SONNY BUNCH: Megalopolis Review.

I honestly have a hard time choosing which of the bonkers performances I most enjoyed. [Adam] Driver has made something of a career out of delivering bonkers performances for aging auteurs: as a Sancho Panza stand-in for Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s decades-in-the-works dream project. Aubrey Plaza’s depiction of Wow Platinum is weirdly timely, given that the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t land Catilina, she instead opts for his insanely wealthy uncle, Crassus, whom Jon Voight plays for an hour with the sort of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a masticating lunatic on that one episode of Seinfeld.

Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily make the case that it’s a fairly straightforwardly fascist tale about the needs of a brilliant leader to guide the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck in which they wallow and into a brighter future, democracy be damned. I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom deliver performances at roughly 110 percent of their required wattage.

Megalopolis isn’t a good movie, precisely—I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels as both standard storytelling and airy metaphor—but I’m glad it exists and happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve consumed over the years helped in some small way to will this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.

Heh, indeed. It’s been a very long time since a movie has come along with such divisive reviews. QED:

● The New Yorker: “Megalopolis” Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Artistic Rejuvenation.

● SFGate (One of Coppola’s hometown newspapers): ‘Megalopolis’ is a piece of s—t.