“Megalopolis” Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Artistic Rejuvenation

The good news is that the Fountain of Youth exists. The bad news is that it costs a hundred and twenty million dollars. At least, that’s what Francis Ford Coppola paid, out of his own pocket, for his own version of it—the making of his latest movie, “Megalopolis.” But he got value for his money, judging from the result, in which he seems like a younger director than he has ever been. With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.

Coppola, who’s eighty-five and made his first feature in 1963, is one of the most flamboyantly gifted filmmakers of his era, but, for the most part, he has subordinated his pictorial power to dramas of tight-fitting psychology and dutiful realism that have both overwhelmed and repressed it. He became a self-consciously serious director and he rarely cut loose. A great exception—the swoonily romantic 1982 musical “One from the Heart,” which had a theatrical rerelease at the start of this year—was panned (unfairly) and bankrupted him. But with “Megalopolis” he cuts looser than ever and is able to do so precisely because he’s also more serious than ever. Coppola fills the movie with fervent, rapturous rhetoric that seems to emanate, almost in his own voice, from behind the camera, and this rhetoric fuses with the visual rhetoric of what the camera does—an aesthetic flamboyance in the movie’s visual compositions, performances, design, costume, and the scale and tumult of its spectacular action. “Megalopolis,” a movie made with hubristic ambition, is not only a tale of hubristic ambition but is indeed a celebration of it. The film is a tragedy in which everything comes out right: Coppola builds his protagonist’s absurd overreach into a foreordained happy ending, and the movie itself is a happy outcome from the very start.

The subtitle of “Megalopolis” is “A Fable,” and a fabulous extravagance is proclaimed both in its premise and its action. The movie takes place in the course of a year or two some time this century, in a city that features many of the landmarks of current New York and is called New Rome. The cast of characters and a smattering of Latin words and phrases imbue this futuristic setting with conflicts and myths borrowed from ancient history. The movie’s visionary splendor and its carefree incoherence are on view in the first dramatic scene, a symbolic blast both of giddy unrealism and of aesthetic audacity: Adam Driver, stepping out onto a narrow ledge near the top of the Chrysler Building, near the decorative arches at its crown, leans out and peers down to the busy street below, lifts a leg and makes as if to fall, and then calls out, “Time! Stop!” The traffic freezes; so do the clouds drifting overhead; so, too, does Driver, keeping his foothold and tilting backward. Then he regains his footing and coolly snaps his fingers to get the world moving again.

Think about it—but not too hard. (Does he also reverse gravity?) Cinematically, “Megalopolis” is a skyscraper of cards. It’s not a chain of dominoes set up to fall with gaudy precision but a mighty contrivance magnificently envisioned yet insubstantially joined, as fragile as it is wondrous. It wouldn’t withstand a push; it would just collapse in a disastrous, unrecognizable heap. So don’t push, as only a malicious child would do. The fragility of conception isn’t a bug but a feature of this cinematic soap bubble of a dreamy wonder. Coppola offers a vision as phantasmagorical as it is absurd, as fanciful as it is exhilarating. Two things keep this contrivance held together in tenuous balance: a clear dramatic framework and Coppola’s sheer strength of feeling.

Driver is at the center of the movie throughout, playing the polymathic protagonist Cesar Catilina. Not only has Cesar won a Nobel Prize for inventing a sort of biological metal called Megalon; he’s also an artist, an urbanist, an architect, a political insider, and the head of New Rome’s Design Authority. He’s Robert Moses if Moses had had Leonardo da Vinci’s spectrum of talents, and his ambition is to transform the city’s neighborhoods, architecture, aesthetic, technology, and thus its very way of life. The movie’s title comes from Cesar’s name for his dream project, a city-within-the-city that will be built using his wonder substance. What he has in mind is a techno-utopia in which form and function are united, in which beauty will be matched by abundance. But that project is controversial, not least because it requires the demolition of existing neighborhoods and, at least temporarily, the displacement of their residents.

New Rome’s mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), is essentially a liberal, devoted to the citizenry’s practical needs (jobs, housing, education) and leery of grand-scale projects, lest they threaten the interests of the city’s many constituencies: working people, business people, unions, banks. He opposes the construction of Megalopolis and, at a site where Cesar has demolished an apartment building (stopping time to savor the implosion), is planning an entertainment complex. But Cicero’s only child, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), believes in Cesar’s work and hopes to smooth matters out between him and her father. Then Julia and Cesar fall in love, incurring Cicero’s wrath and setting up a mighty clash in civic and romantic dimensions.

Coppola’s imagination is excited above all by the volatile intersection of power and family, and that’s the principle with which he builds out the movie’s prime conflict. Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), is the city’s richest man. Cesar’s girlfriend, at least at the start of things, is Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a flashy TV business reporter known as the Money Bunny, who is frustrated; she wants to be “half of a power couple” but Cesar works alone. Instead, she marries Crassus for his money, which she contrives to get control of, despite a prenup, with the help of another of his nephews, the craven Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a populist politician who riles up public sentiment against Megalopolis and launches a defamatory campaign against Cesar.

