‘Megalopolis’ and the Vexations of Decadence

“Megalopolis,” the 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s $140 million passion project, is not by any stretch of the imagination a good movie. It’s easy to understand why he had to fund it largely out of his own pocket, notwithstanding his name and reputation. And as with many later Coppola movies, it’s hard to understand how the artist who made “The Godfather,” “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now” could also be responsible for some of his newest film’s creative choices.

But without being artistically successful, “Megalopolis” is really, really interesting. The film strives to be of-the-moment, to say something big about America Right Now, in a way that relatively few contemporary films aspire to do. And it largely succeeds in that attempt, delivering a portrait of civilizational dilemmas that, whatever its other failings, belongs fully to the realities of 2024.

When I first heard the movie’s plot described as a version of the late Roman republic’s Catilinarian conspiracy updated to a modernish New York, I imagined it resembling Hilary Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall,” a revisionist take on a famous historical episode, with the traditional villain cast as the hero and with ideological goals in keeping with the assumptions of boomer liberalism and contemporary Hollywood.

For Mantel that villain was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s ruthless henchman, who was recast in her prose as a proto-secular man of cool reason surrounded by religious fanatics — chief among them the usually lionized Thomas More, portrayed by Mantel as a zealot who basically deserved his martyr’s fate.

With Coppola’s movie I expected that similar treatment would be given to Catiline, the ambitious Roman aristocrat whose conspiracy to overthrow the republic was famously exposed and denounced by Cicero. The conspirator would be recast as a visionary radical, a good revolutionary and servant of the masses, and his enemies would be conservative-coded and villainous — with the movie’s Cicero portrayed as a tool of the military, perhaps, or religious fundamentalists or fat-cat executives.

But that’s not really what Coppola has put up on the screen. The Roman stuff is there: Our New York is his New Rome, there are gladiatorial matches and chariot races alongside cable news and tabloid headlines. The characters have names that fit with ancient analogues: Jon Voight as the superrich banker Hamilton Crassus, Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero.