Megalopolis (2024)

Some people think this movie will be reappraised in 10 or 20 years, but as far as I can tell those people have not yet offered a good reason to believe this, except maybe that by then cinema as a whole will have degraded to a point where Megalopolis stands out.  Maybe when the time comes, I will see if anyone has something different to say. 

Many of the film critics I follow or film fans I talk to have an auteurist streak, so it's only natural they would be interested in Francis Ford Coppola's vision of utopia.  Still: 

"Transcends all categories of good and bad" 

"Francis Ford Coppola has never been freer" 

"the product of a delusional romantic" 

"the work of an artist who has absolute faith in cinema's power to create emotionally affective images purely through his own force of will"

These are all quotes from basically positive reviews of the film, some from fans posting their comments online and some from my favorite film critics.  The common theme is that Megalopolis is the unfiltered vision of someone with strong beliefs about art, which is true.  And I think Matt Zoller Seitz best articulated the significance of this.  He said:

"No, it only seems ‘indulgent’ by the impoverished standards of American popular cinema, which has been so degraded by anti-intellectualism by this point that even films by directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson are mocked as pretentious, arty or just plain weird by mainstream viewers (in comparison to Marvel, anyway). . . .  Movies like this only seem “indulgent” because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it . . ."

I haven't done the research necessary to know if this is actually true or if it's just what seems true from watching certain social media circles.  Regardless, I too am bothered by what I see of anti-intellectualism and the insistence on personalizing everything just as the individual viewer wants it.  Wanting to personalize artworks is like wanting to personalize birds or trees. 

That said, I have to ask, how far are we supposed to get just from the movie being a big swing, unadulterated by corporate interference?  I am waiting for someone to say they appreciate something about this other than that it was a risky, non-commercial, experimental film in an environment that isn't friendly to such things.  Why must I be OK with the Silicon Valley ideology on display?  No one loves Marcus Aurelius quotes than Silicon Valley types.  ChatGPT will tell you to read Marcus Aurelius.

The two most common comparisons the film gets are Southland Tales and The Fountainhead.  I think only the latter makes sense.  Megalopolis and Southland Tales feel similarly bewildering when you're watching them, but the lingering effect of Southland Tales is different. In Southland Tales, the world is overwhelming.  Megalopolis hovers above it.  Cesar Catalina is too much of a genius for it.  

The two lead women are Aubrey Plaza as an evil gold-digging vamp and Nathalie Emmanuel as a demure wife who defends her husband from the doubters.  There is also Grace VanderWaal as a more minor character.  She's a Taylor Swift-esque pop star who we are initially led to believe is 17, but is actually 23.  This is all a part of a brief subplot in which Cesar Catalina is exonerated for allegations of sexual misconduct. 

There are hundreds of highly acclaimed films--check the "Sight and Sound" list--about men's fears and fantasies about women, or which show women being neglected or mistreated.  It's almost a tradition in auteurist discourse to declare that these elements make the films fascinating and complicated, because they give us a look at the deep, dark pathologies of our auteurs.  (If we address these elements at all.)  See 8 1/2 and Vertigo.  It's not all just cope.  Sometimes these films are quite interesting.  But go through the auteurist canon and it frankly becomes exhausting finding example after example of confessional misogyny.  I know, it's not stylish to sully the divine purity of art with messy, earthly politics.

I'm not saying auteurism itself is the problem.  But there's a certain machismo attached to it.  Godard said all a movie needs is "a girl and a gun."  People treat it like a competition.  Andrew Sarris put some filmmakers in the category labelled "Pantheon" and others in "Less than Meets the Eye."  Fans and critics posture over who's best at putting themselves through "difficult" films, or being above petty ideological concerns to see through to the art underneath. 

If this movie is reappraised, the reappraisers will have different things to say about it from the current fans.  I would guess they discuss the movie's sense of humor and how it looks; in those respects there really isn't anything I dislike about it.  And there is something poignant in the idea that Catalina discovered his world-changing technology trying to save his wife's life--with her gone, the only thing he can do to make himself feel better is to try to save all of humanity.