Last week I got to attend an advance screening of an audacious, epic new film about a temperamental and uncompromising architect and the small-minded forces arrayed against him: The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, with Adrien Brody as a haunted Bauhaus-trained Holocaust-refugee genius, some sharp supporting work by Felicity Jones and Joe Alwyn, and a career-redefining performance by Guy Pearce as the wealthy Pennsylvania businessman who becomes Brody’s patron. It’s The Master meets The Fountainhead, and it’s worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find when it opens in late December.
The year’s other great architect movie, of course, is Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project Megalopolis, with Adam Driver as a troubled visionary who wants to use time-bending sci-fi technology to rebuild a Manhattan-like city called New Rome, Giancarlo Esposito as the city’s hidebound mayor, and a giant, star-studded supporting cast. It’s in theaters this weekend, and you should see it immediately. To be clear, I’m not saying you should see it right away out of respect for Coppola and his legacy. Or that you should see it because by seeing it you will somehow help other movies like this get financed and theatrically distributed. There will not be any other movies like this—even if Megalopolis makes four billion dollars, even if we all get together and charter shuttle buses to bring public-school kids and senior citizens to the multiplex in order to send a message to Hollywood, it’s not happening. The antic more-more-more madness that suffuses every frame of this movie will vanish from the earth the day Coppola’s eyes close. Sometimes Megalopolis feels like the stoned cinematic fever dream that will flash through the auteur's head in the seconds before that happens, as that sweet pineal-gland DMT kicks in. And that’s why you need to go see it.
The Brutalist’s lens on power, dominance and abuse feels fully contemporary, but 36-year-old Corbet’s calm command of the medium is such that you could mistake his third movie for a career-capping opus by an old master drawing on a lifetime of experience; Megalopolis, on the other hand, is a movie by an actual old master, age 85, that feels more like the work of an excitable millennial wunderkind, some galaxy-brained cinephile hotshot who’s inhaled every Coppola movie and is convinced he can beat the maestro at his own game. It’s as arty as Rumble Fish (Francis’ favorite Coppola film, and also Sofia’s) but it makes use of the visual language and world-building capabilities of the modern CGI blockbuster. With its angry mobs, anthropomorphized statues and retro-futurist architecture, New Rome feels more than a bit like Gotham City; among many other things, Megalopolis is the greatest imaginable audition to direct Batman movies by someone who presumably has zero desire to do that.
For a movie inspired by classical antiquity that’s been in the works for nearly forty years, its references feel thoroughly modern; I found myself thinking about Metropolis, but also about The Matrix, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Hunger Games, and even The Phantom Menace, by Coppola’s old pal George Lucas, another filmmaker whose personal-technological vision quest culminated with actors speaking stiffly in fanciful digital environments; and, maybe inevitably given what the movie has to say about the war between fearful and optimistic visions of the future, I thought about Donald Trump, even before Shia LaBoeuf’s character enters politics and marshals an army of thugs (MEGA-chuds?) in red hats.
Yeah, that’s the Shia LaBoeuf, in his highest-profile role in years. Coppola’s said he deliberately cast “canceled” actors like LaBoeuf and Jon Voight in order to foster a spirit of open dialogue, although disregarding Voight’s archconservatism isn’t the same as overlooking what LaBoeuf got cancelled for. For what it’s worth, LaBoeuf and Voight are both very good in this. So is Driver, who gets the most ponderous speeches and finds big Hamlet energy to put behind them. But nobody here matches Coppola’s freak like Aubrey Plaza, whose performance as Driver’s mistress Wow Platinum walks a deft line between camp and eroticism while also harking back to Janet Snakehole.
I haven’t mentioned the boner gag, or the moment where Driver takes a question from the audience (electric!), or the wildly extra wedding-reception sequence, which feels like our hypothetical millenial-Coppola auteur watched The Godfather and went, “You call that a wedding scene? I’ll show you a wedding scene!” I also haven’t mentioned the references to Rosseau and evolutionary biology and Marcus Aurelius, mostly because I’d have to see the film again to tell you what they’re supposed to mean. I’m not sure it even matters. For all its lofty humanist themes, Megalopolis is strongest when it feels the most autobiographical; you don’t need a syllabus to understand why Coppola, at 85, wants to tell us a story in which an artist worries about losing his ability to control time. The film may look like a sweeping philosophical epic, but it’s really one from the heart. —AP
