MEGALOPOLIS: A Weird, Pretentious Blend Of Bad Acting And Beautiful Imagery

Now playing at every megalopolex from here to New Rome:

MEGALOPOLIS (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

It’s been three days since I took in a screening of the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s highly anticipated, and highly dreaded big, ambitious epic MEGALOPOLIS, and I’m still processing the damn thing. I’ll just jump in – it takes place in New Rome, which is New York City in a world in which the Roman Empire never ended, and concerns a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina, portrayed by Adam Driver.

With the backdrop of skyscrapers that shine like gold, under an endless yellow sky, Cesar aims to rebuild the city into some glorious shape-shifting utopia out of some magical substance called Megalon, but he’s opposed by Mayor Frank Cicero (Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito), but lo and behold, the mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Cesar. 

 

On the flashy sidelines in what seems like endless partying is the scene stealing Aubrey Plaza as a blonde, gold-digging news anchor named Wow Platinum (she said on The Daily Show that she “watched a lot of Fox News to research my role as a corrupt journalist”), an actor that Coppola remarked was cast because he was “cancelled,” Jon Vought as Cesar’s uncle Hamilton Crassus (crass name for a crass character), Dustin Hoffman as Crassus’s confidant Nush “The Fixer” Berman, Crassus’s son Clodio (Shia LaBeouf, who just gets creepier with age), and Clodio’s sister Cladia (SNL’s Chloe Fineman who called he character a “coke whore” on Late Night with Seth Myers). 

 

Lawrence Fishburne, whose third ever film credit was as a 17-year old Larry Fishburne in Coppola’s 1979 vietnam masterpiece APOCALYPSE NOW, grandly narrates, and plays Cesar’s assistant and chauffeur. Another member of the cast with major history with the director is his sister, Talia Shire (THE GODFATHER, and ROCKY series), as Cesar’s mother, but she isn’t given much to do. Neither does Jason Schwartzman as one of the Mayor’s men, he’s Coppola’s nephew so it was nice he was invited.

 

Oh, and somehow Driver’s Cesar has the ability to stop time, simply by yelling “Time, stop!” Now this is a compelling used element, and amazingly shot by Coppola veteran, cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr., and the movie surrounding it is gorgeous-looking, but it is never explained, and doesn’t make any sense in the narrative, but I’m not sure if it’s supposed to. Like many things that litter the screen in this strange story, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be saying.

 

But if you let it wash over you, there’s a lot of lush imagery and stunning set pieces to get lost in. One such mesmerizing sequence involves Grace VanderWaal as Vesta Sweetwater, a Vestal Virgin pop star, is harmonizing with an army of multiple versions of herself hanging from the ceiling of the coliseum, and I’m watching thinking, I don’t know what any of this means, but it looks fantastic!

 

After a 9/11-style disaster involving a fallen satellite, the building of the new Megalon-enhanced paradise goes forward, while LaBeouf crazily tries to f*** with Cesar’s reign as hard as he tried to f*** with the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and Plaza’s Wow Platinum (love that name) gets caught up in her own web of manipulations.

 

Unfortunately so much of the acting in this overblown opus is stilted, awkward, and unconvincing. Driver fares the best as his protagonist has an intense gravitas to him (even breathing a little bit of new life into Shakespeare’s done-to-death “To be or not to be” soliloquy), but Cesar is a broadly drawn magazine image for a character, and there never feels like there’s a back story or much depth to the guy. Coppola’s camera obviously adores Emmanuel as Cesar’s love interest, but her dialogue all seems like she’s narrating the film to herself, and it’s a bad thing when her blankness at times recalls Sophia Coppola’s miscast turn in GODFATHER PART III.

Plaza’s Wow Platinum (again, primo moniker) is definitely the most engaging persona here as she’s so unlike any other character the great deadpan actress has played, and feels like she’s in a much more interesting movie than everyone else.

Now, as for the movie’s meaning and/or message, it is obviously Coppola’s attempt at an allegory about how the crumbling of society in our modern times is historically embedded, but I’m not sure how the abstract architectural adventures of Cesar really makes any purposeful point. I may someday though.

 

But at this time, I can’t in good faith recommend MEGALOPOLIS. It struck me as a pretentious, badly acted, poorly paced, messy, cringingly weird, but eye-poppingly beautiful piece of catastrophic cinema made from what I bet is one of the nuttiest screenplays ever (written by Coppola himself with no help!). It does say something that I would watch it again as I feel like I may get something out of another viewing, but I really don’t think casual non-film geek movie-goers will connect to this perplexing passion project, and make it a hit. I’ll be very surprised if it does well at the box office this weekend.

