Megalopolis is an act of remarkable hubris: a self-financed cinematic appeal to humanity to assert and surrender to its basest nature probability of utopia. Francis Ford Coppola loves the people but remains wary of the hungry masses, creating an intriguing tension at the heart of the project, a simultaneous rejection of populism and a desire to help a population yearning for something bigger and better.

This bigger and better future can only be achieved by Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect who not only developed the magical building material Megalon, but also serves as a key bureaucrat in the world of New Rome and has the ability to Ah, hold on the time. However, it is not clear what this ability to bend time is all about. But it looks pretty cool when he stops an implosion mid-plosion. And it brings him into contact with Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter and the only other person who can see him bending time to his will.

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New Rome, a replacement for New York City and America writ large, is dumbed down. It dies a slow death, a death in decadent stagnation: Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) has no vision beyond general vulgarity, and the wealthy elite are happy to wallow in this tasteless excess, even as the masses suffer from a lack of housing jobs, lack of vision. Or something like that, anyway. It’s never really clear what the masses are suffering from, but they often stand on the sidelines and look a little sad. Cicero’s dreams are of concrete and steel and casinos and homes and jobs and economic growth, stability in the present at the expense of future excellence. Cesar dreams bigger, believing that without his hand on the tiller and without Megalon’s shape-shifting alloy, all will be lost.

And yes, this is all a metaphor. (Or perhaps a fable, as the film’s subtitle suggests.) For American politics, for the film industry, for…everything, everything. We live in a rut of our own making, where fashion, intellectual property, and musical styles are recycled over and over again because that’s what people want. All we need is someone who sees everything, to come along and give them something better.

All we need is an artist with a vision.

Entr’acte

Megalopolis is supremely idealistic, a desperate appeal to people who believe in the power of the arts to let artists – the architects, the playwrights, the musicians and, yes, the filmmakers – advance humanity. So I feel comfortable quoting lyrics for a moment just to set the tone. This is from The Pioneers, Bloc Party’s brilliant 2005 debut album. Silent alarm:

If it can be lost, it can be gained
If you can touch it, you can turn it
All you need is time
All you need is time
All you need is time
All you need is

We promised the world we would tame it
What did we hope for?

The wildness of the world, the desire to tame it through willpower (and force projection), the belief that we just need enough time to achieve our goals, and the danger of what happens when you try and fail: Listen This on an iPod in a cubicle in the Weekly StandardA few feet from the closet that housed the Project for a New American Century, “The Pioneers” was a song that hit me hard when I heard it in 2006 for several reasons.

Last but not least, utopian ideals often trigger violent backlash.

Megalopolis will fail commercially. The most visible signal of commercial success and failure, at least at the box office. This isn’t so much a prediction as it is one fait accompli. Nothing so ambitious can succeed because its success is based on convincing people to see something they’ve never experienced before, and if I tell them to go see this thing, it will in the face of their buddy who says it looks like garbage, doesn’t do anything. The film will fail and the nine sums Coppola invested in the film will be lost, recouped pennies at a time over decades as the film finds a home audience. Or not. Perhaps, like other works of mad genius, it will disappear into the ether.

And the lesson that moneymen have learned is that ambition is to be avoided, that idealism is weakness, that the masses want their job and are not interested in what will keep the art of film alive in the years to come. The trade newspapers will shame the film and its director for their daring indulgence. The gossipmongers will spew bile. The studio bosses who spurned the film will knowingly click their tongues. The Roller coaster enthusiasts will point to the box office grosses – and once again play the aggrieved victim, despite supporting the dominant cinematic mode of our time.

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All of this was predictable; Anyone who saw it Youth without youth or Tetro or Twitter I probably understood what a $100 million Coppola film made without any adult supervision might look like, and how appealing that would be to regular audiences. After the film’s final trailer was released, I joked on Twitter that it looked like Francis Ford Coppola’s sucker Puncha reference to the much-hated Zack Snyder film for which I have an unhealthy admiration. But that’s what this film is about: Like Snyder, Coppola was equipped with both a tool to visualize the world as he saw fit, and the budget to realize that vision, and the result is practically experimental. Megalopolis is ethereal and chaotic and barely cares about little things like “linear storytelling” or “audience understanding.” Ultimately, it’s an interesting failure, and an interesting failure is far more worthy of your attention than successful mediocrity. If Megalopolis This is not a moment of rebirth of the art of cinema, but something closer to its death knell. At least that’s what happened with a bunch of ham murderers who gobble up every bit of set dressing they can get their hands on.

To be honest, I have a hard time deciding which of the crazy performances I liked the most. Driver has made a career out of delivering crazy performances for aging writers: as Sancho Panza represents Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s dream project that has been decades in the making. Aubrey Plaza’s portrayal of Wow Platinum is strangely contemporary, considering the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t win over Catiline, she opts instead for his insanely wealthy Uncle Crassus, who Jon Voight plays for an hour with the kind of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a chewing madman in that one episode Seinfeld.

Crassus’ other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing double for Donald Trump, rousing the mob and indulging in populist rhetoric to do… something. The politics of this film aren’t particularly well thought out; Despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily argue that it’s a pretty straightforward fascist story about the needs of a brilliant leader leading the boring masses and corrupt elite out of the filth in which they wallow and into a better future, damn it into democracy. I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom perform at about 110 percent of their required wattage.

Megalopolis While it’s not a good movie – I think it fails on a relatively fundamental level, both as standard storytelling and as a breezy metaphor – I’m glad it exists, and glad to know I’m spending the thousands of dollars on Coppola Merlot, which I have consumed over the years, contributed a little to bringing this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.