Babylon: A Review - Damien Chazelle's Reach Exceeds His Grasp in Bloated Babylon
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A messy misfire of a movie that is not worth seeing in the theater but if you’re interested check it out when it hits streaming.
“BABYLON WILL BE LIKE SODOM AND GOMORRAH WHEN GOD OVERTHREW THEM. IT WILL NEVER BE INHABITED OR LIVED IN FOR GENERATIONS.” ISAIAH 13:19
I readily admit that I am a fan of director Damien Chazelle.
Chazelle’s first feature, Whiplash, which I recently re-watched, was a powerful announcement of the director’s arrival. La La Land, Chazelle’s second film, was an Oscar-winning blockbuster but also a subtle yet masterful movie that was considerably deeper than many understood. Chazelle’s third feature, the over-looked and undervalued First Man, was a brilliant and profound piece of cinema.
Now the Oscar-winning writer/director Chazelle is back with his newest film, the highly anticipated Babylon, starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.
With my Chazelle fandom as context, I’m sorry to have to report that Babylon, a three-hour and nine-minute, sprawling extravaganza, simply doesn’t work. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either.
Babylon chronicles a bevy of characters in the decadent and debauched old Hollywood of the late 1920’s as they navigate the industry’s transition from silent movies to talkies.
Even that description of the plot gives away the game as the film’s narrative is decidedly derivative. Other current filmmakers have made much better films on similar topics, be it P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights – which dramatized the porn industry’s drug-fueled move from film to digital, or even Quinten Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – which was about Hollywood’s transition from the studio system to the new Hollywood of the 1970’s.
Chazelle makes multiple references to both Boogie Nights and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so much so that it seems to be an homage to those movies (it’s also an homage to Singing in the Rain and its coda seems to pay tribute to Kubrick’s 2001), but that doesn’t make his story any more original or compelling.
For example, just the casting of Pitt and Robbie – who both stared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has an air of homage to it. But when Robbie’s character sits in a movie theater and unleashes a million-watt smile when she hears the audience respond to her performance on-screen – which is an almost identical scene from when she played Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it feels less like homage and more like imitation.
GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR
The first thirty minutes of Babylon are an extended, pre-title card sequence that revolves around a massive party at a Hollywood producer’s home in very rural Bel Air.
This party is meant to highlight the debauchery of both the roaring twenties and Hollywood at its height, but Chazelle, unlike say P.T. Anderson, is incapable of adequately portraying the grime and grit under the glitz and glamour.
The party, which features a bevy of bodily fluids – including a woman pissing on a guy to satiate his perversion and a midget with a fake giant cock ejaculating on a crowd (not to mention the pre-party close-up of an elephant’s asshole which then shits profusely on some poor bastard), and a cavalcade of cocaine use, as well as an ample supply of nudity, feels incongruously sterile.
Chazelle’s use of bodily fluids in the film (later on there’s a tsunami of vomit too) are cheap substitutes for realism, most notably the blood and guts of emotional realism, in a story that is never able to fully form truly human, multi-dimensional characters.
The debauched party scene is so cold, controlled and antiseptic that it comes across as a virginal, pre-pubescent boy’s naïve beliefs about what sex and drugs are like. Chazelle is that virginal, pre-pubescent boy.
Once the party ends and the title card presents itself, the story finally begins. The main characters are Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the biggest silent movie star of the moment, Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow-esque “it” girl who gets her big break and makes the most of it, and Manny Torres (Diego Calves), a Mexican film assistant who loves movies and works his way up the Hollywood ladder by dealing with incorrigibles like Conrad and LaRoy.
There are two other semi-lead characters, jazz trumpeter Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and cabaret singer/actress Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). Neither Sydney nor Lady Fay are fleshed out to any satisfactory degree, and their presence in the film feels more like a rather ham-handed attempt to appease the diversity gods rather than to advance the story. It is no fault of the actors, but one can’t help but think that if these two characters were cut, and the runtime of the movie was subsequently trimmed by thirty minutes or so, we’d all be better off.