 

I will say it would probably make a good double feature with the new re-release of CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT, as MEGALOPOLIS often plays like that decadent yet prestigious porno (produced by Penthouse Bob Guccione’s no less), but without the mass orgies. 

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These Indie Kids With Their Surreal Anti-Rom Coms…

This summer has been thankfully free of commercial romantic comedies.

There haven’t been any brightly-lit Kate Hudson or Jennifer Aniston vehicles in which they keep the Meg Ryan rom com fire going with the time-tested true-love-wins-in-the-end formula that I’ve been aware of.

There hasn’t even been a contender for all-star ensemble rom com like last year’s sleeper hit CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

But hold on, that’s at the multiplexes.

What about at the art houses? Well, there are a couple of movies that, at first glance, look like rom coms. Look a little closer, and you’ll see that they are anti-rom coms, that is, comical love stories, but layered with cynicism, realism, and existentialism. And then there’s the surreal element.

Like in first-time director Colin Trevorrow’s SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED from a screenplay by first-time screenwriter Derek Connoly, now playing at the Rialto in Raleigh.

Aubrey Plaza, from the very funny NBC show Parks and Recreation, stars as a jaded young woman interning at a magazine in Seattle (Seattle Magazine, duh), who comes off like a spiritual descendant of Daniel Clowe’s Enid from both the comic book and movie GHOST WORLD. Plaza’s father (Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin) thinks she’s in a funk (he embarrassingly thinks she’s a virgin too), and encourages her to get out and be social. So far, so rom com.

It veers off that well trodden trail, when our surly sarcastic heroine jumps at the chance to work on a story pitched by Jake M. Johnson (from the Fox Zooey Deschanel show New Girl) about what’s behind a classified ad that states: “Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. Safety not guaranteed.”

Plaza discovers that a scruffy Mark Duplass (who appears to be in every other indie film this year) wrote the ad, so she applies for the time traveling companion position. Meanwhile, it turns out that the smarmy Johnson, who at least owns up to being a crass jerk, just took on the assignment so he could hook up with an old girlfriend in the not-as-interesting-but-still-fine subplot.

Sure, it’s predictable that Plaza will come out of her shell and fall for Duplass, but the snappy script and tuned-in tone make this an endearing film that never tries to be too hip or self consciously pop culture savvy, despite having a few STAR WARS references in it. It can’t help but have some rom com story beats, but its naturalistic rhythms subvert them. That’s very impressive, considering the plot hinging on whether or not some odd guy can actually time travel.

Less successful in its rom com subversion, is Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s RUBY SPARKS, now playing at the Colony Theater  in North Raleigh. 

Its surreal premise is simple: a young writer (Paul Dano) writes about his dream girl (literally from his dreams) and she comes to life in the form of the energetic red-headed Zoe Kazan (who wrote the screenplay).

If Dano writes that she speaks French - she speaks French, if he writes that she can’t live without him - she freaks out if he lets go of her hand, and so on. “You can make her do anything you want…for men everywhere - tell me you’re not gonna let that go to waste” Dano’s brother (Chris Messina, another indie actor who gets around a bit) implores of him.

Dano’s attempts to control her always backfire, which, of course, is the point, but RUBY SPARKS is maybe half of a good movie. A sleazy Steve Coogan as Dano’s agent bit seems like a conventional concession, and the film’s conclusion spastically beats its message into the ground - or Dano’s apartment floor as Kazan frantically jumps up and down yelling that he’s a genius, because that’s what he’s typing her to do. Okay, we get it.

It’s sort of ADAPTATION meets (500) DAYS OF SUMMER, but it’s not fleshed out enough to really hit its marks. Still, the attempt to comment on the egos and expectations in a relationship as well as rom com tropes (though I’m not sure it’s really the refutation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ideal that the A.V. Club claims) does yields some satisfaction, and it’s nice to see apt cameos by Anne Benning, and Elliot Gould.

It’s worth noting that one of the only movies close to a conventional commercial rom com this summer is David Frankel’s HOPE SPRINGS, starring Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as an old married couple trying to get their groove back. That’s a nice little film that doesn’t need any sci-fi gimmickry or supernatural shenanigans in order to charm.

But if the idea of seeing A-list geezers getting it on puts you off, and you’re willing to give a surreal anti-rom com made by indie kids a try, go with SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED - it certainly has the edge because nobody would ever call Aubrey Plaza a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Not if they know what’s good for them.

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