Crítica muy positiva del pasado 10 de Septiembre (Festival Internacional de Cine de Toronto), por John Corrado. 4 estrellas le da.


It takes a filmmaker like Francis Ford Coppola to pull off something as audacious as Megalopolis, the Godfather and Apocalypse Now director’s self-financed, $120 million epic that he has been trying to get produced for a few decades now. And now it exists, and I’m actually kind of in awe at what Coppola has pulled off.

It’s bold, visionary filmmaking, as Coppola draws upon a variety of cinematic influences (Fritz Lang, Federico Fellini, even a little Orson Welles) to tell an ambitious story that mixes Roman Empire history with New York City politics. There is a theatrical quality to it as if Coppola is playing with form, yet the film feels almost classical in its scope and ambition, harkening back to a time when directors were mad men risking everything to transfer their visions to the screen.

Adam Driver stars in the film as Cesar Catilina, a brilliant but controversial architect who leads the Design Authority in New Rome, a futuristic city modelled after New York (there are some recognizable allusions to what that city went through over the past several decades. Cesar also has the supernatural ability to stop time, doubling as metaphorical representation of what all artists do with their work. Cesar has plans to build Megalopolis, utilizing a new material he has discovered. But he gets pushback from Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to keep the status quo.

There are various subplots involving the other people in the orbits of these two men. Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), owns the city’s bank, while his cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf) is like the young prince becoming too ambitious for his own good. Things are further complicated when Cesar becomes involved with the mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). There’s also a mistress in flirty TV anchor Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), while Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne) serves as both Cesar’s personal assistant and the film’s narrator

Men and families jostling for power is a familiar theme for Coppola (it’s what underpins his Godfather trilogy, which is really the saga of America). In Megalopolis, Coppola branches out even further to explore how whole civilizations fall due to corruption and greed, or are crushed under the weight of man’s ambition. The Ancient Rome decadence of how the elites live in Coppola’s film stands in stark contrast to the lives of the peasants whose houses are in the way of the new city.

It’s richly layered, weaving in subtext and deeper themes, with a story that, at least on the surface, is fully comprehensible (there’s a reason the film’s subtitle is “Megalopolis: A Fable”). The film is also deeply entertaining, thanks to both its involving performances (Driver commands the screen, continuing to prove he is one of our best actors currently working), and almost operatic high camp moments. I was absorbed from start to finish.

This is Old Hollywood epic, only with digital backdrops instead of painted ones (it’s fascinating to think what this film might’ve looked like if Coppola had produced in the 1970s or ‘80s). Through modern visual effects, Coppola conjures up images that are unlike any I have seen before (like magical realist moments when Cesar stands on floating construction beams suspended thousands of feet in the air). At times it recalls a graphic novel with its triple split-screens, while cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. conjures up compositions that feel like moving paintings.

It’s also a gloriously wide-reaching artistic statement that still feels strangely personal; does Coppola view the misunderstood architect trying to secure a legacy by creating something larger than life as a stand-in for himself? And will this film get a similar critical reappraisal to some of the director’s other works? It’s fun to simply watch one of cinema’s great masters playing around on this large a canvas.

Regardless of how you ultimately feel about Megalopolis itself (I loved it, many others have not and will not), it’s impossible to deny this is anything but the exact movie that Coppola wanted to make at this stage in his career, no matter how divisive it might be. What I will never understand is why so many were rooting for this to fail. We should all just be happy that this film exists at all. Long live cinema!