Cannes 2024: Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' Is a Bewildering Mess

Stephen David Miller experiences one of the most anticipated films of the year.

Image credit: Francis Ford Coppola.

This is the second of 3-4 posts by Stephen David Miller covering the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Check out yesterday’s entry about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Stephen is the co-host of the Spoiler Warning podcast.

Hello again, Decoding Everything readers! I’m back tonight for another dispatch from the ground at the Cannes Film Festival, where I’ll be recapping some of the most sought-after red carpet premieres. Last night, I attended the premiere of a long-awaited film that is coming to a theater near you next week. Tonight, I attended the premiere of a decades-long-awaited film which as of now has still not secured a U.S. distributor: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.

But first, a quick look at the broader festival experience.

Festival Snapshot

Though my coverage will largely be focused on buzzy red carpet affairs packed with Hollywood celebrities, the truth is that these only comprise a small fraction of my experience at Cannes. For every Furiosa or Megalopolis, there are a dozen other films I'll be catching at the fest — some helmed by beloved auteurs of international and arthouse cinema, others by first-time feature directors getting their big break on the Croisette. While a solid number of these will involve equally frenetic black tie premieres, the majority are, thankfully, more relaxed.

One unsung perk of those more relaxed screenings: No security guards yell at you for taking selfies on the carpet! Photo credit: Stephen David Miller.

One complicated aspect of Cannes is that it isn’t just one festival: There are multiple parallel lineups, all worthy of your attention. The most prestigious of these is the Official Selection, which this year includes 22 films In Competition (eligible for the Palme d’Or), as well as a handful of Out of Competition selections like Furiosa or Horizon: An American Saga. Alongside the Official Selection, the Cinephile badge gives me access to other festival tracks like Un Certain Regard, which highlights a broader range of international films, or The Director’s Fortnight, which acts as a sort of mini Sundance by emphasizing up-and-coming directors and smaller, indie fare. 

There are typically two or three Official Selection premieres a day, all of which take place in the late afternoon or evening and involve those paparazzi-filled red carpets I detailed in yesterday’s post. For those who can’t get into those premieres or who are simply tired of wearing a tux, there is a reprise screening the following morning. Personally, I try to average four films a day while I’m at Cannes. This typically means two evening galas, one morning-after screening for the premiere I didn’t catch the night before, and an afternoon slot devoted to one of the parallel tracks.

In the coming posts, I’ll be using this space to highlight some of those other screenings. Today, I’ll shout out two:

• Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond tells the story of a 19-year-old social media influencer who desperately wants to be accepted into a Reality TV program so she can escape the confines of her day-to-day life. I found this to be a moving and nuanced take on what it means to come of age in the era of social media—if you liked Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex, or Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, I think you’ll love this film.

• Speaking of Andrea Arnold: her new film Bird premiered just before Megalopolis today, and I was quite taken by it! It too is a story of coming-of-age and the desire to escape, following a 12-year-old girl living in an impoverished English town who is trying to navigate some tense family relationships. I won’t spoil it, except to say that Arnold makes a handful of very surprising choices which I don’t think any viewer will see coming. Also, Barry Keoghan gives an incredible turn as the main character’s rough-but-earnest father.

Now, on to the main event!

The Movie: Megalopolis

It's virtually impossible to separate Megalopolis from the myth of its creation. To those who have followed Francis Ford Coppola's career, tonight's premiere is the culmination of a saga over four decades in the making. Legend has it that Coppola first had the idea for the film—a sci-fi retelling of the Fall of Rome set in a modern day American city—while he was shooting yet another largely-self-financed project whose production was rumored to be a disaster: Apocalypse Now. What we do know with certainty is that he's tried to get some version of Megalopolis off the ground since at least the 1980s. And though Coppola would continue to make plenty of good-to-great films in his post-Apocalypse career (I implore you to stop what you're doing and go watch Rumble Fish), his work has never come close to the consensus acclaim of his legendary 1970s run. Now after decades of false starts, a mountain of rewrites, and the partial sale of his namesake winery to fund the endeavor, the story he conceived of when he was still at the height of that acclaim is finally coming to fruition. 

