Movie Review: Megalopolis
It’s not too often that a major motion picture by one of the greatest directors of all time makes a movie about urban planning, but that’s exactly what Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is. Megalopolis is the final film by Francis Ford Coppola, one that he originally conceptualized after the success of Apocalypse Now in 1979. Even as his stature in Hollywood grew, he could not find people willing to finance this movie, so he ended up selling part of his winery to allow him to self-finance it. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it received mixed reviews, underlined by significant amounts of bewilderment about the film.
My friend, Justin Chang, said in The New Yorker that, “the very nature of the movie, which is by turns aggressively heady, stubbornly illogical, and beguilingly optimistic, is to question our understanding of time as a finite resource.” While time is certainly a major feature of the film, as an urban planner I saw something much different.
The movie is about a city, New Rome (which looks a lot like a stylized New York, just like Gotham) that is descending into decay and debauchery. The film follows a tripartite conflict on how to handle the decline. A mayor who aims to distract the people from the decline while he tries to cling to power; a demagogue son of a powerful banker who is out to rally the mob for his own political gains; and finally, there is the hero protagonist of the film, Caesar Catalina, a visionary developer that wants to remake the city to reverse the decline.
Caesar Catalina is a Robert Moses-like figure that has seemingly unlimited power to raze communities and displace families to make way for his future development. As one would expect, this angers those who were displaced and provides a power base for the bank exec’s demagogue son to leverage for his own political gains.
In many ways, the parallels between the movie and reality are obvious. Just a couple of weeks ago, before watching the movie, I wrote about city building in an age of decline. This movie encapsulates that subject nicely. On the one hand, there is the politician immobilized by the opinion of people who don’t want anything to change, on the other hand the demagogue who rises to power from people’s anger at their declining standard of living, and floating out there a third option to build a better world. Unfortunately, that better world cannot be built unless cloaked in secrecy, otherwise it too would be opposed.
Too often, this feels exactly how city building in America happens, or fails to happen. Any change to the city with an inclusive process is ground to a halt by public opposition no matter the public benefits the change would bring. It has become increasingly apparent that increased public input makes projects less ambitious and impactful, even when they do make it through to construction.
This is what makes Megalopolis such an interesting movie from an urban planner’s perspective. It tackles the biggest challenge in city building, public opposition to any change, by recasting a Robert Moses-like character from the villain to the hero. In essence, the movie is advocating for public works for the public benefit, regardless of public opposition. In some ways, this is already what places like California are doing with an ever greater reliance on by-right projects with ministerial approval.
However, in the end, the movie misses the mark on both the problem and the solution. The movie shows Caesar Catalina forging ahead with a broadly unpopular project. Projects that are broadly unpopular shouldn’t go forward, regardless of the public benefit they might seem to bring. But that’s not what we see happening in America. Too often, public works aren’t opposed by a majority of people, but a loud minority. The solution is not to forego public input, but to ensure that public input is representative of the community as a whole, and that projects that move forward are supported by a majority of the community. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t make for an interesting or dramatic movie.