“Megalopolis: A Fable” (2024) is Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, which has been in development since 1977. The action is set in New Rome, which bears a striking resemblance to New York City, in an America that looks like the Roman Empire expanded to the New World and was allowed to evolve organically then got wedged in the swinging Twenties. From leading noble families, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the Chairman of the Design Authority, clashes with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a former DA who does not trust his opponent. His party girl daughter, Julia Cicero (“Game of Thrones” Nathalie Emmanuel) peels off from her friends after she notices that Cesar can defy physics, but Cesar’s cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), views her attraction as the final straw in a one-sided childhood grudge. Who can save New Rome’s soul from destruction and lead it into the future?

The characters of “Megalopolis” are more archetypes than people. If you do not adore Driver, you may spend more time comparing his performance to his other showboat, monologuing, self-styled great men characters from the villainous Henry McHenry in “Annette” (2021) to the family man tenured professor treated like a popstar in “White Noise” (2022) with a dash of his elite businessmen from “House of Gucci” (2021) or “Ferrari” (2023). Here he plays a genius, a Robert Moses type with some scientific gifts, who has a beautiful egalitarian vision for the city, but it requires destroying masses of homes. He is not just a genius, but a tortured one (eye-roll) because of a tragic past. Like Batman, his cover is as a dissolute playboy mugging for the cameras, but he prefers to work in his penthouse home/office in the Chrysler building with his chauffeur/bodyguard/historian Fundi Romance (Laurence Fishburne, whose resume filled with franchises such as “The Matrix” or “John Wick” will make one yearn for Keanu Reeves). 

Julia is more than a party girl. She reveals her keen mind to Cesar and collaborates with him to make his dream a reality, to create a better future. In lesser hands, Julia would be the usual two-dimensional love interest, but Emmanuel manages to keep her afloat and not allow anyone to miss her character’s intelligence or make it seem superficial. She is more like an anthropologist slumming it and recognizing a kindred spirit who is more than he seems. Esposito plays her dad, who is not the villain despite his opposition to Cesar and eagerness to throw Cesar under the bus. His love for his daughter and wife Teresa (Kathryn Hunter, who deserves to get the political royal treatment after a bodily fluid filled performance in “The Front Room”) redeems him. For Coppola, flaws can be forgiven if love lies behind genius or power. 

The real villains are Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), an ambitious television personality, and Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who wants money and power without any scruples. The blonde manipulator feels like a dame out of classic Hollywood cinema meets one of Presidon’t’s self-styled business television personalities/”The Apprentice” alums. Plaza and LaBoeuf are so over-the-top in their scheming that they are the most fun aspect of “Megalopolis” just to see what their characters will do next. Plaza is always the most unhinged person on screen, and here, her level of crassness and brazenness will make anyone wonder how she did not single-handedly take over the city before the movie began. While LaBoeuf’s performance is enough to make the average moviegoer forget his on and off-screen sins, it is unfortunate that Coppola relies on cross dressing and other gender bending tendencies to signal his amoral attitude, but LaBoeuf has never looked better than when he dresses like a woman so the math works out. Like Samson, when Claudio’s revamped, whispy mullet disappears, he loses his power. Clodio is clearly supposed to be the Presidon’t figure in the movie who whips the masses into a frenzy. Clodio’s dad, Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), the bank head, is the kind of character that Christopher Walken would have devoured and outshone everyone, but Voight does a decent job.

“Megalopolis” is a beautiful mess. It is a shame that Coppola did not make it as a younger man because then he would have time to continue to make the movie in different iterations until he refined it to perfection, but he does not. If Bane was a film reviewer, he would write, “You film like a younger man, with nothing held back. Admirable but mistaken.” In terms of visuals, from the clothes to the cityscape, it is a sumptuous spectacle, but in terms of story, it is a bit of a sprawling mess missing connective tissue and continuity and screams of the need for a more ruthless, but loving editor. For instance, Dustin Hoffman plays Nush Berman, the mayor’s fixer, and his story line gets pulled so quickly, it may have been better to cut the character out of the story entirely. 

“Megalopolis” is Cecil B. DeMille meets Baz Luhrmann meets Shakespeare (“Hamlet” explicitly and “Romeo & Juliet” implicitly) and Ayn Rand with the striving towards Terence Malick’s lyrical transcendentalist humanitarianism, but Coppola is too terrestrial for his images to match the heavy-handed rhetoric laden dialogue and winds up with “The Hunger Games” without the violence. Basically, human beings are amazing, and more unites than divides us so work together to make a better vision. Coppola has a good heart, and a younger audience will be more impressed with his screed than the more seasoned viewer who is likely to be more cynical about the deserved fate of the human race. Still even the most jaundiced viewer will probably grade Coppola’s excesses on a curve and just ignore the fact that some storylines scream that he needs some therapy considering how some themes betray his baser sympathies.

Among the random sour notes that will need to be ignored, there are themes of not believing sexual misconduct allegations and not trusting the masses, but relying on the basic goodness of the establishment, i.e. the government, including the NRPD, and trusting the elites to lead to a better way. The timing with Manhattan’s slew of arrests of government officials, some former NYPD, seems like a perfect, reality reprise. Somewhere Ridley Scott wants to have some of what Coppola is having because his optimism and naivete does not just extend to life on this temporal plane, but Coppola fundamentally believes that artists can conquer time and thus defy death whereas Scott is so pissed and highly aware of his expiration date. It is kind of sweet how the collapse of the World Trade Center still haunts Coppola, especially the loss of thousands of precious souls, and the pandemic does not touch his work at all. These touchstones do not show a lack of empathy, but a contemporary film’s datedness, stuck a few decades ago in terms of sentiment and preoccupation. While other directors are examining Presidon’t and the pandemic, he is still processing older grievances and borrows from Roland Emmerich to do so. Oh, Coppola also threw in some mommy issues with his sister, Talia Shire, as Cesar’s mother Constance Crassus Catilina, which make Cesar seem more human and less annoying as the person that Coppola has chosen as deserving of accolades.

“Megalopolis” is an odd combination of the visually innovative and narratively derivative. Still it will be hard to resist grading it generously since it feels like Coppola’s earnest swan song, and it is hard to withhold some grace and leeway to a titan in his field who manages to retain his optimism. Former fundies will have a hard time suppressing a giggle at the fact that the US is often compared to Rome, but in apocalyptic fashion as if its downfall is imminent and deserved for the freedom of whoever is the modern-day equivalent of those under their heel. 

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It is unclear whether the public will have the benefit of a live performance during a scene set after a satellite hits New Rome, and Cesar is answering a question that an actor in the movie theater poses. Coppola’s early experience is in the theater, and he clearly was trying to blend movie magic with live performances. It is exciting if it happens because it sparks curiosity about what is going on, but ultimately it does not work. At the AMC Assembly Row, it was impossible to hear the question or see the interrogator from where I was seated, and the sudden smaller projection of Cesar looking in the general direction of the actor did not work. It did not feel as if they were interacting. A staged performance must reach the cheap seats, and a movie must be the opposite to not seem overwrought. Coppola could not strike the balance, and it was a gimmick that did not move the story forward in a meaningful way. Is it groundbreaking? Theoretically, but not in reality.