments edited out. Most movies are memory movies. Like our own memories, they create meaning in the way they order their events.
Dream movies work like our dreams. They are a series of things that happen—“a series of things that happen” is all a movie can be, after all; as Andrei Tarkovsky famously said, movies are sculptures composed of bits of time—but they are structured via “dream logic,” that is, symbolic or emotional logic, not cause-and-effect logic. There are not a lot of dream movies, and they tend to frustrate and annoy many more audience members than they entertain. Dream movies have typically been embraced only in retrospect.
Megalopolis is a dream movie. It was a dream project for Francis Ford Coppola, who has been talking about making the film since the late 1970s. It has always been about ancient Rome, science-fiction conceits with strong fantasy elements (like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), and, quote, “America.” It’s always been artistically ambitious and expensive, two things deemed incompatible in Hollywood boardrooms. Nearing the end of his life, Coppola decided to fund it himself. He sold his wineries to make it possible. I’m not telling you this to surreptitiously oblige you to see the film. You do what you want with your time and money as Coppola has done with his. It’s just important to understand how personal this film is for Coppola.
Many will balk at how personal Megalopolis is. We expect movies, and especially movies made at this scale, to be “for” the audience first. Our blockbustered brains believe that big, expensive movies are supposed to appeal to the masses. (In general we consumers think that everything we spend money on is supposed to be for us, but I digress.) They don’t have to. Mass appeal is one of the great things about movies, but it’s not the only great thing.
Megalopolis’ story—and I use that word lightly—concerns an architect who longs to realize a utopian vision in the heart of a failing city, New Rome. Cesar Catalina, the architect, spars with the others powers that be, politicians and bankers, over what to do with that tract of land in the city’s heart. Various other characters jockey for power as well. As I said, there isn’t much narrative continuity at work here, but there are ideas, themes, symbols; evocative images and beguiling distractions; horrors and hilarities; drama; camp; musical numbers; poetic montages; spectacle; mock CGI; aching earnestness; Freudian farce; satire, slapstick, and sincerity sometimes in the same scene. It is auto-hagiography. It is a utopian vision. It is a dream.
The one thing Megalopolis is not is realistic. Coppola stuffed realism into a box and sent it out the door when he sold his wineries. So don’t expect it. Megalopolis is Mulholland Drive, The Boy and the Heron, Pierrot le Fou, or Eyes Wide Shut. It is not The Godfather. It isn’t even Apocalypse Now.
Even when you are able to raise $150M of your own money to fund your “vanity” project, I think it takes courage to put you heart out there for the world to see. In Megalopolis Coppola is sharing his internal drive, his intuitive sense of the world with the world. It’s awkward. It’s too personal. It’s adorably idealistic. I hope we can always adore idealism. It draws us toward something hopeful, innocent, and pure.
And that is Coppola’s explicit aim in Megalopolis – to draw us toward something hopeful and pure, not so that we blindly accept his vision, but so that we create visions of our own. Indeed, his reliance on obviously false stagecraft (“bad” CGI) is a classic way of distancing the audience from the art itself so that they engage with the ideas motivating it instead. Now in his 80s, the man who has always made movies about America, looks at America and sees a society distressingly close to giving up on itself. He wants us to believe again that a well-functioning society is possible. He wants us to aspire to something grand and good. He believes that art can inspire us in that way. He believes that artists have a responsibility, or even the privilege, of inspiring that in their audiences.
I find that belief inspiring. Not in spite of, but because of its profound hokeyness, I find Megalopolis inspiring. What a film! There’s nothing else like it.
There is hardly a moment in Megalopolis that sets up another moment later in the film. Things just happen. They are all of a piece – they belong together somehow – but they do not seem to cause one another. Watching Megalopolis is like passing from surprise to surprise, some delightful, others confounding, but always interesting.
I’ve written before about the two main kinds of narrative films, dream movies and memory movies. Memory movies relate events in a cause and effect sequence, usually with the nonessential moments edited out. Most movies are memory movies. Like our own memories, they create meaning in the way they order their events.
