Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a painfully awful labour of love — Cannes review

Will every year now bring a spectacular fall from grace from another great of 1970s cinema? That’s the depressing thought that descends while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawlingly awful Megalopolis at Cannes before the scars left by Roman Polanski’s The Palace have properly healed. The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, like his new protagonist, has never been short of vast ambition and it is garishly on display in this painful labour of love which has taken him more than 40 years to bring to the screen. Now we see why. 

After House of Gucci and Ferrari, Adam Driver once again gives his all to playing an Italian-named captain of industry, though this time we are at least spared the accent. Cesar Catilina is both a Nobel-winning experimental scientist and the architect of ambitious plans to rebuild his disaster-struck city as a tech-powered utopia. He has also harnessed the ability to freeze the clock: “Time, stop!” he commands while stepping over the edge of a skyscraper in an opening scene.

The setting is manifestly Manhattan, though it has the trappings, nomenclature and costumery of ancient Rome. Coppola’s screenplay is based on the first-century-BC Catilinarian conspiracy, his grand thesis seemingly being that the US too is a decadent empire teetering on the edge of collapse. Luckily, this hasn’t occurred to anyone over the past 40 years.

And so we get a power struggle between Catilina and the city’s slumlord mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a circus-like sports arena as latter-day Colosseum and debauched parties where women lick cocaine off each other’s breasts. Almost all the women here are sex-crazed seductresses, venal schemers or both. Aubrey Plaza starts off as Catilina’s TV news reporter mistress but ends up playing dominatrix to her drooling nephew Clodio (Shia LaBeouf). Her name: Auntie Wow.

The performances are aggressively theatrical, lines delivered with arched eyebrows and histrionic gesturing. When Catilina embarks on a love affair with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the film goes full telenovela. (“My daughter, a traitor?” — “Daddy, please!”) It is not a compliment to say that Shia LaBeouf’s acting style seems the least out of place here. Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, on the other hand, just look lost. At one point Driver gives us his Hamlet, as if out of desperation. “To be or not to be?” Not to be in this movie, Adam.

It would be easy and less dismaying to laugh off Megalopolis as an overblown exercise in camp sci-fi satire. But no. Coppola has declared his movie a love-letter to humanity that will give it new hope. Why else would he have poured $120mn of his own money into the project? As such, it’s hard not to see some kind of self-portrait in Catilina, a tireless idealist who forges on obstinately in the face of almost certain disaster.

It has been a long time, but maybe Coppola, 85, does still have another great work left in him. His contemporaries Scorsese and Spielberg have both recently proved that age needn’t be the barrier. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about Megalopolis is that it will probably remain largely unwatched and be quickly forgotten. But for the length of its running time all one wants to say is: film, stop!

★☆☆☆☆

Cannes Film Festival continues to May 25, festival-cannes.com