Megalopolis review – Francis Ford Coppola’s epic fail

You’d think that a film that has been this long in gestation – Francis Ford Coppola reportedly first had the idea for Megalopolis in 1977 and started writing it in 1983 – and which has been achieved at such considerable personal cost – Coppola sold a vineyard to partially self-finance it – would have something significant to say. But for all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness.

A strident retro-futurist folly that blends Ken Russell-esque kitsch with swaggering self-importance, the film lays out its central conceit – that modern America follows the template of Old Rome – with a reverence that this idea doesn’t really warrant. Coppola carves his opening statement on a stone plaque in a classical font, and then for good measure has Laurence Fishburne narrate the words while sounding as much like God himself as is humanly possible. America, rumbles Laurence portentously, like the Roman empire, is destined to be brought down by the greed and hubris of a few power-crazed men.

The setting for the story is recognisably Manhattan – the Chrysler Building gets more screen time than some of the supporting characters – but in Coppola’s version, the city is renamed New Rome and features a bunch of characters lumbered with vaguely imperial-sounding names and dressed as if they stumbled out of a fetish-wear toga party. The city’s mayor is Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) – Francis to his close friends – but despite sharing a name with the character, it seems likely that Coppola identifies more closely with the film’s central figure, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Cicero is a small-minded sceptic, more intent on bolstering his power and influence than he is on embracing the radical changes that might just improve the lives of city dwellers. Cesar, meanwhile, is a radical dreamer and a visionary, a troubled genius whose ambition to create “Megalopolis” is too wild and brilliant for mere mortals to understand. A futuristic, shape-shifting metropolis built from a newly synthesised sustainable material, Megalopolis promises to change the very fabric of society. Not least because it requires huge swathes of the existing city to be destroyed to make way for it. Oh, and – small detail – Cesar also has the ability to stop time at will.

Cesar and Cicero are sworn enemies; a key point of contention between them is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter. When we first meet her, in a Studio 54-style nightclub, full of gyrating lovelies licking cocaine off each other’s tits, she’s a party girl who is permanently one nipple-tassel incident away from a public scandal. (If Coppola could stop time, you suspect he would have done it back when it was still acceptable for 70% of a film’s female cast to be gyrating uber-minxes wearing Bacofoil bras). Julia is pursued by Clodio (Shia LaBeouf, minus eyebrows and self-respect), the obscenely wealthy scion of the Crassus banking empire. But she is fascinated by Cesar, who happens to be Clodio’s cousin. Meanwhile, Cesar is in an on-off relationship with an ambitious Wall Street reporter called Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, whose vampy cartoon femme fatale is one of the film’s more enjoyable elements).

One of the toughest challenges for a film-maker is conveying genius in a cinematic manner. Megalopolis avoids the hoariest of cliches (a frenzy of scrawled equations and diagrams on walls, windows and any other flat surface) but Coppola’s approach is little better: Cesar’s free-form jazz brainstorming session, with wacky human pyramid antics, is so mortifying that you risk chewing your fingers off in secondhand embarrassment.

The film is not without redeeming features. The design departments – production and, particularly, costume – have gone all out, revelling in an opulently lush colour palette of regal dark reds and forest greens. And there’s the sheer scope of the ambition on show: I would rather watch a picture that shoots for the sky and misses rather than one that plods cautiously along in the safe zone. Still, this does fail on many and varied levels.

The performances are wildly uneven, with Driver and Plaza gamely giving it their all, while Jon Voight, as bank owner Hamilton Crassus III, mugs like a panto villain and Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a presence in the film. But the main issue is an incoherent screenplay that seems in thrall to the very monstrous elite that the film attempts to skewer. A case in point: at one moment in the picture a satellite plunges from the heavens, scoring a direct hit on the city and causing, we imagine, untold devastation and misery. Kind of a big deal, you would think. But the event is dismissed in a couple of scenes as a casual aside, viewed, like everything in the story, from a rarefied position in the corridors of power. For a film that continually bangs on about the greater good and a new utopian future, this is possibly the least egalitarian piece of storytelling I’ve ever seen. The film stops short of describing them as proles, but the only time we get to see the ordinary folk of the city is when they are either gazing in mute, uncomprehending awe through a fence or when they are rioting.

For audiences in the market for a Coppola-directed tale of New York-based power struggles within a dynasty of Italian heritage, let’s just say there are better options on offer.

• In UK and Irish cinemas