'Megalopolis' review: Francis Ford Coppola's epic is ambitious, inventive... and borderline unwatchable

In Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” modern America has merged with Ancient Rome to create a strange new society where swords and sandals mix with QR. But class conflict persists, so New York City Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) pledges small-ball improvements to schools and sanitation. The architect Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver), however, lobbies to build a utopia out of Megalon, the miracle-metal he invented. When the visionary dreamer falls for the politician’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a power struggle emerges that could bring society itself to ruin.

And they said nobody makes original movies anymore.

Some 40 years in gestation and reportedly financed with $120 million of his own money, Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is utterly his own. Subtitled “A Fable,” it blends science fiction, political allegory, philosophy, the theory of evolution and Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” into a stylistically adventurous epic. It’s a paean to man’s ability to innovate, and a battle cry to charge forth into a shining future. It is also, despite glimmers of humor and depth, an absolute mess.

Here is a movie full of haute-couture togas, Latin dialogue, surrealist imagery (a God-like hand grabbing the moon) and some surprisingly graphic sex. In one scene, Caesar wields the power to stop time; in the next, he snorts coke at a nightclub. Characters serve as social commentary -- the virginal pop star Vesta (Grace VanderWaal), the rabble-rousing politician Clodio Pulcher (a suitably creepy Shia LaBeouf), the oversexed newscaster Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, going for broke). Meanwhile, Coppola's screen might split into three panels or shrink to an iris, silent era-style. At the screening I attended, a live actor showed up to ask a question of Caesar.

All of this might have been entertaining if the movie weren’t so full of puffed-up intellectualism. The symbolism is as subtle as a frying pan (Lady Justice, surrounded by poverty, moans and falls off her pedestal), while the half-dozen quotes from Marcus Aurelius are the first ones you’ll find in a Google search. At one point, Caesar recites Hamlet’s monologue – not just “To be or not to be,” but the whole dang thing. (Talk about stopping time.) This movie should have been a mad, maximalist fever-dream, like Jodorowsky’s “El Topo” or Coppola’s own “Apocalypse Now," but instead it feels like a lecture delivered with raised finger and stentorian voice. (The narration comes from Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine, Catalina’s limo driver.)

And yet – is this not the work of a cinematic master? A filmmaker who, at 85, still has the power to bring his unfettered imagination to the screen? Yes, indeed. But an imagination unfettered can sometimes run amok. I believe it was the Roman architect-engineer Vitruvius who said, “Nothing requires an architect’s care more than the due proportion of buildings.” At least, that’s what I found on BrainyQuote.com.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman