Here is a most infuriating film from the legendary Director, Francis Ford Coppola. It’s been hyped as the passion project he’s been wanting to do for over four decades, and when major studios balked at giving him the money, he went and sold his fabled vineyard. Now, I don’t know how much of this is true. Still, I can most assuredly say that given all the precious hours of movie-watching that Coppola has given the world over the years with the Godfather franchise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Apocalypse Now, I wanted to love this film and declare he’s still a story-telling genius at the age of 85.

So what is Megalopolis? It’s a crazy rabbit hole of a film that would like to compare today’s avarice and city politics to ancient Rome. It’s the utopia/dystopia dichotomy as defined by Mr. Coppola, and there’s something rather High School and naive about his perspective. Hamlet meets Romeo & Juliet meets The Bonfire of the Vanities (or Banalities), with a Fellini fixation and tributes to Ben-Hur and the Big Top thrown in. There are crazy dream sequences, plus split-screen wonders, and all that’s missing is Coppola throwing us a close-up of his kitchen sink. Yes, it’s one of those all-or-nothing kinds of films, and he’s definitely decided to give us the ‘all’.

At one narrative level, it’s Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) v Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an opportunistic traditional politician versus designing genius and wannabe urban savior. And things get complicated when widower Cesar falls for the Mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Grace VanderWaal, Jason Schwartzman, and Laurence Fishburne are some actors who came for the ride. And let’s not forget Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, who seems to be having the most fun, portraying the mother of Cesar. I loved her line about what she first thought was a stomach ache turning out to be her genius son and claiming she’s being attacked when her son is kissing her hand. 

In the film's first half, there’s too much stylized dialogue and soliloquies; Driver even goes verbatim with Hamlet’s To be or Not to Be. And you will snicker at how they keep trying to find ways to give lines to Dustin Hoffman when his character is such a giveaway - and I mean that in more ways than one. While the casting is generally fine, it’s the narrative that resembles a Frankenstein monster - all bits and pieces picked up from here and there and being passed off as a single, organic story. It’s like someone with the aptitude of a high school student was asked to draw up a Sci-fi future morality play or fable. 

Coppola’s fixation on the rich and greedy is evident in his exposition of this near-future society. It’s fine as a starting point, but you hoped he would also shower some attention on the masses and the downtrodden for whom this utopian vision is supposed to be. Instead, we get this storyline of games the rich and powerful play to while away the time and give a sham purpose to their lives. Given how it seemed so important at the film's start, even the gift of stopping time isn’t explored or utilized.  

There is much to like in this film, and it’s wonderful to see Coppola still so ambitious, daring, and driven - it’s just the finished product. It shines, it glimmers, but it also feels hollow - and I genuinely wish it didn’t. To paraphrase another Hamlet passage - all sound and fury signify nothing.