Is ambition a virtue? The only thing each side of the argument agrees on is that the answer is obvious.
To those in the affirmative — usually from countries north of France — the mortalest of sins is wasted potential. Where would we be if the likes of Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Springsteen took it easy? We would be stagnant, with nothing to do, say, or play during fireworks.
The slackers might reasonably counter that every dictator was also a real go-getter. If the devil finds work for idle hands, then he finds promotions for those with hands raised. There’s a reason why John Lennon held a bed-in for peace: you can only make war out of bed, and you can only make children in it. As far as approval ratings go, the latter wins in a landslide.
The merits of ambition is the driving question of “Megalopolis,” released in theaters Sept. 27 to mostly empty theaters. It is also a fair question of its auteur, “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola. A project several thwarted decades in the making, Coppola gave up any hope for studio collaboration and liquidated much of his fortune to self-fund this film, which at its highest estimate cost $140 million. You could rent Luxembourg with that cash, or six months of catch with Shohei Ohtani. For Coppola, now 85, it was the price for purity of his vision, for good and ill. The buck has to stop with Francis, simply because it’s his to begin with.
“Megalopolis” takes place in an alternate America in a city called New Rome City, quite similar to New York City, save with more chariot races and less bodegas. The city is an updated version of the end-stage Roman Republic, with a disaffected underclass ruled over by a small number of patrician families.
A sense of stagnation permeates all, with the poor too disenfranchised to change much and the elites happy to anesthetize themselves off into the sunset rather than rise to the challenge. One is reminded of the saying that it’s easier for us to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Power is shared in an informal, uneasy triumvirate between three men. There is Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), content keeping the city afloat and himself in power, less content with the partygirl behavior of his daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Another is Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), head of the national bank and the richest man in the city. He is quite content with the status quo, which brought him his wealth and his young marriage to his younger wife, financial reporter Wow Platinum (a very game Aubrey Plaza). Wow is conspiring with Crassus’ nephew and heir Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) to part him from that fortune, while Clodio tries to rile up the poor in a populist bid for power.
The most important of the triumvirate is Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), genius nephew of Crassus, rival cousin to Clodio, and former lover of Wow. He has parlayed his Nobel Prize for inventing the miracle element Megalon into chairmanship of the Design Authority, and seeks to jostle New Rome out of its decadent slide by constructing a new utopian city (which you could probably guess the name of).
Driver’s character can also control time, but then “Saved by the Bell’s” Zack Morris used that power more frequently and effectively than he does here. Julia originally tries to spy on Cesar for her father, but falls in love with his vision as much as him. Here is a man who doesn’t want to just manage the decline, but slay it. That his utopia resembles an early 2000s screensaver is beside the point.
In what is already an internet meme, Cesar self-identifies with having an “Emersonian” mind, but between the architecture, the invented element, and his drive to have the future created in his individual image, Cesar is more a Randian hero. He professes to care for the underclass, but is also willing to risk what fragile peace they still have to chance greater happiness in his pipe dream. The creative act, his creative act, is preferable puttering along in the status quo, even if it fails. One wonders where the production ends and the text begins.
Fortunately for me, it doesn’t take an astute critic to draw the parallels between protagonist and director. To make it easier, it’s not even the first time Coppola has risked his fortune on a film: his 1981 movie “One from the Heart" almost bankrupted him, sending him into the more solvent field of supermarket wine. More than any other filmmaker, Coppola puts his money where his mouth is, which is why there’s always the tempting escape hatch to praise his ambition and sidestep his failures.
I will tip my hand as a critic to admit I’m not impressed by ambition alone — if I was, I’d spend more time on Linkedin and less on Twitter. Which isn’t to say I prefer achievable mediocrity, just that a belly flop from any height remains a belly flop. I respect Coppola too much to treat him with kid gloves; this is a cinematic titan who deserves to be in the arena, not out to pasture.
Much of “Megalopolis” doesn’t work, yet oddly enough what works best are Coppola’s biggest reaches. There is a stretch in the middle, at the cutely named Madison Square Coliseum, where hubris and artistry finally lock pace and deliver some of the more exciting filmmaking this year. Where it fails are those aspects well within its grasp: a tin ear for dialogue, a script that loses track of characters for 20 minutes at a time, and some of the most garish lighting this side of HGTV (where have you gone, Gordon Willis? A nation squints its blinded eyes to you!).
By self-funding, Coppola protected himself from meddling yet cost himself perspective. It is both his Cesar’s fortune and misfortune to be spared such a lesson. If the lesson of “Megalopolis” is to submit yourself to the vision of an übercreative, then the lesson of making “Megalopolis” is you can only get by with a little help from your friends.
