Producers: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Barry Hirsch and Michael Bederman   Director: Francis Ford Coppola   Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola   Cast: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, Isabelle Kusman, Bailey Ives, Madeleine Gardella, Balthazar Getty, Romy Mars, Haley Sims and Dustin Hoffman   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C-

It’s always sad to watch a big, ambitious film flail and flounder as it unspools before you on the screen.  It’s even sadder when the film is the work of a prominent elder statesman among directors who’s done superb work in the past, although his output has been erratic overall. 

All of which is prelude to saying that Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is a mess, an idea movie in which the ideas are staggeringly banal, though dressed up in extravagant images, even when they’re coherent, which isn’t very often.

The film, described as “a fable,” compares modern America to ancient Rome.  But it doesn’t do what many of today’s supposed thinkers do, which is to equate the decline of the American Empire to that of Rome.  Instead Coppola focuses on the degeneration of the Roman Republic into what became an Empire.  But he doesn’t try to depict that historical event in even remotely accurate terms.  Instead he simply accesses some names to give his tale a vague semblance of the milieu of the time.

If there is a point he latches onto, it’s what scholars of the period call the Catilinarian conspiracy, traditionally portrayed as an attempted coup d’etat led by a dissolute nobleman named Catiline (although Mary Beard has recently argued it was a largely made-up threat by his enemies).  It came to a head in 63 BC, the year that Cicero was serving as one of the two consuls, the highest magistrates in the state, and he claimed for himself the status of a hero when he brutally crushed it. 

In Coppola’s fable, Giancarlo Esposito is Franklyn Cicero, mayor of the economic basket case that is New Rome, a composite of Rome and New York.  Catiline, here called Cesar Catiline and played by Adam Driver (who looks disconcertingly like Ezra Miller in the early going) is a brilliant architect, winner of a Nobel Prize, who has invented a remarkably malleable, permanent building material called Megalon, with which he hopes to refashion New Rome as Megalopolis.  (He also, for some reason, has the ability to suspend time, which plays no role of importance in the narrative but does afford Coppola and editors Cam McLauchlin and Glen Scantlebury the opportunity to manage a cheap special effect with a few freeze frames in which the implosion of a building, for example, is stopped at mid-fall). 

So the two men are at loggerheads. Cicero is a practical, nuts-and-bolts kind of guy who intends to address the city’s economic problems by constructing a casino complex made, as his aged fixer (Dustin Hoffman) proclaims, of “concrete and steel!”  The plan infuriates Catiline, who publicly denounces the mayor as a slumlord.  He, by contrast, is a visionary, utopian thinker, Howard Roarkish in his egotism but sarcastic and often hedonistic.  He’s also despised by his cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a reckless rabble-rouser who tries to wreck his reputation by publicizing a doctored video of him in flagrante delicto with Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal), a teen pop star who’s famously a virgin.  Clodio puts the video on air during the wedding festivities of Catiline’s uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), an enormously rich and powerful banker (the real Crassus, of course, was played by Laurence Olivier in “Spartacus”) to Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), an ambitious TV reporter who aims to steal control of his bank from her befuddled old husband with the connivance of his grandson Clodio.  Those festivities, featuring chariot races, Greco-Roman wrestling and acrobatics, are held at a Romanized Madison Square Garden.

There are further reasons for animosity between Cicero and Catiline, including the fact that as DA Cicero had prosecuted Catiline for murder in the accidental death of his wife Sunny Hope (Haley Sims), though Catiline was acquitted of the charge of uxoricide.  Tension now escalates because Cicero’s beloved daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) has become a supporter of, and fiancée to, Catiline, though Clodio also desires her.  (To make things even muddier, Pow lusts after Catiline.)

