Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.To put yourself in the place of Francis Ford Coppola, writer, director, producer and financier of late-career saga Megalopolis, first cut your own hair. That way you are doing a job which, like that of handling a filmmaker with big ideas, should only ever be carried out by someone else. Next, take the reported budget of $120mn and burn it in a bath. Even after The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Coppola spent much of the past 40 years failing to get the movie funded by a studio. Now, however history judges his DIY fantasia, he is unlikely to get his cash back.But don’t be glum. Coppola surely isn’t. His operatic epic may be overblown and weirdly childlike. It is also nothing if not his: all his.And so at last to an opening shot of Adam Driver, atop the Chrysler Building. New York glints below. Now, though, the name is New Rome. Driver plays Cesar Catilina, an infamous maestro of an urban planner. The classical allusions are more than gestures. Manhattan is reimagined as late Roman capital, down to the decadence, Colosseum and looming imperial collapse.“Our American republic is not so different from Rome,” Laurence Fishburne intones in voiceover, in case the populus missed that. The movie says a lot, and all of it out loud, as Driver’s maverick genius duly plots a new New Rome — the utopian Megalopolis. Fate and lesser mortals provide the headaches. Among supporting roles are a deviant cousin (Shia LaBeouf); a feral reporter (Aubrey Plaza); a bureaucratic mayor (Giancarlo Esposito); his wild-living daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel). Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman crop up too, presumably rivals for the lead when Coppola first pitched the project. The staging is lavish and eccentric, until the budget seems to dwindle, when it is cheap and eccentric. The mode is sci-fi tinted melodrama, a tale of family intrigue, lost futures and love, not least that of a filmmaker for their hero. Who could have inspired Coppola’s grand visionary, his beautiful ideas frustrated by halfwits? “When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free,” Driver exclaims, a mission statement I guarantee started life as a Post-it note on the Coppola fridge.Catilina’s biggest problem is people telling him no. Coppola has rid himself of that. Creative autonomy proves a mixed blessing. The general whole thing aside, his biggest risk is making Megalopolis what is, at heart, a silent movie. The visual language and tonal extravagance come straight from a 1920s blockbuster. And, in fact, the results can be a thrill, channelling the silent era’s fearless scale and possibility. (Acting that seems mad by modern standards makes total sense in context.)The hitch? Sadly, the film is not silent at all. Several lines have snap. Many more are stilted or windy. And Coppola is a remarkably awful judge of where the good stuff is. You could make a case for the entire final act being redundant while elsewhere subplots and set pieces are lopped off with a rusty fish knife. (Also: the sexual politics predate silent film by a century at least.)If the past and future get everywhere, Coppola is also very keen for us to know he is addressing the present. Donald Trump will be displeased; Elon Musk ecstatic. And yet it all circles back to Coppola himself, with ghost traces of his old movies, and a return to his career-long obsession with time and power. There is certainly a lot to scoff at here, and ticket sales will probably bear out the sneers of what is left of Hollywood. But in the end, you may ask which is the true success story. The studio exec squeezing a living from a medium they don’t even like? Or Coppola, so entranced by that same art form that even now, he still wills it to be more.★★★☆☆ In UK and US cinemas from September 27
