In an awards season awash with sentimental memoirs about the wholesome magic of the movies, most notably Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s symphonic recreation of pre-talkies Hollywood as a riotous carnival of debauchery initially feels like a welcome blast of operatically gaudy excess. With a starry ensemble cast led by Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, Babylon features fictional characters loosely based on real silent-movie figures, while the screenplay draws on sources as diverse as Singin’ In The Rain and Kenneth Anger’s notoriously salacious gossip anthology Hollywood Babylon.
After jazz-themed stories like Whiplash and La La Land, it makes sense that Chazelle should widen his focus to try and encompass the Jazz Age on a more panoramic scale. The result is a ravishing spectacle, full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying not much, lacking the emotional depth or socio-political context to justify its over-indulgent three-hours-plus runtime. Paramount are releasing Babylon in North America on December 23, with worldwide roll-out across January and February.
With this sprawling multi-character saga, Chazelle is clearly shooting for a kaleidoscopic Hollywood epic in the spirit of Paul Thomas Anderson or Robert Altman. That said, the most immediate parallel here is Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, particularly in the magnificent opening party sequence, which takes place in 1926 at a palatial Bel Air mansion perched atop rolling hills, a reminder of that fairly recent past when Los Angeles was a sleepy mid-sized city surrounded by desert. Filmed in a series of bravura swooping camera shots, this bacchanalian orgy features mountains of cocaine, graphic sex and kinky transgression, including a thinly veiled reworking of the sordid scandal that effectively ended the career of silent movie star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, despite him being acquitted in court for the rape and manslaughter of Virginia Rappe.
Chazelle uses this spectacular party scene to introduce all his main protagonists. Robbie pays Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow-style wild-child starlet from the wrong side of the New Jersey tracks, desperate for fame to fill the aching void left by her tragic but fuzzily explained family background. Pitt radiates maximum matinee-idol charm as Jack Conrad, a much-married playboy movie star modelled on John Gilbert. Jovan Adepo plays Sidney Palmer, an African-American jazz trumpeter with a burgeoning screen career, while Li Jun Li brings elegant androgyne chic as Lady Fay Zhu, a Chinese-American lesbian chanteuse partly based on Anna May Wong. But the nearest thing in Babylon to a sympathetic central narrator is Manny Torres (Diego Calva), an ambitious Mexican-American who rises from minor domestic fixer to major studio player.
Fired up by the whirling centrifugal energy of its opening sequence, Babylon blasts along in broadly comic mode for most of its boisterous, eventful second act. As Nellie, Manny and Sidney rise through the Hollywood ranks, the wild anarchy of the silent era gives way to the more corporate talkies era, with higher stakes and stricter moral restrictions on screen content. As the Roaring Twenties reach their delirious climax, Chazelle racks up a series of impressive grand-scale set-pieces, all swept along by Justin Hurwitz’s poundingly percussive hot-jazz score. This relentless, pummelling energy is initially exhilarating, but it eventually becomes slightly exhausting.
Never less than dazzling on a technical level, Babylon is an audio-visual banquet of delicious ingredients, from Linus Sandgren’s kinetic, balletic cinematography to Florencia Martin’s gorgeous retro production design. Performances are strong across the board, particularly from the broodingly handsome Calva and a high-voltage Robbie, who manages to inject real emotion into a cartoonish Manic Depressive Pixie Dream Girl role. The richly colourful supporting cast, including film-maker Spike Jonze as a pretentious German director and Jean Smart as an acerbic gossip columnist in the Hedda Hopper mould, is full of flavoursome fun.
Chazelle also deserves credit for acknowledging the contribution of non-white and queer figures to Hollywood’s origin story, peppering his screenplay with numerous examples of casual and overt racism. That said, these secondary characters are mostly mono-dimensional and tokenistic, their struggles relegated to the sidelines, while even the main protagonists lack any real psychological hinterland. When Babylon seeks to amuse us with outlandish scenes of Robbie wrestling a rattlesnake or projectile vomiting over high-society snobs, it hits the target. But when it aspires to make us care, it feels shallow and banal.
Babylon really comes off the rails in its final hour when Chazelle belatedly tries to get serious, showing us the steep Faustian price paid for all this unchecked decadence. A bizarre cameo by the film’s executive co-producer Tobey Maguire as a sickly, seedy gangster plunges Manny into a subterranean hellscape on the fringes of Hollywood, a surreal underground sex dungeon peopled by grotesque monsters and violent mobsters. Chazelle appears to be channelling David Lynch’s Blue Velvet here, but this jarring detour into shlocky horror never feels convincing on either a literal or metaphorical level. At this point Babylon risks becoming more like a Paul WS Anderson film than a Paul Thomas Anderson film, not a fate to wish on any director.
After his grandiose, novelistic opening, Chazelle seems to run out of steam, wrapping up Babylon with glib moralising and an unconvincing romantic subplot. As Nellie’s career buckles under the weight of her addictions, Jack faces a painful reckoning with his diminishing marquee power, and Manny is forced to leave Hollywood to save his own life. Several key characters are then killed off in perfunctory ways that feel more like contrived closure than dramatic necessity. A coda sequence, set in 1952, further hammers home the film’s Singin’ In The Rain parallels as part of an audaciously self-flattering montage that includes Méliès and Bergman, Kubrick and Godard, The Wizard of Oz and Avatar.
Chazelle has spent three hours building up to this Big Statement, only to deliver a hubristic and condescending sermon about cinema’s heart-warming, life-affirming importance to the common man. Having initially pitched itself as a bittersweet critique of amoral Hollywood excess, Babylon ends up as a trite love letter to the magic of the movies, essentially the same facile message as La La Land splashed across a much bigger canvas. What a swell party this is, but Chazelle should have ended it just as the cocaine-fuelled debauchery peaked rather than making us stick around for the long, dreary, self-indulgent hangover.
Director, screenwriter: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Olivia Wilde
Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton
Cinematography: Linus Sandgren
Editing: Tom Cross
Production design: Florencia Martin
Costume design: Mary Zophres
Music: Justin Hurwitz
Production companies: C2 Motion Picture Group (US), Marc Platt Productions (US), Wild Chickens (US), Organism Pictures (US)
In English
189 minutes
