W. T. F?
So many thoughts.
BAbylon
Director: Damien Chazelle • Writer: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Diego Calva, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo, Olivia Hamilton, Max Minghella, Eric Roberts, Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, Flea
USA • 3hrs 9mins
Opens Hong Kong February 2 • III
Grade: C-
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon has no real connection to gay, agitating, writer and avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s lascivious book Hollywood Babylon. If only it did. It would probably be more engaging. As it stands, Babylon is an excessive piece of self-indulgent rip-offery that suggests absolutely nothing new about ambition, morality, art and identity. It’s a poison pen love letter, if there’s such a thing, that literally and figuratively shits (inside of maybe five minutes) on the movies, on screen craft, on filmmakers, and on the audience that prances around playing at profundity. If a bigger bullshit movie comes out this year – yes, I know it’s February – I’ll be surprised.
Chazelle was dubbed the industry’s boy genius back in 2014 when Whiplash hit, and then a darling following La La Land, which is still a musical only for people who don’t like/have never seen a musical, and is one of the most egregious re-imaginings of jazz ever put to film. He seemed to hit his stride with an exploration of under-the-radar obsession and the emotional cost of that in First Man, the film where he turned a corner by demonstrating subtle maturity and restraint. Alas, he’s stepped off that path and doubled down on derivative, fluidic, numbing excess. Short version: Babylon is about a group of movie lovers trying to break into the business during the roaring, decadent, amoral 1920s – either that or stay on top of it. Technological and psychoactive substances will prove to be their undoing. Only some will survive. Boogie Nights (among others) already told this story, and told it better.
It doesn’t even look that great
The more you know about Hollywood’s industrial history – the emergence of the nickelodeons, the 1930 Hays Code that killed titillation (early Hollywood was super-horny), the rise of talkies and how they ended careers, the power of the gossip rags, the marginalised POCs and LGBTQ+ artists that had more of an impact than anyone cares to remember – the more you’ll get from Babylon. At the very least you’ll have fun playing Spot the Reference: to silent film star John Gilbert who famously crashed and burned when sound arrived, to hedonistic rapist Fatty Arbuckle, to power moguls that built MGM and Warner, to trailblazing LGBTQ+ icons Dorothy Arzner and Anna May Wong, musician Curtis Mosby (allegedly) and early transplants from abroad, like Ramon Novarro and Erich von Stroheim.
Diego Calva (Narcos: Mexico) is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant with Hollywood aspirations, if only he can get people to see his as something other than a waiter. His lucky break comes when he’s charged with getting an elephant to a hedonistic, drug-fuelled orgy at the home of an executive. After being shit on, quite literally, Manny makes it to the party and meets the Clara Bow-ish sex kitten Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie, never as un-ingratiating as she is here), who’s “Already a star” in her OTT trashy New Jersey way. All the major players are at this party. Supernova Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) arrives without his fourth wife, who gets pissed off at him and leaves him in the driveway; celebrity chronicler Elinor St John (Jean Smart in a amalgam of several prominent gossip columnists from the time) is there looking for a scoop; title writer and cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (Wu Assassins’ Li Jun Li) is there to mess with gender and be… Asian? Trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo, HBO’s Watchmen) is… Black? This is about the depth of character Chazelle gives the ensemble. If he’s trying to address the erasure of marginalised early contributors to Hollywood’s growth this half-assed lip service isn’t going to work. This is a collection of underwritten archetypes that could easily be edited out; no one would know they’re gone. I would say that’s an ironic commentary but the script isn’t smart enough for that.
After the in your face opening salvo, Babylon settles into bloated fairy tale mode, intent on punishing us as well as the characters, first but subjecting them to all manner of depravity and humiliation and then by sending them down narrative roads we’ve seen a million times. The minute Nellie gets blasted on the cocaine buffet and does her aggressively modern shimmy – the period setting laced with contemporary accents says jack shit about these people or their circumstances – you know she’s going to wind up back in a Jersey gutter. When Elinor and Jack have a heart-to-heart about what he sees as a hit piece on his fading glory, it confirms our suspicions that Jack’s high octane idol days are unsustainable. Sidney remains Black.
The film’s only true high points are the hilariously frantic day on set at the studio Kinoscope, where Jack has gotten Manny a job. Spike Jonze’s turn as a labour-busting German director who can’t “lose the light!” anchors one of two inspired sequences, the other being Nellie’s first sound performance, that exploit Chazelle’s regular DOP Linus Sandgren’s (No Time to Die) graceful camera and editor Tom Cross’s increasingly manic visual storytelling. Even Florencia Martin’s (Blonde, Licorice Pizza) production design just seems gaudy after a point. Overstuffed and contrarily as hollow as a Kardashian, it takes Babylon over three hours to say a fraction of what Steven Spielberg said in about three minutes in a key passage of The Fabelmans. And, hoh, man, then it ends with a reference to Singin’ in the Rain – another, much better movie Chazelle rips off that I’d rather be watching – and what could be the most boneheaded montage of the year. Yeah. I know. It’s February. — DEK