Megalopolis Review: Coppola’s Futuristic Vision Shines in Style, Falters in Story

Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited “Megalopolis” is beautiful. It’s a beautiful movie, set in a futuristic New York inspired by old Rome, where the rooms are beautiful, the lighting is always wonderful and the actors’ faces have a wonderful glow. But behind all that beauty is an incoherent story, an awkward series of performances, and a filmmaker who seems to have lost track of his goal. “A Fable” is the film’s subtitle, but its moral is extraordinary: Be careful what you wish for.

Coppola, the Oscar-winning writer and director whose best films include “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” self-financed the $120 million “Megalopolis,” a project that was decades in the making. (Three decades ago, the script had its first table read, which included some of the cast members of the film currently being produced.) It’s the story of one man with many goals: Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect and visionary who wants to transform New Rome into a utopian world. Behind him is Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to preserve the city’s old, corrupt system; among them is Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who loves and is loyal to Caesar.

It’s not a bad idea for a movie, but still, “Megalopolis” is miscast from the start: The opening party feels like Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”; Driver’s character has bizarre superhero qualities (can he stop time?) and reads Shakespeare indistinctly; and interesting actors, like Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza, keep turning up in unimpressive or, as in Plaza’s case, very much the wrong roles.

Nearly all of the cast, especially Driver, seem at sea, repeating their lines mechanically rather than bringing the words to life. The 85-year-old Coppola is still full of ideas, but many of them read as gimmicks that bring nothing to the story, such as an interminable circus sequence, an inexplicable switch to a three-way split screen and a line spoken to the actual theater audience. And whatever it is, the story doesn’t last long enough; there’s nothing in these characters that could captivate us.

There’s beauty here, in the dazzling shots of New York and New Rome (the Chrysler Building sparkles like a jewel against a blue sky), and in the witty references to the toga in Milena Canonero’s costumes. (Driver wears a striking black hat on several screens, which is far better than his dialogue.). Still, the hat gives him even more work.And it’s strange to see a filmmaker take a big shot at something, even if the results are uneven. But I was checking my watch before “Megalopolis” was over. It was a movie that was better left in its dreams, or perhaps it could have been sung by the Coppola of several decades ago.