Megalopolis

2024 seems to be the year of great Directors choosing absurdism/ choosing violence/ choosing to challenge/ getting poetic license/ losing the plot. Delete as appropriate there.

Film should, in some cases, be challenging and sometimes require effort to understand and carry metaphor and meaning beyond its surface level.

However, there have been instances this year (Kinds of Kindness, Joker: Folie a Deux, The Book of Clarence) where there’s an argument that the films fall the wrong side of the challenging/nonsensical divide.

When these films come along, it can be hard to remove the art from the artist but sometimes you have to call things as they are.

Megalopolis may well be the final film of the great Francis Ford Coppola and is a self-funded effort, decades in the making.

You can try and create meaning for it, you can try and use metaphor to justify its existence and you can be an arthouse fan who likes the weird but it’s hard to argue that this borders on being an unwatchable mess.

What should be an interesting allegory and indictment of the world by setting the film in ‘New Rome’, a future quasi-New York but with a lot of the structure of ancient Rome (and its inhabitants) is instead a baffling, often incomprehensible hodgepodge which bludgeons any meaning it might have with a plot clearly designed to confuse and aggravate the audience.

Some sci-fi hokum about a ‘new element’ and the ability to stop time completely detract from what should be a Cicero/Caesar (here spelt Cesar for no reason) Ancient Rome retelling in the modern day/near future.

There are some hints that there is method behind the madness. A liberty statue keeling over from exhaustion, a Vestal Virgin caught in a press scandal, a Shakespearean soliloquy used to mock Cicero in a public forum and other moments hint at what could have been.

When these are mixed in with penis jokes, storylines picked up and dropped for fun, incest hints, random Nazi imagery, whatever the hell Shia LaBeouf has been told to do and dialogue that may as well have been improv’d by actors told to converse as if they’re in films of different genres, its mishmash of tones just grates over its two and a half hour runtime.

Coppola gets a free pass for his incredible career and many of the actors here try their best with the material. Adam Driver completes his baffling ‘Italian Trilogy’ of mostly disappointment (House of Gucci and Ferrari preceding this), Aubrey Plaza chews scenery for fun like she's in an entirely different, altogether better, film and Giancarlo Esposito is never less than incredibly watchable but it’s just hard to know what the point is.

Much like Joker before it, is this Coppola taking the piss? Is it actually a comedy and he’s laughing at everyone taking this allegory seriously? Is it so nuanced as to go over the head of everyone but the intellectuals and actors? Is it just something that, over time, he steadily lost grip over and it’s fallen apart with no one bold enough to tell him?

Who know what he was thinking and who knows how it’ll be looked on in time. But, right now, if this was any other Director and any other cast, this wouldn’t have even seen the light of day.

Sadly, a nonsensical, dribbling mess of a cinematic experience.

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