Megalopolis: A Fable

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

A masterpiece. Absolutely brilliant. Completely uncompromising. From the first frame to the last and even in its title, this movie is in constant conversation with cinema, history, literature, philosophy, architecture, poetry, art, politics, and more. It draws upon an ocean of references to craft a potent message about the importance of new ideas and dreaming up a new future, just as the bulk of the Western world is lurching backwards. If you added up the number of ideas in every movie you've seen this decade, Megalopolis would probably still have more. You don't have to understand every reference (I certainly didn't!) to appreciate the complexity of the message. It's scarcely two hours long, but feels like more than twice that, crammed as it is with things to say and boldly inventive cinematic ways to say them.

If you know anything about this movie, you probably know that 1) Francis Ford Coppola has been thinking about it for half a century and finally spent over a hundred million dollars of his own money to produce it, and 2) it has not been well received by the movie-going public, to say the least. I find it deeply disturbing that while the movie is doing everything that it can to grab you and shake you to say "America must not give in to petty grudges and isolationist fear! America must stand up and build a new tomorrow for the human race because no one else can do it," which is an extremely important message, viewers are online posting "megaFLOPolis lol" memes. Who gives a damn at all how few dollars the movie grossed at the box office? I know who doesn't: Francis Ford Coppola. He made this movie to say things, not to earn a profit, and no movie's value should be measured in receipts. I don't know how people can gripe about how the only movies that seem to exist any more are superheroes and horror franchises and dumb family flicks, and along comes this movie which is weird and fearless and fascinating, and people make fun of it for being weird. Don't you say that want something different and challenging? Because this is what that looks like!

I do accept that enjoyment of this film depends upon your interpretation of it. For instance, I don't see these characters as people meant to be understood as human beings; I see them as archetypes and living embodiments of ideas, who jockey for power because this is about which ideas deserve to win in our culture. As such, the emotional outbursts and strange acting choices are not in service of drama, but in service of ideas and message, and so yeah, they're going to seem tone-deaf and bizarre if you're expecting straight drama. For another example, the incredible future city that Adam Driver plans to build is depicted mainly as having moving walkways with a golden glow for people to get around, and viewers have reacted as though this is a laughable idea -- and it is, if taken literally. Is it not clearly a stand-in for The Future? Coppola cannot tell us what the future will look like; what he argues is that we ought to listen to people who can, and his silly walkways are merely a placeholder to represent their visions. This isn't rocket science.

In fact, the hardest common criticism for me to understand is that the film's ideas do not cohere in service of any ultimate point. One of my main problems with the film is that it is too clear about its main point, spelling out in the final stretch what Coppola wants to say about civilization and America and failures to learn from our collective past. I wish that it would introduce its ideas and let us draw our own conclusions from them. I also wish that Driver's city planner be portrayed as less of a John Galt figure whose brilliance is flawless; even if he's an archetype, there are limits to how much I can stand of "genius white guy deserves no blame for wrecking lives because he's manifestly perfect."

But those choices do little to tarnish what is a massive cinematic achievement. Scarcely is there a moment without some fascinating new way to visualize or dramatize ideas in a movie stuffed to the rafters with them. Consider one of my favorite sequences, an accelerating montage suggesting the ideas pouring out of Driver's mind as he works. Coppola draws upon botany, scientific illustration, and retro-futurism to suggest dream-visions of an impossible future, initially in a triptych until Driver's character shatters the frame with the force of his mind, and eventually the film melts in the projector because this flood of ideas exceeds comprehension and cannot be sustained. Show me Sonic the Hedgehog 3 pulling off a sequence this creative. This movie does not express itself shyly and so neither shall I: This is one of the best and most important films of the year, and it deserved a very different reception.