The first act of the film was my least favorite part, but to its credit it does get incrementally better from there, but unfortunately it never soars.
The third act is much more blatantly symbolic than the previous acts, such as when Manny descends into a near literal hell that becomes more and more disgusting and denigrating with every circle, and that approach resonated with me, which was a contrast to the first half of the film.
ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT
Pitt’s acting mirrors the film’s failings and successes. In the first two-thirds of the movie, Pitt gives a rather shallow, smirky and one-note Pitt-ian performance. He’s Brad Pitt, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, playing a character that is one of the biggest movie stars in the world…get it? But in the third act, Pitt eschews his empty movie star magnetism for a melancholy that actually becomes quite moving.
Margot Robbie is a luminously beautiful women, and she’s certainly ambitious – not unlike her character Nellie LaRoy, but there is something off about her in every performance she gives (I also just saw her in the most recent David O. Russell film Amsterdam and oh dear…but that is a discussion for another day). Whether it’s her over-reliance on a sort of old-timey New Yawk accent or what, I can’t quite figure just yet, but she always appears to be “acting” and everything she does feels mechanical and manufactured.
In Babylon Robbie works her ass off, of that there is no doubt, but it never coalesces into anything captivating. There’s lots of over-the-top yelling and gyrating and manic pixie dream girl mania and hysteria, but never anything that ever feels genuine or grounded.
Diego Calva is a pleasing screen presence, but his character Manny is under-written, as is his love story, and he never really gets his hands wrapped around this whole unwieldy thing to find its sweet spot.
As for the rest of the cast, it’s a mixed bag or worse. For instance, Jean Smart is overall pretty dreadful as a gossip columnist, but she does give a very effective monologue late in the movie that works quite well.
Eric Roberts plays Nellie’s dad and is utterly atrocious.
Lukas Haas plays Conrad’s producer and best friend and it’s an awkward and totally forgettable piece of work.
Tobey Maguire plays a crazy mob boss in a scene that is very, very similar to the “Sister Christian” scene from Boogie Nights, except this time there’s no firecrackers but instead a bodyguard who spits at random intervals. The scene could’ve been great I suppose, but just never comes together, and Maguire’s character is a freaky sideshow lacking gravitas.
The biggest issue with the acting is the same issue with the movie, it’s all light and no heat. There’s lots of yelling but nobody says anything.
It must be said that Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is at times glorious (even when seen through a sub-par projector which unfortunately is the case in most theaters nowadays), and the music and score by Justin Hurwitz (who won an Academy Award for the music in La La Land) are terrific.
It’s somewhat intriguing that Babylon is either a companion piece to La La Land or its outright prequel. Chazelle makes this fact pretty clear by repeatedly using an integral piece of Hurwitz’s music from La La Land as a cornerstone of Babylon.
The ethereal La La Land - the dream of Hollywood, contrasted with the nightmare of Babylon, is an intriguing formula, if only Babylon could hold up its end of the bargain.
A MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF AN ERA, MADE AT THE END OF AN ERA
I concede that making a movie about the impact of technology on the movie business and how Hollywood ruthlessly makes difficult transitions, is insightful in this era where streaming moves the earth beneath Hollywood’s feet and, much to my chagrin, auteur movies - like Babylon, face the real possibility of extinction. I also admit that as a fan of Damien Chazelle and also due to the evolution/devolution of the film business which seriously threatens to end the auteur era which I love so much, there’s a part of me that desperately wants to adore Babylon and declare that making a decidedly decadent movie about Hollywood decadence is in fact clever if not ingenious, but if I’m being honest, I have to say it’s actually pretty trite.
Ultimately, I wanted Babylon to be great and to my disappointment it wasn’t even good, instead it’s a messy misfire of a movie that’s an empty imitation of other more worthy films. I cannot recommend seeing Babylon in the theatre, but if you really want to see it wait until it hits a streaming service, that way the long run time and derivative drama will be more digestible, if not necessarily palatable.
©2023