Dream movies work like our dreams. They are a series of things that happen—“a series of things that happen” is all a movie can be, after all; as Andrei Tarkovsky famously said, movies are sculptures composed of bits of time—but they are structured via “dream logic,” that is, symbolic or emotional logic, not cause-and-effect logic. There are not a lot of dream movies, and they tend to frustrate and annoy many more audience members than they entertain. Dream movies have typically been embraced only in retrospect.
Megalopolis is a dream movie. It was a dream project for Francis Ford Coppola, who has been talking about making the film since the late 1970s. It has always been about ancient Rome, science-fiction conceits with strong fantasy elements (like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), and, quote, “America.” It’s always been artistically ambitious and expensive, two things deemed incompatible in Hollywood boardrooms. Nearing the end of his life, Coppola decided to fund it himself. He sold his wineries to make it possible. I’m not telling you this to surreptitiously oblige you to see the film. You do what you want with your time and money as Coppola has done with his. It’s just important to understand how personal this film is for Coppola.
Many will balk at how personal Megalopolis is. We expect movies, and especially movies made at this scale, to be “for” the audience first. Our blockbustered brains believe that big, expensive movies are supposed to appeal to the masses. (In general we consumers think that everything we spend money on is supposed to be for us, but I digress.) They don’t have to. Mass appeal is one of the great things about movies, but it’s not the only great thing.
Megalopolis’ story—and I use that word lightly—concerns an architect who longs to realize a utopian vision in the heart of a failing city, New Rome. Cesar Catalina, the architect, spars with the others powers that be, politicians and bankers, over what to do with that tract of land in the city’s heart. Various other characters jockey for power as well. As I said, there isn’t much narrative continuity at work here, but there are ideas, themes, symbols; evocative images and beguiling distractions; horrors and hilarities; drama; camp; musical numbers; poetic montages; spectacle; mock CGI; aching earnestness; Freudian farce; satire, slapstick, and sincerity sometimes in the same scene. It is auto-hagiography. It is a utopian vision. It is a dream.
The one thing Megalopolis is not is realistic. Coppola stuffed realism into a box and sent it out the door when he sold his wineries. So don’t expect it. Megalopolis is Mulholland Drive, The Boy and the Heron, Pierrot le Fou, or Eyes Wide Shut. It is not The Godfather. It isn’t even Apocalypse Now.
Even when you are able to raise $150M of your own money to fund your “vanity” project, I think it takes courage to put you heart out there for the world to see. In Megalopolis Coppola is sharing his internal drive, his intuitive sense of the world with the world. It’s awkward. It’s too personal. It’s adorably idealistic. I hope we can always adore idealism. It draws us toward something hopeful, innocent, and pure.
And that is Coppola’s explicit aim in Megalopolis – to draw us toward something hopeful and pure, not so that we blindly accept his vision, but so that we create visions of our own. Indeed, his reliance on obviously false stagecraft (“bad” CGI) is a classic way of distancing the audience from the art itself so that they engage with the ideas motivating it instead. Now in his 80s, the man who has always made movies about America, looks at America and sees a society distressingly close to giving up on itself. He wants us to believe again that a well-functioning society is possible. He wants us to aspire to something grand and good. He believes that art can inspire us in that way. He believes that artists have a responsibility, or even the privilege, of inspiring that in their audiences.
I find that belief inspiring. Not in spite of, but because of its profound hokeyness, I find Megalopolis inspiring. What a film! There’s nothing else like it.
Elijah Davidson is Co-Director of Brehm Film and Senior Film Critic. Subscribe to Come & See, his weekly newsletter that guides you through the greatest films ever made, and find more of his work at elijahdavidson.com.
There are segments throughout the film that feel spacious, like Costner is reveling in the opportunity—maybe his last opportunity; there’s a “shoot your last shot” air to all of this—to create iconic “American” images, to commit them to the screen, as they used to say.