With that myth in mind, tonight wasn't just about watching a movie; it was about taking part in cinematic history. Even for a festival known for generating hype, I can safely say that the energy was more palpable tonight: the fight to get a ticket more intense, the red carpet more frenetic, the anticipation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière more pronounced. When the director entered the theater alongside his cast and crew, the lengthy ovation he was given felt less like an expression of excitement for Coppola’s upcoming film, and more like a celebration of something he’d already accomplished. Whether his wild passion project proved to be a hit or a dud, he’d managed to defy the odds and finish the damn thing. And he was coming here, to the festival that first welcomed his The Rain People in 1969, to share it with the world. Whatever it was, we were ready for it.

Francis Ford Coppola receiving a standing ovation as he enters the theater. Photo credit: Stephen David Miller

The result is exactly what you might expect a movie 40 years in the making to look like: an overstuffed, bewildering, self-aggrandizing, sporadically dazzling but mostly clumsy mess.

First, a word about the plot. The film takes place in the futuristic city of New Rome, and follows a three-way power struggle between Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), inventor and city planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), and chaos agent / failson Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf)—heir to the fortune of banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Mayor Cicero believes in pragmatic solutions to city problems, while Cesar wants to rethink the very idea of a city via a new material he discovered called Megalon. When Cicero's daughter Constance (Talia Shire) sets off to find dirt on Cesar, she discovers that…er…uhm…

If it sounds like I'm struggling to convey the basic setup of the movie, it's because there is no "basic" setup to be found. Coppola may have started with a kernel of an idea back on the set of Apocalypse Now, but when you let a kernel cook for too much time it's likely to explode. Yes, Megalopolis is a fable about modern society using the allegory of Rome. But it's also a sprawling attempt at creating a sci-fi epic, a meditation on the creative process and the value of free expression, a tale of backstabbing and palace intrigue, an ode to human connection, a warning about the rise of populism, a star-crossed romance, and a philosophical drama about urban planning. All of these ideas combine to make Megalopolis simultaneously obvious and confusing. “Obvious” because every individual metaphor or theme Coppola is going for is extremely heavy-handed; “confusing” because, taken together, the metaphors almost seem to cancel each other out. The film clearly wants to pronounce some grand, universal vision for humanity, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it wants to say.

Tonally, Megalopolis is no less confused. The dialogue is highly self-serious, except when it suddenly decides to veer into comic relief. When not literally reciting Shakespeare or cutting to voiceover narration about the history of civilization, characters tend to speak with a lofty theatricality that sounds like they’re quoting some major, famous thinker. That is, unless they sound like they’re starring in an American Pie sequel instead.

All of these are (as best I can recall) lines uttered by characters in the same movie:

• “To escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

• “If the mind can create gods, might that power be harnessed elsewhere?”

• “You have anal tendencies; I have oral tendencies.”

• “Look at this boner I’ve got!”

There are sweeping generalizations about the dynamics of society and our infinite potential as a species, but there’s also a coke-infused fever dream, not one but two in-universe pop musical numbers, and a totally unnecessary subplot about a phony sexual assault allegation (which struck me as particularly uncomfortable given both LaBeouf’s involvement in the film and recent reports about Coppola’s troubling behavior on set.) At one point in the screening, Jason Schwartzman literally walked out onto the physical stage at the Grand Théâtre Lumière with a microphone and started delivering live dialogue opposite Adam Driver’s character on the screen. It was a shocking thing to witness, and something I presume will only happen tonight…but what exactly was all that shock and novelty for? [DChen’s note: Really curious how that scene will play out when this thing hits VOD!]

Left: Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito leaving the screening. Right: Francis Ford Coppola hugging Cannes Festival director Thierry Frémaux. Photo credit: Stephen David Miller

Megalopolis is a totally bonkers experiment, and it mostly falls flat. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to you. The plot is too convoluted for it to work on an intellectual level, and its emotional through line is confusing at best. But for as much as I recognize its failures as a film, I have to admit that I found the experience of watching it in a packed premiere pretty damn incredible. There’s a real thrill to witnessing such a massive swing and a miss in the presence of the filmmaker, especially with a crowd so clearly in love with cinema as an art form. It encourages you to hunt for the glimmers of genuine inspiration beneath the clumsy execution, to root for the pieces that work even if it ultimately falls apart. Whatever this was, it was a communal experience — something that could only happen here, in this room, tonight.

Or as a wise man might say: At the end of the day, it is still really impressive that Francis Ford Coppola made a movie.