'Megalopolis' Desperately Needed More Wow Platinum
Aubrey Plaza is the only one in Francis Ford Coppola's epic boondoggle bringing the correct level of weird.
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On paper, Megalopolis sounds like it should be incredibly weird. And yet in practice it’s strangely formless, a sort of atomized, teflon mist of disparately strange ideas that slid right off my frontal cortex the second they made contact, leaving little trace they were ever there. If I tell you for instance that Shia Labeouf’s character kidnaps a rogue tuba player and turns him into a Nazi, that would probably sound like a movie you should see, or at least it sounds like one I would want to see. And yet in the context of Megalopolis, even that comes off as just another Thing That Happens, in a mostly disconnected potpourri of things happening.
Francis Ford Coppola, now 85, reportedly spent $120 million of his own money making Megalopolis, which has reportedly been in development for 25 years and has been headline fodder all year, from Coppola’s possibly lecherous behavior on set (a story which spawned an intra-trade beef and a lawsuit) to the trailer using fake critic quotes invented by AI. I consider it tantamount to my duty as a film lover to support a film such as this, costly boondoggles by legendary directors being half the reason a movie-writing industry even exists. An unreleasable debacle released nonetheless is by definition a triumph of the human spirit. And yet, I feel like I’m going to instantly forget everything about it that I don’t write down here.
To be fair, if every disconnected story element was as weird as Shia Labeouf kidnapping a rogue tuba player and turning him into a Nazi, Megalopolis would be exactly the kind of bizarre must-see for which I’d been pining. I went in hoping for freaky and weird, but instead mostly got what feels suspiciously like a stupid person’s idea of Smart. The characters all have Roman names — Crassus, Cicero, Cesar. Adam Driver’s character makes his entrance reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy. Not just the “to be or not to be” part either, we’re talking almost the entire stanza.
Why is he doing that? Because big ideas, that’s why! Rome! Shakespeare! Mortality! The environment! Uh… Urban Planning! Coppola (who wrote as well as directed) is so hyper focused on the big questions in Megalopolis that there isn’t much time left for the little weird ones that tend to make stories interesting.
This is a movie that takes place in “New Rome,” a metaphor for our crumbling American Empire, which we know because the connection is spelled out explicitly in an opening narration featuring Laurence Fishburne dramatically intoning over title cards etched in ClipArt marble — a motif which bookends scenes throughout the film. This movie supposedly cost $120 million dollars to make and the CG looks like it came from a Daily Wire-crowdfunded movie about Ayn Rand. That they got busted for using ChatGPT to cut the trailer feels sadly fitting.
Driver plays New Rome’s acclaimed architect, Cesar Catilina (which is admittedly a great character name, a Romanized Max California from 8MM). Cesar has a grand vision for New Rome, a city-state that will grow along with the people in it, thanks to a magical new material Cesar has discovered, Megalon. This particle has wondrous properties never entirely explained, though it floats in the air and glows gold-green, which is apparently the justification for the sickly gold-green tint pervading the entire movie.
Attempting to thwart Cesar’s grand plans is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad) who asks Cesar, New Rome’s future? What about its present? Do people not need food and shelter now? What is legacy when there are hungry mouths requiring sustenance? Cesar and Cicero represent two poles in a conflict so abstract that it’s hard to take sides, all laid out for us at some kind of grandstanding press event attended by half the town. They also have history: Cicero was once the District Attorney who prosecuted Cesar (unsuccessfully) over the suspected murder of his wife.
Coppola is most interesting at his most horniest, and the Cabaret-esque club scene that introduces us to Franklyn’s debauched scenester daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Cesar’s androgynous failcousin Clodio (Shia Labeouf, with shaved flapper eyebrows) at least has enough peculiar production design to cut through the crushing drone of Big Ideas. Drugs, androgyny, see-through dresses — at least it’s something.
New Rome’s decadent side, by far its most interesting side, is represented by Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a hyper-sexual stock market reporter (think Downtown Julie Brown meets Jim Cramer) who begs to perform fellatio on her boyfriend Cesar while her flirtatious interview with Crassus plays on TV beside the bed. “Is there anything you want that you don’t already have?” she purrs.
“Oh yes,” Crassus drools, practically flicking a tongue between his fingers.
Hamilton Crassus, played by Jon Voight, is New Rome’s famous billionaire banker, for whom Wow Platinum will periodically leave Cesar, whenever her ambition outpaces her libido.
Aubrey Plaza, Shia Labeouf, Jon Voight (last seen as an ex-KGB agent in Reagan) — these are the kinds of kooky casting choices Megalopolis desperately needed more of. I kept hoping against hope that at some point, C-Tates would show up. Megalopolis tends to feel like an uninspired TED talk whenever it isnt’t overtly sexual, like Will.I.am lecturing a corporate boardroom about futurism after a 10-hour redeye flight. Only Wow Platinum seems capable of pulling the material down from the rafters. “How did you get the name Wow Platinum?” someone offscreen asks Aubrey Plaza at a dinner party.
“I gave it to myself, somewhere between Downtown and Penn Station.”
Sure, sure. As one does.
Megalon. What does it do? Will it truly usher in a new utopia? “Utopias become dystopias,” Gus Fring warns. His daughter soon falls for Cesar.
The camera loves Nathalie Emmanuel, one of the few actors who looks good in Megalopolis’ putrescent color palette, who slips inexplicably into a Gangster’s Moll accent about once every two sentences. Cesar Catilina has the ability to pause time, like Adam Sandler in Click. He yells “stop time!” and New Rome’s inexorable bustle instantly freezes, save for Julia Cicero, the only other exemption to this temporal paradox. When Cesar realizes he can’t freeze her, he has no choice but to love her. Or something like that.
Julia discovers that Cesar is still in love with his dead wife, whom he definitely didn’t kill. He visits her flawless corpse every week in some Megalon-induced wormhole, which begs the question, if Cesar can alter space-time enough to visit his wife’s freshly-dead cadaver, couldn’t he alter it a little more and go back to when she was alive? Julia nonetheless falls instantly head over heels for him, because there’s nothing women love more than an emotionally unavailable artist.
Julia inspires Cesar, and together they make beautiful stuff. Or rather, they talk about the beautiful stuff Cesar is making that we never actually see. Sometimes they have deep conversations on rooftop decks with giant clocks built into the floors. Time. Legacy. The future of humanity. Meanwhile Wow Platinum plots with Hamilton Crassus, and Clodio Pulcher rouses the rabble. What do they want? To hold backwards signs! When do they want it? Some time in the future or past!
Bailey Ives plays Huey Wilks, which I mention here because “Bailey Ives plays Huey Wilks” is one of those Megalopolis-induced sentences that will pinging around in my head for weeks, alongside “Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum.” (Fine, I lied, some parts of Megalopolis did penetrate my cerebral cortex, just nothing related to the actual story).