Parents' Guide to Megalopolis

Many moviegoers won't quite know what to make of this dense, intellectual, visionary artwork by octogenarian Francis Ford Coppola, but others will find it revitalizing, transporting, and astonishing. A project that Coppola had cooking in some fashion for decades, Megalopolis is without a doubt his most ambitious project since his 1970s heyday, though it does recall visual elements of movies like Rumble Fish and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Megalopolis is packed with history and literature and a lifetime of knowledge, championing the ideas that human beings have more in common than we don't and that, with real communication, we can build a better tomorrow. The movie goes for huge, outsized imagery, evoking the innovative filmmakers that Coppola has admired over the years, from Federico Fellini, Michael Powell, and Emeric Pressburger to Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick. It even evokes king-sized silent-era classics like Abel Gance's 1927 Napoleon, which Coppola helped restore and re-release in 1980.

Yet there's thought behind every image. If a character sits behind a desk that seems to be sinking into the floor, it's because he's overwhelmed and uncertain of what to do next. If characters stand on a giant clock, it's to suggest that time is pressing. And this isn't just empty beauty. Coppola has sometimes had trouble conveying emotion in his more technologically advanced movies, but that's not a problem here; we can feel the passion and rage flowing between the characters. That said, Megalopolis is sometimes opaque, shooting off in so many directions that it might feel like tentacles of excess. It will certainly try some viewers' patience. Yet history is on Coppola's side. Visionaries usually tend to baffle their audiences in the moment (as was the case with Apocalypse Now), but their courage to stick to their convictions eventually wins out—perhaps several years and several viewings down the road. Megalopolis is a film that may be discussed and appreciated long after other popular movies are forgotten.