‘Megalopolis’

Reflecting​ on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new movie. It has a beginning and an end, in that order, and more middles than the director or the audience can cope with. Some are interesting and plainly intentional, some are gestures towards an old-fashioned rebellion against coherence, and some seem to be mere wanderings into an inescapable mess. At times we may feel there is a kind of plot line around the idea of putting on a show, or politics as stealing a show, but the feeling doesn’t last long. When chariot races invaded a 21st-century New York I thought for a moment that the projectionist (if there are such people any more) might have slipped the wrong reel in and we were watching scenes from Gladiator. The lengthy set pieces – the wedding celebrations of the richest man in town, played by Jon Voight, for example – are both spectacular and dizzying, but the dizziness tends to win out in the end, particularly when characters start crossing from frame to frame in a triply split screen.

The setting is New Rome, identical to New York except when it’s not, and the film starts well, or starts well twice. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect, steps out onto a ledge at the top of the Chrysler building. He is cautious at first, seems genuinely afraid of falling, but composes himself and looks as if he is about to kill himself. He leans forward at an impossible angle and a double freeze-frame occurs – of the movie and in the movie. Catilina, apparently, can stop time. He does this again as a flourish when an apartment building is destroyed, so that he can put a piece of the future in its place. That is, the building explodes, starts to crumble and then the crumbling stops. It starts again when Catilina gives the word.

In the other beginning Catilina interrupts an event starring his arch-enemy Cicero, the ex-lawyer who is now mayor of New Rome (Giancarlo Esposito). The mayor decides to wait out the intrusion of the person he calls – the word had to come in somewhere – a megalomaniac. Catilina recites Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. The performance is impressive, and the old speech actually feels new. This is in part because it is no longer a soliloquy but a brilliant public rant, a sort of scolding of the world. ‘For who would bear the whips and scorns of time’ is more an invitation to drastic action than an explanation of suicide: a verbal backing off corresponding to the change of heart on the roof.

Other good moments include the sight of gigantic stone statues collapsing as if they are tired or wounded; of Mayor Cicero’s desk sloping at a mighty angle because of all the paper on it; of a police car with the obvious but still surprising initials NRPD. A promising line of organisation appears when Laurence Fishburne, Catilina’s driver, reflects on the question of time and gives the impression of knowing where the film is going. It can’t be an accident that Coppola takes away this perspective almost as soon as it appears – an example of what I was calling his rebellion against sense.

Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is Cicero’s daughter and becomes Catilina’s wife, provides a thread of consistency. Their child is the heir to whatever future this city will have. Julia is interested in Catilina’s idea of a new world, and her persistent attention to his clichés makes them far more interesting than they are in his own delivery. ‘I reserve my time for people who can think … about science. And literature and … architecture and art,’ he says. And ‘when we ask … questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.’ Julia’s quotations from Marcus Aurelius, proudly announced as such, are much sharper, and closer to her father’s ideas: ‘It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given.’ And she too can stop time.

The most dramatic attack on sequence concerns a substance called megalon, a liquid metal created by Catilina that does all kinds of things. It creates a new city. It repairs Catilina’s own face after half of it has been shot away. We see the ruined face, the hole where the eye was; then a bandage covers it, so we imagine what lies beneath. And then we see Catilina’s face entirely restored, looking just like the one he had at the beginning of the movie. Of course it is the one he had then; repair, in this sense, means a backwards move in time. No magical invention can quite equal the art of photography.

Much of the acting in the film stands clearly apart from the dizziness, and we need to credit both the director and the players for this. Driver is more varied than he has ever been; Esposito manages to look like a crook and a nice guy without any sense of contradiction; Emmanuel hangs on to a kind of innocence that everything in the film should have wrecked long ago; and Voight brings an eagerness to his character’s enjoyment of his high regard for himself that is worth watching again and again.

Old Rome plays a large part in the life of its modern counterpart. Latin phrases appear on buildings; the most famous phrase attributed to Cicero (or in the case of Sallust’s work, to Catiline) is spoken aloud, with something of the double meaning that Hamlet’s speech acquires: ‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’ Or, addressed to the people: ‘How long will you go on putting up with this?’ Mary Beard tells us that ‘a string of crimes’ was attached to the historical Catiline’s name, ‘from the murder of his first wife and his own son to sex with a virgin priestess’. In New Rome, Catilina is tried for murdering his wife and ultimately acquitted. The prosecuting lawyer is Cicero, who at one point admits that he knew all along that Catilina was innocent. There is also the possibility of a scandal because a photograph shows Catilina in bed with an underage pop star – who turns out not to be so young after all. This material not only provides a background for the enmity between the architect-inventor and the mayor, it conjures up a world where errors and falsehood can be recognised, and where the mildly monstrous, always operatic Catilina may after all turn out to be almost human. He has boasted of being ‘cruel, selfish and unfeeling’, and perhaps we are looking at a moment of redemption. He thinks his first wife may have died because he paid so little attention to her, so the false blame becomes metaphorically true. The film takes us on a visual journey to a bedroom where he visits a still living wife, holding her hair in his hand. Then it corrects the illusion. Catilina is in the same posture, the bed is empty.

One unusually quiet moment in the film involves Catilina’s mother, who appears, smiling but rather fierce, to reproach him for not mentioning her in his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize (category unnamed). After all, she says, she taught him all he knows, and even now is ready to explain to him what string theory is. He insists that he loves her, but otherwise doesn’t respond to anything she says. In a late visual echo of this scene, the mother appears in a crowd when her son and other main actors are on a platform. She doesn’t speak, we just see her move among the rows of people. She is a reminder of something, but of what? Of the fact that the inventor of new worlds can’t be turned into a human being, however much the sentimental side of the movie wants to tug him that way?