"What do you think about this boner I got?"

The benefit of the doubt is a powerful thing for an audience to give over to a filmmaker, but if there's one filmmaker who has earned such status, it's Francis Ford Coppola. The (literal) godfather of New Hollywood's film brats of the 1970s, Coppola mentored and paved the way for some of the biggest filmmakers of the last quarter of the 20th century. When he works on an epic canvas—which he really hasn't done since 1992's Dracula—attention must be paid amongst the cine-literate.

Now, the man is no stranger to failure, with plenty of costly missteps that had him working as a hired gun to pay off his debts. That makes his decision to once again get himself into the exact same situation he was in after One From the Heart bankrupted him forty two years ago. Whether it was Coppola's vanity or a sincere belief that the world needed Megalopolis before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he's basically doomed himself to repeat his past.

In very broad strokes, Megalopolis transplants the historical Catilinarian conspiracy to a not-too-distant future New York, now known as New Rome. There are slight variations at work to indicate this isn't our world, i.e. Madison Square Garden is still at its old location some twenty blocks north and the Statue of Liberty is holding her torch in her left hand.

Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is the film's Ayn Rand-ian protagonist, an architect who dreams bigger than anyone, knows more than everyone else, and is therefore given leeway to be an indulgent, drug-addicted asshole. Several years back, he was prosecuted for the murder of his wife Sunny (Haley Sims) by Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is now the mayor of New Rome. Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a famed celebutante, and as if that wasn't enough of an affront to her father's career, she soon finds herself falling for his mortal enemy, Cesar Catilina.

Julia hopes to convince her father that Catilina's vision for a new New Rome is worth fighting for, as this visionary architect has also invented a new element known as megalon, which can create community and equity among the people. There's also a vast array of subplots involving Cesar's gold digging mistress and entertainment journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who marries Cesar's wealthy uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), whose moron son Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) begins to flirt with violent populist rhetoric in a bid to challenge the mayor.

The script, such as it is, has every single actor in the film spouting nonsense, just attempting to out-pontificate one another. I will say this is with the noted exception of both Laurence Fishburne—as Cesar's assistant and the film's narrator Fundi Romaine—and Giancarlo Esposito, both of whom successfully manage to make this overwrought fluff sound poetic. In one of his first scenes, Driver recites—in its entirety—Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man" speech from Act II, while teetering on a catwalk above a proposed model of New Rome. It kinda doesn't get any more on the nose than that, if you ask me.

Nathalie Emmanuel's performance is probably a good yardstick by which to judge the other performances, as she's playing things sincerely and straight down the middle. If she's smack dab in the middle of the cast in terms of being more successful and most interesting are Fishburne, Esposito, the always reliable Kathryn Hunter, (shockingly) Jon Voight, with Aubrey Plaza delivering probably the film's best performance, or at least it's the performance this film deserves.

Everyone else is either given nothing to do—DB Sweeney, James Remar, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman—or fail to make an impact with what little screen time they're given like Dustin Hoffman, who seems so happy to have a job he forgot to do any work on his role. We also have to address the 800-pound gorilla in the film: Shia LaBeouf. He has the energy of a bobcat who has been given meth and let loose on set, which would be fine if we didn't know what we know about him as a person. I can usually separate the art from the artist, but when I see a person who is known to be violent in the real life given a chance to indulge that side of themselves on screen, it fills me with concern for the others around him.

Driver is easily the most wayward soul in this film with a performance that ranges from shouty mad angry to borderline comatose, sometimes within the span of a single speech (and he's got a lot of them in this movie). Somewhere around two hours into the film he intones that, "we are in very urgent need of a debate about the future," and I was worried that we'd soon be subjected to that as well. He is an actor I admire greatly, but he seems to be drowning in this film's excess in a way he hasn't previously. The man knows how to stay afloat in a river of spectacle, and here he seems resigned to his fate.

There are interesting moments in the film, but not one of them is transcendent. Not one of them features anything approaching the top tier moments Coppola has given us in the past. Nothing about this movie lingers after you watch it, except dribs and drabs of interesting imagery. However, nearly every thought I've had about plot points in the film since seeing it has been followed with, "that made no sense."

The score by frequent late period Coppola collaborator Osvaldo Golijov is many things at once, but almost always pitched in complete opposition to what we're seeing. Conversations about mundane subjects had while sitting around a table are underscored with a forceful sax music I've only ever referred to as sexaphone, and other scenes are scored to what sounds like an orchestra tuning up. It's as jumbled a mess as the rest of this endeavor, so I suppose it's appropriate.

This experimental shit of Coppola's has finally gotten the best of him, and may have just finished him off for good. It's a shame. He is the most feted and accomplished filmmaker of the 1970s and no one can take that from him, but that was a long time ago. His last unquestioned masterpiece, Apocalypse Now, played at Cannes a week after I was born, in May 1979. I've liked some of the stuff he's made since then, but does any of it approach that capital-M Masterpiece status? No. Not by a long shot.

I just can't help but wonder why he risked it all for... this film. This weird movie that plays like a Baz Luhrmann film without the courage of its convictions. This movie that sounds like it was written over winter break by a first semester college freshman who just took Ancient Rome 101 and Intro to Philosophy.

Ultimately, the film's thesis statement seems to be that we should always indulge a great man, whatever his flaws, because his genius is beyond our capacity. As a society, we tend to do that a lot, so I'm not sure why Coppola's potential final statement to the world is one of such unbelievable vanity as to endorse that viewpoint. When I left the theater, I left with it my benefit of the doubt for this once great filmmaker. Maybe now that he's (potentially) broke, Coppola can get back in touch with the common man. He should give it a shot, at the very least.

**I Think You Should Leave fans, see below for a succinct meme I made that sums up my thoughts on the whole thing

Header image via IMDb
Image below via Me & Meme Generator