Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited “Megalopolis” is a beautiful mess. It’s a gorgeous-looking film, set in a futuristic version of New York inspired by Old Rome where the rooms are lavish, the light is always uncannily lovely and the actors’ faces seem to have an unearthly glow. But underneath all that beauty is an incoherent story, a curiously flat array of performances and a filmmaker who appears to have lost his way. “A Fable” is the movie’s subtitle, but its moral is perhaps an unexpected one: Be careful what you wish for.
Coppola, the Oscar-winning writer/director whose greatest films include “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” famously self-financed “Megalopolis,” with its $120 million budget, and spent decades imagining it. (The first table read of the script, with some of the actors now in the finished film, was 37 years ago.) It’s the story of a man with wild ambition: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect/visionary who seeks to remake New Rome into a utopia. In his way is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to keep the city’s old, corrupt ways; between them is Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who loves Cesar and finds her loyalties divided.
Not a terrible idea for a movie, to be sure — and yet, “Megalopolis” is a misfire from the start: An early party scene feels like an outtake from Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”; Driver’s character has weird superhero elements (he can stop time? Sometimes?) and intones Shakespeare for no reason; and interesting actors keep popping up (Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Aubrey Plaza) in roles that make no sense — or, as in the case of Plaza, seem woefully wrong for them. Nearly everyone in the cast (alas, particularly Driver) seems at sea, mechanically reciting their lines rather than bringing the words to life. The now 85-year-old Coppola is still full of ideas, but many of them — an endless circus sequence, an inexplicable switch to three-way split screen, a line spoken from the theater’s actual audience — read as gimmicks, bringing nothing to the story. And that story, such as it is, simply isn’t enough to sustain the running time; there’s nothing about these characters to pull us in.
There’s beauty here, in the glittering scenes of New York/New Rome (the jewel-like Chrysler Building, gleaming against an indigo sky, deserves a supporting actor nod), and in the witty references to togas in Milena Canonero’s costumes. (Driver sports a dramatic black cape in several screens, which he wields rather better than he does his dialogue. Then again, the cape gives him more to work with.) And there’s a certain strange pleasure in watching a filmmaker take an enormous swing at something, even when the results are uneven at best. But long before “Megalopolis” was over, I was sneaking peeks at my watch. Maybe the Coppola of several decades ago could have made this sing — or maybe this was a movie better left in his dreams.
