Babylon

2022's three hour plus long BABYLON is more or less what I expected: considerable ambition, far beyond the grasp of its filmmaker.  Writer/director Damien Chazelle dreams big but has yet to mount the masterpiece he thinks he's creating.  I felt the same way about LA LA LAND, his 2016 musical.  A similar seeming lack of preparation (apparently Paul Schrader agrees) and skill stymied that film's success, as well as a particularly shallow take on the genre.  Chazelle here again comes off like a fifteen year old who was given a large budget to realize his fantasies, which this time are based on real life show folk and their bad behavior.  The film, which recalls Hollywood in the late '20s and early '30s, suffers a Wikipedia level analysis, with hollow attempts at wringing emotions to match.   Another cartoonish parade of stress and anxiety (kinda like WHIPLASH, which I enjoyed) - to say nothing of rank amateurism. 

 

Chazelle repeatedly mistakes a fever pitch for energy.  He shamelessly copies the kinetic styles (whip pans and such) of Scorsese, Tarantino, and especially Paul Thomas Anderson.  There were so many reminders of the latter's BOOGIE NIGHTS I was beginning to wonder if BABYLON was an homage to him as well.  The director gives the film a mostly frantic pace, with the occasional pause for a decent scene.  Then we get a litany of absurd and even gross moments.  This is literally a piss, shit, blood, sweat, and vomit saturated movie, one eager to show orgies yet somehow feels buttoned down at the same time.  We merely gaze at and push through a sea of drunken, drugged, and copulating revelers, rather than feel like true, uncomfortable observers (as we did with Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT, a problematic film in its own right).  As if our master of ceremonies is actually a scared fanboy who doesn't know how to deal with the material, try as he might.

Our main players are Manny (Diego Calva), an Hispanic immigrant toiling in the fringes of Hollywood who dreams of being on a movie set, Nellie (Margot Robbie), a Jersey girl with enough confidence and brio (and dumb luck) to become an overnight sensation, and Jack (Brad Pitt), a leading man who is about to learn the sad truth about movie star longevity.  Each will suffer the transition of silent pictures to talkies and general Los Angeles toxicity.  A both memorable and cringeworthy sequence puts Nellie through multiple takes during a shoot as she struggles with hitting her mark and managing her voice, perhaps deemed too high pitched for New Hollywood.  In typical over-the-top Chazelle fashion, we get a relentlessly screaming assistant director and a director of photographer who dies from heat exhaustion because air conditioners make too much noise.   Damien Chazelle thinks he's being stark here, as he does when he shows others dying on movie sets.  It was just so primitive and barbaric back then, eh Damien? 

The actors, which also include a well cast Jean Smart as a gossip columnist (her late discussion with Pitt's character is far and away the best part of this movie), are fine.  Calva has a future, I think.  Robbie, whose hair styles reminded me of Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1980s,  has some good moments, but the screenplay lets her down over and over, supplying Big Scenes that are mere spectacle when they could've made a salient point and simply moved on.  Like the rattlesnake scene.  Or worse, the party scene (which is bathed in pious, heavy handed 21st century scolding), where Nellie vainly tries to pass herself off as refined.  Pitt effortlessly embodies his character, though you might argue he's just doing his usual shtick.  The emotions we are supposed to feel for them, and Sidney (Jovan Adepo) a black jazz trumpeter (and music fan Chazelle again indulges near pornographic trumpet shots) who gets his chance in movies, just don't translate. 

By the time Tobey Maguire (who also produced) shows up, the movie really jumps the shark, with a sequence that was so howlingly bad I was in disbelief. 

But I wasn't surprised, honestly.  BABYLON had doom written all over it.  Chazelle has not matured as a writer or director.  He seeks to damn and embrace Hollywood, and fails on both counts. Was this movie supposed to be a fable?  I was often embarrassed, though the finale - a montage of movie clips that was intended as some sort of eleventh hour Tinseltown adulation - was the icing on this rotten cake.  Truly wrongheaded and squirm inducing.  To say nothing of anachronistic and even sycophantic.