The stark solidity of the rivalries and the fixed severity of the characters’ conflicts are built on an underpinning of extravagant fantasy that’s a mere wink away from comedy; the story may as well involve the rivalry of Bugsius Bunnilina and Mayor Elmyr Fuddero. What rescues it from cartoonishness is the authentic grandeur and crazed gravitas that the actors bring to their roles—and the many inventive dramatic fillips and flourishes that Coppola devises for them to strut their stuff with. Driver, from the day he hit the screen in “Girls,” has been among the most imaginative and spontaneous of actors, and his performance in “Megalopolis” is as essential to the movie’s freewheeling inventiveness as is the role he plays. His Cesar is more than a genius of art and science; he’s a creator of moments themselves, dominating public and private arenas with a showiness that’s redeemed by style. At a press conference of Mayor Cicero—reported live by Wow—Cesar roves around, a Dracula-like presence under a black cape, before emerging to deliver, of all things, one of the finest renditions of Hamlet’s existential soliloquy that the movies have yet offered (a scene to rival Charlie Chaplin’s fierce rave of it in “A King in New York”).

The sassy swing of a sequence in Cesar’s studio, with his entire staff collaborating in efforts closer to play than to labor, has the feel of a Vincente Minnelli set piece, with the long-limbed Driver doing dancelike maneuvers in a swivel chair. As Cesar prepares to show Julia the wonders of his scientifico-artistic contrivances, he changes jackets, with the aid of an assistant, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne)—who’s also a historian recording the events at hand—and the elegant shiver of his shoulders invests the instant with momentousness. Yet at a moment of physical and emotional agony, Driver is also capable of rending the screen with a simple repeated one-syllable incantation that constitutes one of the most indelible inflections I’ve heard in a movie.

The actors all seem to be having the time of their lives. As Wow Platinum (whose name has an origin story too snappy to spoil), Plaza brings a coruscating intensity to machinations in the bedroom and the boardroom, as well as brazen flair to her character’s on-the-air allure. Voight is gruffly, fiercely Shakespearean in his worldly crudeness; LaBeouf brings a lizard-like protean desperation to Clodio’s needy stratagems; and, as Cicero’s wife, Teresa, Kathryn Hunter gets a welcome and radiant turn displaying warmth, curiosity, tenderness, and physical delight. (She even gets to dance—with Jason Schwartzman, as Cicero’s bandmaster, playing drums.) Emmanuel, as Julia, is winningly plainspoken and thoughtful, even as she brings a lyrical lilt to the most exquisitely designed scene in the movie, a skyhigh romantic reunion on cable-dangling girders.

Though much of “Megalopolis” is wildly subjective and built from hallucinatory effects, the movie’s relentless energy is captured in images that are graphically eye-catching and straightforwardly composed. Coppola’s work shows in their imaginative power, produced by way of unexpected and revelatory angles and graceful gestures that are heightened by the simplicity with which they slip onto the screen. Even at the start, a few sharp camera glances catch both the vast skies over Cesar’s head and the slippery-soled shoes on his feet.

Some of the rapid-fire action, violent and insolent, is realized with mercurial editing that also spotlights the high-relief images that it joins. The most grandiose compositions are reserved for displays of Megalopolis, starting as a work in progress and culminating in a vision of the cosmic that combines startlingly biomorphic forms with eerily flowing motion and a palette of colors and a style of glowing light that are as unnatural as they are seductive. The movie’s physical design, its costumes, and its accessories are as showily assertive as the images and the performances—not to mention the hulking old-school Citroën in which Cesar tools around town, the gold headdress that Wow dons for a costume party, and a touchless floating ball that’s Julia and Cesar’s domestic toy.

Subplots proliferate, involving dark suspicions from the past, fake news from the present, legal troubles issuing from both, and the documentary evidence that underlies them. Cesar, who’s widowed, is deeply devoted to the memory of his late wife, and his touchingly, melodramatically fervent demonstrations of enduring devotion are echoed in Coppola’s onscreen dedication of the movie to his wife, Eleanor, who died in April. There’s also a brief but jolting live-performance element that, though peripheral to the plot, is crucial to the experience—a moment of theatrical interaction with the filmed image, which highlights the immediate physicality from which even the most elaborate cinematic images are made.

The movie only gets clumsy when dealing with something of which Coppola has little recent experience: ordinary life. The everyday people (which is to say, extras) whose homes are demolished to make room for Megalopolis; or who appear destitute on ravaged streets late at night in an obscure neighborhood that Cesar happens to be passing through; or who support Clodio’s political campaign (up to a point)—these are caricatures, even stereotypes, and get almost no screen time. I wanted to know what they may have noticed, or not, when Cesar stopped time and thus stopped them in their tracks.

“Megalopolis” rises to its philosophical climax with speechifying in a vein of eyerollingly adolescent humanism. Its open-minded sincerity is coupled with a vision that’s less a matter of joyful creativity than of what Cesar calls debate, and which brings to mind bureaucratic conferences and PowerPoint presentations—a utopia in which the plenitude of art and science supplied from above yield earnest, well-meaning boredom. But there’s nothing boring in Coppola’s realization of this culminating drama, and none in Driver’s declamatory enthusiasm. The romantic visionary gets an exultant sendoff in a sentimental display of family life on the public stage, Coppola’s own personal utopia. Ultimately, the contradictions at the heart of “Megalopolis”—the incompatibility of the order of art and the loose ends of life, the artist’s unifying imperatives versus society’s centrifugal uncertainties—remain unexamined, unexplored, merely papered over in a mighty paean to harmony and progress through reason and inspiration. Still, for a hundred and twenty million, a kid can dream big. ♦