Megalopolis

For obvious reasons I approve of both stories about imaginary cities and old men blowing their savings on self-funded movies, so I felt obliged to go and see Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis despite the decidedly patchy reviews. And much to my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

It's a very odd film: a sort of allegorical drama set in 'New Rome', which looks like New York, but where people wear slightly Roman-inflected costumes and have names like Crassus, Cicero and Ce(a)sar. The idea that the United States = Rome is an old one, but I'm not sure it's ever been done quite this literally: there are chariot races in Madison Square Garden.

But the story isn't an updating of any particular episode from Roman history. It's about a genius architect 'Cesar Catilina', played by Adam Driver, whose vision of a utopian new city built from his wonder-material 'Megalon' is frustrated by the cautious mayor, Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). All the characters Represent something: Catilina is art and progress, Cicero is the status quo, and the rabble-rousing Pulcher (Shia LaBoeuf) waves the flag for Trumpist populism. Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuele) provides the Love without which Catilina's artistic powers would be useless (the film is dedicated, movingly, to Coppola's late wife Eleanor). Oh, and there's also Jon Voigt as the power of Capital, and Aubrey Plaza as an amoral journalist named Wow Platinum who represents – well, amoral journalism, I suppose. 

You know all those rules of storytelling that screenwriting gurus like to talk about? Megalopolis has thrown them in the bin and written its own rules, and then thrown them in the bin and decided to just wing it. No three-act structure here. No guarantee that the myriad plot-points it introduces will ever pay off. Catilina, in addition to his magical Megalon substance, has the ability to stop time, but these sci-fi elements don't play out in the story as they would in conventional fantasy or sci-fi - they're METAPHORS, you see, and so is almost everything else that happens on screen. At one point, during a visit to the city's seedier side, huge classical statues of truth and justice slump wearily against walls, or collapse in alleyways. 

Subtle it ain't, and it probably sounds unbearably cheesy. But it's all so earnest, and so unpredictable, that it's somehow never less than entertaining. It's strongly dependent on state-of-the-art special effects, but the world they conjure is determinedly artificial-looking, and the dialogue and delivery sound tremendously old-fashioned: close your eyes, and you could be listening to a film from the '50s, or the '30s.

The sincere utopianism is old-fashioned too: Catilina's big appeal to the masses at the end sounds like Chaplin's speech about 'the soul of man flying into the rainbow' at the end of The Great Dictator. Big Ideas are thrown around like confetti, but I'm not sure they're explored in any real depth. Although there are plenty of jokes, it's hard to be sure sometimes if we're laughing with the film or at it. It seems to have bewildered a lot of viewers. But the key thing is, I don't think Megalopolis cares. It has the same weird, earnest energy I find in middle period John Boorman films. It's just going to do its own thing and explore its own brilliant, flakey ideas, and the audience is welcome to come along for the ride, but it absolutely doesn't give a damn whether they think it's cool or not.

Well, I think it's cool. And there was never a moment when I knew what was coming next. How often can you say that about a film?