Babylon

 Hello, everyone! Happy belated New Year! I hope you guys had a good Christmas, watched some good classics, and ate a lot. Now that the holiday hubbub is over and things are slowing down, I thought I’d put out another review, this time of a film that’s been on my mind since my brother and I saw it on Christmas day.

 

We’re taking a look at Damien Chazelle’s fourth flick, Babylon.

 

We open on the sun-scorched hills of 1926 Los Angeles as our lead Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is transporting an elephant to a party held at his employer’s – the fictional Kinoscope Studios - mansion. The scene climaxes when Manny and his associates are trying to push it up a hill, during which the incontinent pachyderm defecates all over them. And it’s not just a quick cutaway gag; we as the audience are the entire affair in fascinatingly grotesque detail as DP Linus Sandgren’s beautiful 35 mm cinematography lingers on the moment.

 

And as if that were not enough, we transition to the party itself, which looks like something out of both Jordan Belfort and Jay Gatsby’s wildest dreams. Attendees are having sex all over the place, there’s booze a-flowing, the mansion has a private stash of cocaine in which Manny and burgeoning starlet Nellie Laroy (Margot Robbie, essentially doing her Harley Quinn schtick) indulge as they talk about their dreams of being in the film industry. There’s some wild jazz music composed by Chazelle mainstay Justin Hurwitz, performed by a band led by Jovan Adepo (late of Fences and HBO’s Watchmen), a fabulous cabaret performance by Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), and the introduction of Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, an alcoholic John Gilbert-inspired silent star whose love life is a mess.

 

Just from that opening half hour alone, I thought we were in for a manic, zany treat. And for the following hour, we certainly are as the next morning, we are transported to a Kinoscope lot, where multiple silent films of varying genre are being shot, and are treated to a chaotic day on set through the eyes of both Manny, whom Jack has taken under his wing as a PA, and Nellie, who has taken the place of an actress who OD’d at the previous night’s party. There’s chaos galore, aided in part by Tom Cross’s fast editing that made Whiplash and La La Land such delights, and a wonderfully crazed performance by Spike Jonze as manic German director Otto van Strassberg. There’s even a nice touch of gallows humor as one actor is actually killed during a battle scene, and everybody acts like it ain’t no big thing. All of this is craziness is capped by a tense sequence where Manny is tasked with picking up an extra camera and only manages to get there just before magic hour is over and done with. They get the shot, everyone cheers, and it’s onto the next day.

 

Let me tell you, what I just described is perhaps some of the best filmmaking I’ve seen all year. Not only is it a nice return to the energized pace of Chazelle’s earlier work – especially after the slow and frankly boring First Man – but it does wonders in tearing down the prim and proper veneer of silent cinema, exposing it for the wild, crazy, and sex-crazed period that it actually was. Also, anyone who has ever participated in filmmaking will relate to the hurry-up-and-wait nature of the Kinoscope scene, as Manny’s errand to get the camera brings everything to a grinding halt, and all anyone can do is sit around, wait, and in Jack’s case, drink like a sailor…

 

Unfortunately, after this sequence, the whole film takes something of a nosedive and gets a full-on identity crisis, smashing together the plots of Singing in the Rain and A Star is Born, as Manny rises through the ranks to become a studio executive, Nellie becomes the new “it” girl of Kinoscope, while Jack’s career faces the encroaching cloud of irrelevance as films transition to sound. Then there’s a weird third act tangent where Manny is invited by gangster James McKay (a wonderfully odd Tobey Maguire) to tour L.A.’s underground world of oddities that feels like it’s happening in a completely unrelated David Lynch project. All of this unfocused chaos is capped off by an indulgent, WTF, and pretentious ending that’s supposed to play out like a glorious love letter to cinema, but feels more like something a first-year film student put together to make it look like his film “meant something.”

 

So, yeah, as you can tell, Babylon is…a lot. It starts off strong and memorable, but once it gets going, it loses all sense of direction and doesn’t know if it wants to be a leering look at the seedier and sexier side of early Hollywood or a hagiographic gaze of its mythologized bygone glory. Now don’t get me wrong, there are bits of greatness in here, particularly a scene where Sidney is forced to put on blackface so his skin tone matches the rest of his band and the film can therefore play better in the South, but is immediately undercut as he disappears from the rest of the movie until the very end (and even before then, he kinda got the short end of the stick in terms of character development). As a matter of fact, I’m given to wonder if the rest of the film were just about Sidney, Lady Fay Zhu, and Manny, while Nellie and Jack just served as side characters.

 

And yet, I still can’t help but recommend this film, even while acknowledging that it doesn’t really work at the end of the day. Because the chaos and rough-around-the-edges nature of the whole affair is something to behold…just be prepared to doze off as it goes along.