Peter-H wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2024 1:38 amThere are many campy and silly elements in the movie. In another movie, the campy/silly elements would come off as intentionally humorous. However, this film's tone is so portentious and self-serious that it doesn't normally play that way. It just plays as weird and disorienting. The movie has lines like "revenge tastes best in a dress" (said by Shia-labeouf's cross-dressing character) and "you're so anal, I'm so oral" (said by Aubrey Plaza to Adam Driver). Are these lines supposed to be funny?
Yes! I'd go so far as to say that both are straightforward jokes with contextually communicated setups and punchlines. In the former case, LaBeouf is goofing around with his partner-in-crime about a disguise, but underneath that is a subversion of the character's heretofore arch-masculine approach. He hates Adam Driver so much that he'll debase his Roman
virtus (in his eyes, and also in a certain sense in the eyes of the film) for revenge. In the latter case, Plaza is attempting to entice Driver into sex with a series of cheeky come-hither one-liners. It's a little broad, because her character is a little broad (in ways that are useful for the critical aims of the film), but it's one of our first signs that Plaza's preferred tactic is overt sexual manipulation (see also: her subsequent interactions with Voight and LaBeouf himself). Her specific phrasing is also a subtle Freudian joke: the anal phase of development follows the oral, so she is rhetorically making herself an "immature" sexual partner, itself a powerful image that recurs through the film. Quite frankly, I think there are several other humorous asides you could have picked from this wonderful film (such as Driver's recitation of the entirety of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy) whose points are harder to grasp.
I think the two major elements of the film's approach that cause it to fail to land for so many people (it seems yourself included) are its simultaneous contempt for conservatism, abstracted in the nightmare cartoon vision of modern elite culture with a Roman makeover, and its equally earnest and sentimental depiction of progressivism, which Coppola conjures as a force so perfect and powerful that it can bestow actual superpowers. When examined from this perspective, the narrative of the film is not so much nonexistent as it is simple and sublimated into the philosophical conflict at the film's core. Similarly, the movie is not a tonal disaster area so much as it is a combination of broad yet pointed satire and deeply sincere suggestion for a path away from what ails us. If you wanted to watch a film that is truly just rudderless setpieces, throw on
Caligula. On that movie, Mr. Sausage put it better than I could:
Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Aug 26, 2024 2:23 pmas shot, the movie is a collection of set pieces without a narrative throughline, little sense for the passage of time (we leap forward in time constantly and unexpectedly), and nothing but loose connections between them. There are a lot of moments, but no real movie to speak of. And these moments are always the exact same thing, over and over. There's no variety to them, just the same cruelty, venality, and excess played again and again, sometimes in different environments, usually not. The film is obviously uninterested in either politics, history, or psychology. Its one and only interest is its own prurience, which it indulges at length.
Caligula is dull. After an hour, you've seen everything; after two, you're wondering how much more there could possibly be; and by the end of three you're begging for everyone to get butchered and the credits to roll.
Even if you hate this film, I don't think you could make a serious argument that it is either "uninterested in politics, history, or psychology," given how frequently all three subjects recur, or only interested in its own prurience or feeling of self-impressedness.
I also kind of rankle at your description of the movie's central conflict. Cicero and crew's "perspective" on the world is neither moderate nor stabilizing: they are elitists who preserve the unequal status quo for personal gain, in doing so hollowing out society, creating a 1% monoculture as inaccessible as it is repulsive as it is inescapable, and justly attracting the ire of ordinary citizens (note how Esposito is met with constant booing whenever he appears in public, a device that would be effective enough if it were not an eerily accurate replica of the public image of the current mayor of New York, and several other occupants of the same position during the lengthy gestation of this film). What you have cast as disconnected sketch comedy bits are, in fact, vicious satires of the real counterparts of most of these characters. Consider, as you do, virginal pop star Vesta Sweetwater's arc.
During her relatively brief time on screen, she:
1. is presented as an archetypal Vestal Virgin, a woman whose purity represented the spiritual quality of the Roman state (utile elite civic institution)
2. auctions off her virginity to a high bidder (elitist corruption of said institution)
3. is revealed to be spiritually impure (comes to signify the rot and incapacity of ruling elites)
4. rebrands herself as a newly sexually potent adult (attempts institutional transformation)
None of this is subtle, but the point is to connect two separate patterns of social and cultural behavior and use the grossness of one to comment upon the grossness of another. Coppola is using the oversexualization of female teen idol singers and the usual arc they take to talk about the worst parts of conservative culture: it is moribund, predictable, and fetishistically obsessed with the sexual behavior of vulnerable women. It's an accurate read of these types of artistic expression (when I saw Sweetwater's second music video, I could only think about
a real teen idol trying to rebrand her sexuality using the verbatim phrases "untouched XO" and "losing all my innocence in the back seat"). But more pertinently, it is a highly effective
Vox Lux-esque attempt to expose the interconnected qualities of social problems that share a root cause.
A skeptic of this reading might suggest that the film thus puts its faith too much in Adam Driver's architect and his grand central plan to save humankind, but I think the film is implicitly critical of his actions in isolation. Acting alone, he is a genius, but also a Robert Moses figure, a great planner whose politically entrenched brilliance has led him to disregard the humans whom a better system would serve (hence his copious demolitions of buildings early on in the film and his pigheaded attitude towards displaced residents). Nathalie Emmanuel's character saves him by returning him to humanity, by, to borrow a phrase, being the heart that mediates his head and his hands. Only together and through love can they strive towards the grand civilization-saving plan of Driver's dreams. To Coppola, this is corny, and also true.
I kind of can't believe that it's taken me this long to talk about the special and visual effects, the best and most striking element of this film, but that's because they are, again, powerful contextual extensions of the film's mood, milieu, and message. On one level they are abstracting devices, tools through which Coppola can blend disparate real-world influences like the hold of "Roman-ness" upon the American founding myth or the venality of mainstream news media or the mental disarray of post 9/11 New York, but their form too does tremendous things for the movie. Some parts of the film, mostly those with the villainous characters, feature what I would call deliberate tackiness, with overlit shots, asymmetrical camera movements, heinous CGI elements, and garish costume and hair/makeup choices. Most of Voight and Plaza's wedding, for instance, features all of these elements, culminating in Driver's drug-enhanced freakout in which the hideousness of New Roman life physically harms him. But these are combined with effects that are utterly gorgeous and convincing: Vesta Sweetwater's virgin-song looks completely different and is shot in a completely different fashion to the Bacchanalia surrounding it. It is ethereally beautiful, in contrast to the ugliness around it, because it is a direct expression of a Roman founding myth. From the opposite side of the film's conflict, I found the scenes with Driver on various rooftops to be completely transporting and convincing. You feel (or, well, I felt) perfectly his fear of and difficulty in expressing his great vision, and are(/were/was) astonished by the occasional but stunning use of his magic power. Megalon is an aesthetically ideal substance, as multivariate and beautiful as it is useful. Vesta Sweetwater demonstrates how it "goes with anything" before it's ever used to build a building. I know that a lot of this paragraph is "but I found it compelling," but I think there's more to Coppola's method towards effects-driven filmmaking than what most profit-minded effects-heavy films can contain (for the dreamier parts of this film, what other comparison even exists but
Twin Peaks: The Return?). It's a real shame to me that this film is attracting pejorative comparisons to the Wachowskis or Prequels-era George Lucas, as in truth it finds a substance in its maximalism that those filmmakers never achieve.
I should conclude.
Megalopolis is the best ideas-and-effects-laden extravaganza that the 2000s (n)ever produced. See this movie early and often. I'll grant you that the title cards looked kind of ugly.
