There’s a magnum opus like Megalopolis that comes out almost every year. Almost every year,  some director uses close to three hours of screen time to translate an inscrutable vision. These movies always connect with a few people, but they tend to freeze out the vast majority of audiences.

This particular magnum opus is both shorter in the runtime and far, far longer in gestation period. Francis Ford Coppola has been talking about making Megalopolis, his idea for setting the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC in modern-day New York, literally since the 1970s. He famously hasn’t brought it to the screen all these years because he’s had to make profitable schlock for the studios, to recoup several flops, and only now is self-financing it to the tune of $120 million of his own money because he’s 85, and definitely won’t be able to make it after he’s dead.

It would be great, both for Coppola apologists and for fans of big-swing cinema, if we could say that Megalopolis is a satisfying realisation of all those years of build-up. The film does have moments where it flirts with that sort of greatness. Really, though, it’s likely to connect with a few people and freeze out the vast majority of audiences – especially in the wake of the alleged misconduct by Coppola toward women on the set. But at least it’s “only” two hours and 18 minutes.

Since most people aren’t familiar with the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC, it’s probably best just to synopsise Megalopolis on its own terms. The film stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, a brilliant scientific mind and socialite playboy who has invented a building material he hopes will reshape the city of New Rome as a utopia full of buildings resembling vegetation more than steel and concrete. (New Rome in all other ways resembles New York City, including iconic locales like Madison Square Garden and the Statue of Liberty.) Cesar is in a bitter rivalry with the city’s mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose own socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) becomes entranced by Cesar when she sees he can freeze time. That’s a metaphor for what any artist does, and a few demonstrations of this early on prepare us for the sort of head trip that tries to tackle everything, and maybe succeeds.

Megalopolis then layers on the characters and conflicts, as we also meet Cesar’s uncle, the billionaire Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight); Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), Cesar’s jealous cousin; Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a TV presenter who tries to cozy up to anyone with power; Cesar’s driver and assistant, played by Laurence Fishburne, who also narrates; and of course your standard cohort of Coppola relatives, including Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman. There are several converging plots to assassinate and/or overthrow various of these people. Their logic may not be apparent to anyone but those most closely committed to following the story, or students of Roman history.

Megalopolis is part Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountainhead, part Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and/or Romeo + Juliet (Cesar recites Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech at one point), and maybe a little bit of the Leos Carax movie Annette from a few years back, though probably only because that is also a magnum opus featuring Adam Driver. Its regular incoherence is probably partly by design, but that doesn’t necessarily help in the moment.

On the one hand, it is encouraging that Coppola still has the creative gusto to make something like this at his age, following in the footsteps of someone like Ridley Scott in tackling grand-scale cinema even into his dotage. Many of his recent efforts have been truly eccentric little misfires. On the other hand, Megalopolis is not a success. Its accomplished visual stylings dress up too many ideas with too little clarity in their execution, and that makes the film feel longer than its 138 minutes.

Megalopolis is pretty in every scene, reminding us that Coppola has presided over the art direction of such films as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The art deco production design might itself be worth the price of admission. Then you have Coppola using some digital technology that also wouldn’t have been available to him at other times the film approached fruition, including just before 9/11. There are compelling moments, for example, when marble statues representing democracy and justice slump against nearby buildings, or collapse under the weight of modern-day excess and venality. These statues come to life in keeping with the opening description of this film as a fable.

Fables, though, are usually characterised by their function as pedagogy. If we can’t extract a clear message from a fable, what value does it have? Megalopolis is pageantry of the highest order, but little more than that since we can’t figure out what it’s on about. There’s a cautionary tale here about unchecked money and power, and the cretinous Shia LaBeouf character (is there any other kind?) is at one point trying to influence the masses in an uprising, even though he himself is a symbol of the sort of thing they’re rebelling against. Hypocrisy is a necessary part of any story of money, power and political uprising. But then we also have to make room for the Driver character and his architectural ideas, to say nothing of the mysterious death of his wife, and then there’s a bit about a pop star called Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal), who fundraises off her virginity pledge in raising millions. (Yes, you are catching the reference to the Vestal Virgins.)

This last scene is instructive in what Megalopolis brings to the table. New Rome really is an updated version of the Rome of 63 BC, as many of the men sport Caesar-style hair, and this fundraiser takes place in a new version of the Coliseum set in among the skyscrapers, including chariot races shown on video screens. Megalopolis feels like a series of individual images and visual concepts that Coppola has been imagining for nearly five decades. It does not feel like career encapsulation he obviously wanted, or if so, it suggests a career informed more by confusion than clarity.

 

Megalopolis is currently playing in cinemas.