“Megalopolis,” the 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s $140 million passion project, is not by any stretch of the imagination a good movie. It’s easy to understand why he had to fund it largely out of his own pocket, notwithstanding his name and reputation. And as with many later Coppola movies, it’s hard to understand how the artist who made “The Godfather,” “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now” could also be responsible for some of his newest film’s creative choices.
But without being artistically successful, “Megalopolis” is really, really interesting. The film strives to be of-the-moment, to say something big about America Right Now, in a way that relatively few contemporary films aspire to do. And it largely succeeds in that attempt, delivering a portrait of civilizational dilemmas that, whatever its other failings, belongs fully to the realities of 2024.
When I first heard the movie’s plot described as a version of the late Roman republic’s Catilinarian conspiracy updated to a modernish New York, I imagined it resembling Hilary Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall,” a revisionist take on a famous historical episode, with the traditional villain cast as the hero and with ideological goals in keeping with the assumptions of boomer liberalism and contemporary Hollywood.
For Mantel that villain was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s ruthless henchman, who was recast in her prose as a proto-secular man of cool reason surrounded by religious fanatics — chief among them the usually lionized Thomas More, portrayed by Mantel as a zealot who basically deserved his martyr’s fate.
With Coppola’s movie I expected that similar treatment would be given to Catiline, the ambitious Roman aristocrat whose conspiracy to overthrow the republic was famously exposed and denounced by Cicero. The conspirator would be recast as a visionary radical, a good revolutionary and servant of the masses, and his enemies would be conservative-coded and villainous — with the movie’s Cicero portrayed as a tool of the military, perhaps, or religious fundamentalists or fat-cat executives.
But that’s not really what Coppola has put up on the screen. The Roman stuff is there: Our New York is his New Rome, there are gladiatorial matches and chariot races alongside cable news and tabloid headlines. The characters have names that fit with ancient analogues: Jon Voight as the superrich banker Hamilton Crassus, Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero.
But the central conflict isn’t really left versus right, the tribune of the people against a conservative establishment. Instead, it pits Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina (note the two historical referents), a great scientist, architect and would-be rebuilder of the city, against various forces representing inertia and sterility: the uncomprehending establishment and the ungrateful masses, liberals who don’t get it and populists who don’t want to get it, all ranged against the man of genius and his vision of progress and utopia.
This is, in other words, a movie about decadence, a favorite theme of mine, and one that Coppola treats much more directly than do other contemporary stories (the “Dune” adaptations, say) that play around with ideas about stagnation and how it might be defeated and escaped. Indeed, one of the many problems with the movie’s script is that it’s often too direct about its theme, giving its hero and his narrator-cum-bodyguard (played by Laurence Fishburne) too many clumsy and pretentious monologues about the need to wrestle your way out of civilizational cul-de-sacs.
But still, since decadence is one of our great problems, there is something admirable about seeing it dramatized and critiqued so explicitly, however cumbersome the writing and bizarre the plot mechanics and inert some of the performances. (Though special plaudits to Voight, Aubrey Plaza and Dustin Hoffman for fully committing to the gonzo aspect of the film.) And to see it taken on by a storyteller who’s willing to display a certain political ambivalence about what kind of solutions decadence requires.
By this I mean that while at times Coppola seems to want a good liberal solution to decadence, with lots of bright talk about liberty, equality and fraternity, he has conjured up a rather different response in the actual character of Catilina. Driver’s scientist-builder is Coppola’s version of a Nietzschean or Ayn Randian superman, like Howard Roark from “The Fountainhead” working with the alchemical breakthrough of Rearden Metal from “Atlas Shrugged.”
If he resembles anyone in the contemporary landscape, it’s probably Elon Musk — and the movie even has a faintly Muskian pronatalist message to go with its techno-optimism about urban planning. And it has a more-than-faintly Caesarist message as well: In the movie’s climax (lightest of spoilers here), the Roman-American republic’s decline is arrested, the failures of both politics-as-usual and populist reaction are overridden and defeated, not by democracy, parliamentary procedure or mass protest, but by one man’s indomitable will.
Perhaps you can reconcile these tensions through Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American sage invoked several times in the course of the movie — insofar as Emersonianism arguably represents a fusion of the liberal and the Nietzschean spirits, a Prometheanism that celebrates human greatness and ambition without necessarily yielding to dreams of dictatorship. Perhaps. But part of what makes “Megalopolis” so interesting is seeing how a recognition of the problem of decadence can draw even a liberal like Coppola toward post-liberal and illiberal currents, toward a story line that talks about human solidarity but shows you, in its conclusion, a great crowd gathered to be inspired and elevated by a single, almost godlike man.
And finally, the inability of all this to cohere fully — the fact that Catilina’s vision of urban utopia looks a bit like what you’d get from plugging prompts into an artificial intelligence image generator, the fact that Coppola intuited his way to a story that’s genuinely timely and shot through with complex political resonances but then just couldn’t quite make it work as cinematic art — well, that itself is a signifier of our times.
You can grasp something about what’s wrong with our contemporary Rome, you can sense something about what’s missing from today’s Hollywood, but actually making the new thing, or at least the critique that points ahead, remains a potent challenge — because even seen clearly, decadence will have its due.
Breviary
Jason Willick on American grand strategy.
Rose Horowitch on the elites who can’t read books.
Joshua Rothman on the prophet of the death of culture.
Ross Barkan on the death and life of progressive urbanism.
Ed West on the beautiful impurity of English.
Brad East on our finest fantasist.
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Much like Coppola, I am engaged in an act of decadence-defying hubris by releasing a long-gestating passion project into the world. For the next six months I will be serializing a novel, “The Falcon’s Children,” with a new chapter released each Tuesday. You can read the prologue and learn more about the project here.
Also: It is late notice, but this weekend I’ll be participating in the annual Front Porch Republic conference in Grand Rapids, Mich., with events this evening, Oct. 4, and on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 5. The conference schedule and registration page can be found here.
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