Babylon
The director of La La Land re-visits Hollywood with a dizzying, episodic and stylish homage to the decadence of a bygone era.
It’s her party: Margot Robbie enchants Diego Calva
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And as audiences around the world flocked to the new picture houses, so fantasists and the dispossessed sought out the capital of broken dreams. In Christian lore, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon came to symbolize great luxury and corruption. And so the writer and filmmaker Kenneth Anger adopted the term for his seminal critique of Tinseltown, Hollywood Babylon, an inventory of outrageous scandal which was banned on its publication in 1965. For sure, Hollywood back in the 1920s was a carnival of the nouveau riche, excess and debauchery and Damien Chazelle’s bloated epic starts off as if Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! had trespassed on the set of Tinto Brass’s Caligula. Set to the soundtrack of a brass band, a coke-crazed starlet urinates on the distended belly of an overweight actor and the star attraction, an elephant, defecates like only an elephant can.
The writer-director Damien Chazelle, who has moved from the low-budget, critically acclaimed Whiplash (2014) to this $80m behemoth in the space of three films, has done what so many emerging prodigies do – that is, to earn the right to be outlandishly self-indulgent. Chazelle is an extraordinary talent and he fills the screen with extraordinary imagery, and in the process has unleashed a series of unforgettable scenes. If one thinks the elephant wins tusks down, there are so many more moments to follow. Ultimately, though, the film adds up to little more than a series of dazzling sequences, with no real narrative momentum.
Essentially, Babylon follows the progress of four characters. There’s the matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) who spends his days in an alcoholic haze and thinks it’s cute to speak in non-stop Italian (because he can). There’s the dynamic, self-assured would-be actress Nellie LaRoy (a sensational Margot Robbie) who exudes stardust and can cry on demand. There’s Manuel Torres (future star Diego Calva) a Mexican immigrant with a knack for achieving the impossible, who is desperate to share the American dream. And there’s Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a black trumpet player who acts as witness to the troubling times.
One thing we have to ask ourselves is whether or not Babylon is a love letter to Hollywood or a denunciation. There is one hallucinogenic waking vision – Chazelle’s own 2001 Star Gate sequence – which takes in everything from Un Chien Andalou and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Pather Panchali, Terminator 2 and Avatar. But Babylon is also a brutal condemnation of the industry’s exploitation of the innocent, where it was not uncommon for fatalities to litter film shoots. Many movies have covered the early days of Hollywood, from Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (1976) to the Taviani brothers' Good Morning, Babylon (1987), so essentially Chazelle is covering familiar ground, albeit with remarkable daring, drive and panache. To some it may come as an eye-opener, to others a re-run over old territory. His greatest touchstone is Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), to which he liberally pays homage, later revisiting scenes that we have already seen earlier in his own film. But whereas the latter was relentlessly entertaining, funny and touching, Chazelle’s version is a cynical, soulless beast, and often bit of a slog.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Tobey Maguire, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde, Cutty Cuthbert, Spike Jonze, Taylor Hill, Karen Bethzabe, Joe Dallesandro.
Dir Damien Chazelle, Pro Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe and Olivia Hamilton, Ex Pro Tobey Maguire, Screenplay Damien Chazelle, Ph Linus Sandgren, Pro Des Florencia Martin, Ed Tom Cross, Music Justin Hurwitz, Costumes Mary Zophres, Sound Ai-Ling Lee and Tobias Poppe, Dialect coaches Elizabeth Himelstein, Brian Foyster, Audrey LeCrone and Susanne Sulby.
Paramount Pictures/C2 Motion Picture Group/Marc Platt Productions/Wild Chickens Productions/Organism Pictures-Paramount Pictures.
189 mins. USA. 2022. US Rel: 23 December 2022. UK Rel: 20 January 2023. Cert. 18.
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