Great artists don’t have to be great for their entire career – a fact confirmed by Francis Ford Coppola, whose career in the 1970sThe godfather, The conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse now) is perhaps the best ever, and whose subsequent production is wildly mixed and contains no additional undisputed masterpieces. Megapolisthat Coppola has been trying to make for forty years and that he is financing himself, is an attempt to recapture its former glory, full of epic visions and grand themes and gestures. Such ambition unfortunately leads to a daring saga that has far more moments of stumbling than soaring. It’s a mess to be admired, but a mess nonetheless.

Megapolisin theaters September 27, dreams of a better future by looking at yesterday, with Coppola mining the past: Art Deco and German expressionism, archaic car radios and handwritten letters, and iris shots, tilted angles, split screens and painterly sets backgrounds – in an attempt to imagine the future. It’s a noble effort, but one that doesn’t work, as its marriage of the old and the new (including flowery animation and CGI effects) is clunky and often ugly, its frame awash in shimmering golden hues, lush set design and bizarre overlapping images that make the proceedings garish and have a Neil Breen-like affect.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, Coppola’s first feature since 2011 Tweet is a sloppy mix characterized by the occasional beautiful spectacle (such as two lovers kissing each other deathly on steel beams hanging above a metropolis) and an abundance of clumsy compositions that vainly strive for splendor.

MegapolisThe director’s story is set in a 21st century Big Apple known as New Rome because, as the director’s script makes clear, it is a sci-fi parable about the fall of an empire. In this third millennium city, a war rages between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the chairman of the Design Authority, and Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Cesar believes Franklin is a regressive “slum lord,” and he provokes a confrontation by demolishing what appears to be a subsidized apartment complex to build Megalopolis, a utopia he plans to create with a magical organic substance known as Megalon. The specific nature of this material is never made explicit, but it has enormous potential to create an eco-paradise where everyone gets a garden, houses expand next to residents’ families and people travel via moving walkways.

Lion’s Gate

A spiritual descendant of The Fonteinkop‘s Howard Roark, architect Cesar has the power to literally freeze time because he is an artist, and his progressive designs threaten the status quo represented by Franklin, who in his previous role as prosecutor tried to convict Cesar of the murder ( and failed). from his first wife.

Despite Franklin’s hatred of his opponent, his beloved daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with him and becomes his romantic partner and his muse. This confuses both Franklyn and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), Cesar’s TV journalist girlfriend, who responds to his rejection by grabbing Cesar’s banker uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), an elderly car horn with unprecedented wealth. Crassus has four children who fuck each other incestuously, and the most conniving of them is Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a long-haired cross-dressing weasel who lusts after Julia and comes to loathe his cousin Cesar.

Coppola conveys all this through frantic plots and accompanying images Megapolis lurching, spinning and thrashing around as if disconnected from convention, continuity and the earth itself. It’s a series of home run swings, and when they connect, they’re powerful. All too often they smell wonderful.

The same goes for the film’s performances, led by Driver in a turn that vacillates between arm-waving, toe-tapping flamboyance, blasé curtness, and pretentious speech. Cesar is a motley collection of ideas, emotions and tics, and although Driver commits himself fully to the role, he can’t overcome the drastic shifts in the register of the action – up to and including a sequence in which he is resurrected by Megalon and, for one while time, resembles a space-age version of Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face The Dark Knight.

Laurence Fishburne provides heavy-handed narration as Cesar’s driver and Talia Shire talks string theory as his “crazy” mother, while Plaza clumsily tries to chew the scenery and Emmanuel strives to be the film’s innocent and pure heart. Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, and other notable faces pop up every now and then in throwaway roles, adding to the kitchen sink feel of the whole affair.

Coppola indulges every conceivable whim Caligula-style revelry, 2001-like transformations and circus-style drug trips. From a purely logical point of view, Coppola’s conception of the future is nonsensical (why, for example, are chariot races back in fashion?), and from an allegorical point of view:Megapolis after all, labels itself as “a fable” – it is transparent and unsubtle.

The director’s boldness occasionally pays off, but those few examples are drowned out by a tidal wave of absurdity, as when Plaza’s gold digger wraps himself in Cesar’s coat and notes that it smells exactly like him — a combination of sandalwood, citrus and “sweet masculine memories.” ” MegapolisOpera-over-the-topness is intentional, as are the many flattering parallels it draws between Coppola and Cesar, two dreamers dedicated to paving a hopeful and groundbreaking path for themselves, their art, and the world at large. However, the film’s sincerity clashes with its attempts at comedy, culminating in a late joke about Voight. Only LaBeouf knows how to find the right balance between serious and insane as a Trumpian rabble-rouser; his Clodio is a petulant wannabe tyrant, motivated by jealousy, greed and ego.

Megapolis has no shortage of imagination and fills the 138 minutes with all kinds of confusing and seductive madness: a Vestal Virgin elicits donations from bigwigs with a song, and is then exposed as a fraudster; a surprise attack via crossbow; and Cesar does an improvised rendition of Hamlet‘To be, or not to be’ speech. For every Shakespearean version, Coppola delivers lame humor (while talking about her boyfriend, Wow tells Cesar he’s “anal as hell” while she’s “oral as hell”) and showy sub-Myst panoramas highlighted by blurry cityscapes, crystal clear home video projectors and giant clocks because Cesar, you see, is obsessed with time.

Midway through its IMAX premiere at the New York Film Festival, the film stopped, the lights in the auditorium came on, and an actor in the theater approached a microphone to “ask” Cesar a question on screen – a device that was intended to reinforce the idea that dialogue is the key to saving civilization. Unfortunately, from the author Megapolis is too stupid to start a serious conversation.