This muddle of characters and machinations is, frighteningly, only the tip of a titanic iceberg.   There’s a swarm of other figures surrounding the main ones, like Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), Catiline’s loyal factotum and chauffeur, who also serves as narrator from time to time; Jason Zanderz (Jason Schwartzman), Cicero’s spokesman; Constance (Talia Shire), Catiline’s sharp-tongued mother; Teresa (Kathryn Hunter), Cicero’s good-natured wife; Hart (D.B. Sweeney), New Rome’s commissioner of police; and Aram (Balthazar Getty), Clodio’s minion.  These and other flit in and out of the action for reasons too nebulous to understand. 

Coppola also sprinkles into his script dialogue drawn from earlier works.  The most obvious is the famous opening of Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration, which the mayor intones when Clodio’s venomous video comes out over the Garden’s Jumbotron.  (Catiline, meanwhile, seems to be suffering from some drug-induced apoplexy.  Later he will endure the hideous effects of an attempted assassination—an ugly scene, since the paid shooter is a child—which, however, he overcomes with Julia’s support.)  But there are other example of borrowing, or purloining, from Shakespeare (Driver, for instance, gets to deliver Hamlet’s famous soliloquy), Marcus Aurelius, and others.  There’s also a moment when Driver is shown replying to a question posed by a member of the live audience (or an usher, more likely).  How this will play out on Blu-ray remains unclear.

All of this palaver unfolds almost helter-skelter but at great length, growing more and more tedious as it becomes clear that the film has no coherent point to make.  (A Latinist who wanted to quote Cicero himself might shout, “Quousque tandem abutere, Coppola, patientia nostra?”)  What the director means to say is obscured by an ending that, despite his presumed antipathy to the development of autocracy, seems to celebrate Catiline’s remaking of Rome (he is also called Cesar, after all).  And the final shot focuses on the infant daughter of Catiline and Julia as a Kubrickian star-child. 

Coppola attempts to camouflage the film’s jumbled messages with flamboyance; not a single aspect of “Megalopolis” exhibits a hint of understatement.  The performances demonstrate various degrees of over-the-top excess; the worst offenders are LaBeouf, Voight and Plaza (though their final confrontation at least has the virtue of being one of the picture’s truly funny moments, most of the episodes being either heavy-handedly sober or just plain silly).  But the cast are all giving the director what he’s asked for. 

The visuals are even more overblown.  The production design by Bradley Rubin and Beth Mickle and costumes by Milena Canonero are both wildly colorful, and the showy cinematography by Mihai Mălaimare Jr. and Ron Fricke, coupled with the effects supervised by Jesse James Chisholm, make for some eye-popping results (Dean Sherriff is credited as “visual concept designer”).  There’s absolutely no attempt at realism; instead, the images have a quite deliberate artificiality about them, a stylized approach the film shares with other Coppola efforts like “One from the Heart” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”  McLauchlin and Scantlebury do yeoman work trying to tie together the scattered strands of the director’s handiwork into a cogent whole, but their effort is ultimately unavailing.  Osvaldo Golijov’s score is blustery with some calculatedly ethereal interludes.

One can’t deny the ambition behind “Megalopolis,” or the commitment to realize his vision that led Coppola to plow so much of his own money into making and distributing it.  And it must be admitted that as zany and ridiculous as it is, the film isn’t exactly boring: it’s irritatingly elephantine, but its very wackiness keeps you watching even as your jaw drops at the lunacy.  At least it’s not a carbon-copy Hollywood blockbuster; its flaws are of a completely different sort.  Even as you sigh in relief when it’s over, you might find yourself admiring Coppola’s willingness to risk everything on a project that will doubtlessly cost him dearly.                  

A final point: a national preview screening of “Megalopolis” was preceded by a live-stream of a Q&A with Coppola, Robert De Niro and Spike Lee in New York.  Technically it was a disaster, constantly dropping out and leaving only brief fragments of the discussion audible.  Viewers took it in good humor, laughing at the ineptitude of it all.  After the film had ended, some in the dazed audience thought that it might have been an improvement if it had been live-streamed, too.