I want to love Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-years-in-the-making science-fiction epic. Thirty minutes into Megalopolis I scramble to find excuses on its behalf. And it’s all downhill from here.
There are fascinating comparisons with Brady Corbet’s upcoming The Brutalist, a genuine masterpiece that similarly synopsizes the writer-director’s career.
The kindest thing to say about Megalopolis is that it strives but fails to contain Coppola’s life and works. There’s something of the hermetically sealed worlds of such later Coppola joints as One from the Heart and a welcome dollop of the ambition that shaped Apocalypse Now.
Adam Driver plays a genius architect caught between the vagaries of corrupt officials, demagogues and one conniving media whore. Aubrey Plaza is criminally wasted as the woman journalist who – wearying-movie-trope klaxon – has unlimited access to men in power and is sleeping with all of them.
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She’s not even the worst female character. That misfortune befalls poor Nathalie Emmanuel, Driver’s winsome, nothingy love interest, with a role that makes your average Mary Sue look like Rosa Luxemburg.
Aspiring parallels with the fall of Rome, overlaps with Ayn Rand’s strikebreaking anthem The Fountainhead, and an energetic cast (including Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight and various Copollas) can’t elevate this unwieldy mess. Potentially interesting political machinations are eclipsed by cartoonish characterisation and a blob of irrelevant subplots.
There are moments when it’s unclear if Driver is corpsing. Perhaps the patron saint of difficult productions – The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Annette – doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We know exactly how he feels.
A lovely heartfelt address, delivered by Driver’s iconoclast and clearly intended for the director’s late wife, Eleanor, might land better if the central romance weren’t so limp.
The Cannes premiere featured a daring extratextual interaction. That much-needed moment of razzle-dazzle has, unhappily, been excised from the theatrical cut. The rest is noise. It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it.
Megalopolis is in cinemas from Friday, September 27th
