Is ‘Megalopolis’ Actually an Arthouse Film?

‘We are in need of a great debate about the future,’ or so says Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the principal character of Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis (2024). Drawing on an enormous range of ideas and influences from cinema, art, literature and history, Coppola urges audiences to imagine something better for society. The movie is a rarity, bearing a $120 million budget but made outside the purview of any studio, funded entirely by Coppola, who sold part of his winemaking business to make it. His singular control is fully evident, for both good and ill. With Megalopolis, we see what a blockbuster art film looks like. 

The movie posits a version of America based on the waning days of the Roman Republic. ‘New Rome’ is a freewheeling blend of New York City, classical Roman aesthetics (Caesar cuts for all the men, police uniforms with centurion breastplates), art deco (Cesar’s office is in the Chrysler Building), and even 1980s-style tabloid television and a ’90s music video. Cesar is a scion of a powerful banking clan and visionary architect who seeks to transform the city with a revolutionary shapeshifting building material. Opposing him is the administration of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Such a brief synopsis neglects the many other characters and subplots, or how it plods for much of its runtime through a sleepy romance between Cesar and Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), before surging into a dizzyingly fast mode for its last third. One quasi-prominent character is killed off in a brief aside depicting a period the story mostly skips over. An apocalyptic disaster striking New Rome is treated almost perfunctorily. 

Many of Coppola’s higher ideas about humanity’s potential to rise above petty strife and build something better for itself are lost in the shuffle. The movie’s vision of progress is an enlightened rich genius bestowing a utopian project upon uncomprehending masses. Cesar’s urban environments are a vague gold-glowing mass of moving sidewalks, personal transportation bubbles, and sprawling coral-like structures. It’s informed by Neri Oxman’s 3D-printed designs guided by organic matter, with perhaps a flavour of the concept art legendary comic book illustrator Jim Steranko created for the production long ago. 

But despite its stated ideals, in practice Megalopolis is less about imagining the future than it is about exploring the soul of the imagineer. Cesar possesses the ability to halt time, but this doesn’t have any direct bearing on the story. Rather, it’s a metaphor for how cinema enables an artist to control time. Within this framing, the emphasis on Cesar’s travails make sense – his romance with Julia, an attempted public ‘cancellation’ via a doctored sex tape, his Shakespearean musings (literally, as he quotes among other things Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ monologue). Coppola’s mind is more on the past than the present; this is his epic reflection on his long career.

Coppola rose to prominence as one of the luminaries of New Hollywood, when directors in the mainstream American film industry had a level of creative freedom unlike in any other time in history. He first conceived of Megalopolis around the time this period ended in the early 1980s, and he spent decades chafing against the demands of commercial filmmaking as he attempted to get the project off the ground. He would ultimately walk away from the system, returning to his roots as an independent filmmaker with several ultra-low-budget features in the 2000s.

It was within this sensibility that he finally began to realize Megalopolis. The film is constantly experimenting, refusing to abide by conventional rules of editing or framing, letting the real and unreal, the tangible world and the life of the mind intermingle. Cesar rides through a city at night and imagines a statue of Justice collapsing to the ground in exhaustion amid tableaus of poverty, demonstrating how he views society around him. The performances are often broad, verging on cartoonish in a knowing way, as if the performers are gesticulating in a Roman theatre rather than for a camera. There are montages in split screen conveying a cacophony of overlapping events as the plot careens toward its closure. In certain showings of the film, at a crucial transition point, a theatre employee will walk out in front of the screen and directly ask Cesar a question, which he will answer. Coppola might not be able to conceive of a convincing urban future, but his imagination for cinema’s untapped possibilities is capacious. Despite the film’s messiness and sometimes overwhelming excess, it’s gratifying to see such ideas explored so unfettered by any question of studio demands or commercial viability. 

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is in cinemas worldwide from September 27 

^{Main image: ​Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis, 2024, film still. Courtesy: 2024 Caesar Film}