Towering, Timely and Trite

Released the day after news broke of sweeping federal indictments against New York Mayor Eric Adams, the purposefully epic new film “Megalopolis” feels more like a documentary on acid than the fantastical fable it labels itself. The City of New York is cast as the capital of New Rome, an empire on the verge of collapse, rife as it is with bacchanalia, blatant corruption, tawdry media idols, collapsing humanist ideals, gross inequity between have-nots and have-billions and rising populism amongst huddled masses yearning for fascism disguised as freedom. If this all sounds familiar, it is because legendary director and writer Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon with this film, but a moon that has no place for subtlety, or rather, no time for it. 

The overarching meta-narrative of the film is time — that he as a cinematic elder can’t spare the time for unobvious reference (“Make Rome Great Again”); that we as a culture are out of time; that humans as a species must make the most of time’s march despite its vicissitudes; and that each of us as individuals should seize every precious, precarious moment to both dream and act.

The film’s protagonist Cesar Catalina, played by the impossibly virile and aptly named Adam Driver, can stop time with a snap of his fingers, seemingly because he and only he has the capacity to dream, at least at the film’s outset. Part Robert Moses, part Superman, and part supermodel with drug habits, Driver leads the city’s Design Authority much like Moses did his infamous “public” Authorities, with godlike force yet likable mien. 

Consistent with any number of films centered on a hot architect (in actuality the hottest thing we architects can typically offer is espresso), the movie’s obvious parallel protagonist is Howard Roark of “The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand’s megalomaniac strong man who would rather blow up his buildings than see his designs altered. Catalina shares Roark’s penchant for detonating that which does not follow his will, including public housing he deems unworthy of its residents while offering nothing to replace it beyond his convictions. He is at constant odds with his crass conniving cousin and the venerable but ever-compromising Mayor Cicero, played respectively by a slimy Shia LeBeouf and an erudite Giancarlo Esposito. Yet the only character who seems to truly understand Catalina’s egotistical flaws is his mother, rendered brilliantly by Talia Shire, who bemoans that humans, unlike alligators, do not eat their young. 

Famously it was said of Moses that he loved the public but not the people, and while that same impulse pulses through Roark and Catalina, neither of their creators saw fit to critique it. Consequently what confuses is that Catalina, unlike Roark, is an anti-fascist force. Rand saw fascism as a higher calling, whereas Coppola’s Catalina sees utopian beauty as the tsunami that will topple both the compromised mendacity of bureaucracy represented by Esposito and the ugly ignorance of populism led by LeBeouf. “Fight fascism with futurism!,” he seems to proclaim, conveniently forgetting that futurism was a fascist, albeit beautiful, movement.

Because fascists too tend to drape themselves in the splendor of neoclassicism, including Trump, this paradox of imposed beauty versus public agency exacerbates the movie’s aesthetic and ethical contradictions. Catalina mocks a grotesque yet all too familiar casino proposal with Shakespearean longing (“to sleep — perchance to dream”). He is driven by chauffeur and sonorous narrator Laurence Fishburne through broken streets teeming with both the unhoused and writhing neoclassical statues seemingly ripped from the lost edifice of the original Pennsylvania Station. And throughout, Driver’s Catalina returns again and again to the power of utopian beauty to save us from ourselves. 

Frequent readers will know that I am somewhat sympathetic to this belief, but from history I know its pitfalls, which is why I identify as a utopian pragmatist who advocates for a more broadly conceived, pluralistic beauty. The world can be an ugly place, but grafting singular beauty upon it without introspection and accountability, as fanciful stars in my profession still attempt, is even uglier.

This is particularly the case when Catalina — who, in his most starchitect mode as an ambulance chaser, reimagines a massive irradiated ground zero, created when an aged Soviet satellite crashes into Midtown South. Funded by his billionaire uncle, who is played with plutocrat precision by Jon Voight, Catalina rebuilds the disastrous crater site not as, say, the much-needed housing his previous antics with explosives demand, but as a diaphanous cloud of glowing taffy ribbons that seem to serve no purpose other than perhaps being the best looking airport travelator you’ve ever ridden. This feckless structure is supposedly constructed from a new bio-regenerative material Catalina invents called Megalon, which ironically serves as product placement for real-life designer Neri Oxman and her mega-wealthy, MAGA-loving megaphonic spouse Bill Ackman. Megalon, apparently made from Catalina’s dead wife’s golden locks, also saves his life after an assassination attempt by a young boy, so yes, the movie has several jump-the-shark moments that jumble innumerable films from “Metropolis” to “Willy Wonka” to “The Terminator.”

The staccato frequency of unedited narrative leaps make one wonder about Coppola’s recreational habits, but larger questions surround the film’s flimsy aesthetic leaps. Of Moses’ desecration of the Bronx with the Cross Bronx, the late great Marshall Berman wrote the poetic elegy “All that is Solid Melts into Air,” yet by contrast Coppola’s paper-thin design inspiration for our future says all that is solid melts into saccharine.

If only — if only — Coppola and Driver had been more inspired by Catalina’s luminous perch at the top of the Chrysler Building, known to mere mortals as the Cloud Club. In it we are grounded by the glory of the interior of Chrysler’s glistening spire, made from Nirosta — a truly beautiful synthesized material — with its unmistakable chevron portals pulling the city’s skyline into the hues of Catalina’s garret. The color I most associate with Coppola is Titian, named after the Renaissance painter who established with his intoxicating, luscious red a defining color not only for famed works like the “Venus of Urbino,” 1534, but for the art direction of Coppola’s Godfather films and his heart of darkness in Apocalypse Now. For “Megalopolis,” Coppola unleashes tubes of Titian alongside rich companion colors that mesmerize viewers, but in nowhere more so than Catalina’s lofty atelier, where he, unlike Roark, makes gentle, consensual love to the mayor’s daughter Julia Cicero, played by the resplendent Nathalie Emmanuel. Had Catalina’s new utopia at the crater site brought Titian forward, had it pulled history into the future instead of forcing us onto golden Megalon escalators reminiscent of Trump Tower, then perhaps the solidity of the film’s aesthetic argument could have reinforced the solemnity of the film’s political argument.

Even had it done so, this is an unapologetically male movie, which as a Coppola film, shouldn’t serve to surprise. It longs for a humanist past and a romanticized future largely governed by men, while romping through the violent confusing collage that is our present, which is largely governed by chaos (and also largely by men).

Yet for all the predictable criticisms one could make of this testosterone-fueled cinematic pilgrimage, we need this movie right now. We have a convicted felon as a major party candidate for president and an indicted mayor running the nation’s largest city. Men, especially young men we are losing to Trump, deserve better role models, and in Driver’s Catalina they could find one, despite his didactic ego and terrible haircut. As Catalina and I mourn equally, we seem unable to build or do anything communal. Those of us on the left may blame the right for this, but part of what criticism of this movie will expose is the left’s ability to self-immolate by disposing the baby of humanism with the bathwater of patriarchy. Perhaps this is why the film’s final grace note is the ability of Catalina’s lover Cicero to also stop time and seize agency, a mixed-race woman who eerily reminds me of our ebullient, powerful vice president.

This is why “Megalopolis,” flaws notwithstanding, is important. Unlike most narratives today, it advocates for hope, it cries for a better future, and insists we are not going back. It is about this moment, it is about us, and it is about time.