Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is a bursting-at-the-seams hallucination of a movie; it’s wonderfully out there. At once a melancholic lament and futuristic fantasy, it invokes different epochs and overflows with entrancing, at times confounding images and ideas that have been playing in my head since I first saw the movie in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, it was both warmly received and glibly dismissed, a critical divide that’s nothing new for Coppola, a restlessly experimental filmmaker with a long habit of going off-Hollywood.
Nothing if not au courant, “Megalopolis” is a vision of a moribund civilization, though also a great-man story about an architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who dreams of a better world. An enigmatic genius (he has a Nobel Prize) with an aristocratic mien and a flair for drama, Catilina lives in a city that resembles today’s New York by way of ancient Rome, although it mostly looks like an elaborate soundstage. As familiar as Fifth Avenue and as obscure as the far side of the moon, it is a world that mirrors its real counterpart as a playpen for the wealthy and a prison-house for the destitute.
The city haunts Catilina. It also inspires him..