BABYLON Review
Damien Chazelle’s tribute to Old Hollywood is absolutely nuts in the best possibly way.
There’s always a bit of a buzz in the air whenever filmmaker Damien Chazelle delivers a new movie. At least for me, that’s because he’s one of the few filmmakers who has directed two of my #1 movies with “Whiplash” and “La La Land.” Thusly, I may be suggesting that I’m always going to give him the benefit of the doubt rather than believing any early hype or criticism.
Maybe you know a little about Babylon, like the fact that it’s set in old Hollywood, mainly between 1926 to 1932, at a time when motion pictures were exploding and silent movies were succumbing to the talkies.
Manuel Torres (Diego Calva) is a Mexican immigrant who does odd jobs for a rich studio exec, but dreams of working at the studio himself. When we meet “Manny,” he has been commissioned to bring a live elephant to a debaucherous mansion party where everyone is having just way too much fun with sex, drugs and alcohol flowing freely. There, Manny first encounters the “wild child” Nellie de Roy (Margot Robbie), a partying Jersey girl who shares his dreams of making it big in the burgeoning Hollywood system. Manny is immediately smitten with Nellie, but she gets her big break quicker than he does and is immediately thrust into a silent movie, a massive epic for the studio Kinoscope that is absolute chaos; she impresses the big wigs enough to get a contract with Kinoscope. The third part of the equation is Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, the studio’s superstar male lead, who Manny also meets and quickly gets a job as his aide/assistant.
There are other important players in the story like Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer, a trumpet-playing bandleader who Manny gives a boost to get him into pictures, and Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu, a lesbian dragon lady whose career Manny tanks to keep her away from Nellie. There are plenty of others in this enormous ensemble that pop in and out of the main trio’s lives, including Jeff Garlin as studio head Don Wallach, Jean Smart as tabloid journalist Elinor St. John, Lukas Haas as Jack’s agent and best friend George, and many more. In a rare appearance in a studio movie, Eric Roberts plays Nellie’s father, who immediately tries to capitalize on her growing fame to try to bend the ear of Hollywood luminaries, including Jack.
Make no mistake that while Babylon has many dramatic moments, it is a comedy at heart with Chazelle’s sense of humor fully on display even if it’s as simple as putting Robbie into scenes with Samara Weaving, who has been mercilessly compared to her Aussie countrymate. In their scenes together, Weaving plays the studio’s hot star who is shown up by Robbie’s newcomer. There’s another scene where Robbie seems to be recreating a moment from Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, again seemingly a clever nod to her former role as Sharon Tate. Tobey Maguire shows up in the last act when Chazelle goes full-on Boogie Nights, but I especially loved the hilarious P.J. Byrne being given a chance to deliver one of the movie’s funniest moments, as we see Nellie struggling with the transition to talking pictures.
There are aspects of the humor that goes full-on low-brow, and because of that, the movie has as much in common with Triangle of Sadness or even some of Monty Python’s more scatological work. Maybe it’s done to shock the viewer, but it adds to the sense that Chazelle is not completely trying to glamorize old Hollywood, as some might suspect.
Watching Babylon, it’s also hard not to think of the work of Baz Luhrmann, who has frequently created these crazy party scenes on screen, but also tends to throw everything at the viewer in the first 20 minutes just to make sure they’re up for a different cinematic experience. There are also a few things in Babylon that veer from memorable moments from the trailers, which can be almost distracting at times.
Even so, the movie just looks fantastic, a combination of the work done by DP Linus Sandgren, as well as the production and costume design teams, but the real stand-out is the editing by Oscar-winner Tom Cross, who Chazelle is working with for the fourth time. Watching Babylon’s frenetic pacing, it’s obvious what an important role Cross plays in Chazelle’s vision, being able to handle the amount of characters and sheer mayhem (both in foreground and background) in a way that makes sure that the most important moments stand out.
Chazelle clearly has a lot to say about the early days of Hollywood, including its treatment of minorities, but some of that tends to get lost in the shuffle of some of the movie’s more insane moments. (The ending is going to be quite divisive, for sure, and may generate more head scratching than anything else.)
That said, if Paul Thomas Anderson made this exact same movie, critics and others would be falling over each other to heap praise on it and claim it to be a masterpiece. In some ways, Babylon is like that Bradley Cooper section of Licorice Pizza but going at that piece for almost its entire 3-hour running time. Babylon is very much a comedy but one with really deep moments that does an effective job showing how fame and acclaim can be fleeting even once one gets their lucky break in Hollywood.
Rating: 8/10