"Babylon" - Film Review
Like La La Land before it, Damien Chazelle puts Hollywood at the forefront of his latest film, Babylon. It’s an audacious, sprawling three-hour ode to cinema and Hollywood during the beginning of its supposed Golden Age. Babylon begins on the precipice of the “talkies,” the fundamental shift in filmmaking from a silent artform to something more akin to what we now know as a movie. The film’s focus is on two dreamers, Nellie (Margot Robbie) and Manuel (Diego Calva), who are desperate to become involved in movie-making. Their quest for fame and fortune introduces them to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent film star, and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), two regulars in the Los Angeles party scene.
Babylon is by far the most ambitious of all Chazelle’s movies. It takes a certain amount of confidence to ask for three hours of a viewer’s time and to believe that the story you’re telling is deserving of that time. If La La Land was Chazelle’s sun-drenched love letter to the city of Los Angeles, then Babylon is its cynical sibling. While Chazelle does at times gleefully linger in the romantic process of filmmaking by showing euphoric scenes of movie magic coming to life, there’s something far darker at play within Babylon.
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The party scenes that are heavily featured in the trailers are rambunctious sex blowouts, but act more as set dressing than anything else. The film’s main characters don’t partake in anything other than copious amounts of cocaine at these parties, which creates a feeling of disconnect. Chazelle wants to show that Hollywood wasn’t all glitz and glamor, but doesn’t want to dig too deeply into that world. For all Babylon’s opulence and splendor, its darkness has a superficial quality to it. It’s as if the film is afraid to take a genuine look at the abuses and mistreatment of minorities that took place in order to build the behemoth that is the film industry as we know it now.
The film’s final sequence will surely be a hot topic in the coming weeks. It is simultaneously unexpected, based on everything that has come before it, and the most obvious ending for Babylon. It’s almost as though Chazelle himself is unsure how he feels about the business and the experience of working in Hollywood. It’s painfully clear that he adores the history and the science that combine to create the art of film, but there’s anger in his finale. It’s a rumination on whether his art, or any art for that matter, is worthwhile. Chazelle seems to net out on the side of adoration more than damnation, but his central thesis lacks cohesion.
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It’s hard not to compare Babylon and La La Land, given their similar subject matter and Chazelle’s choice to reuse and reference La La Land’s score in Babylon. Where La La Land felt as though Chazelle had dotted the i's and crossed the t's, Babylon is far looser. Chazelle’s now-signature rhythmic editing comes out in full force, but its magic loses its sheen as Babylon continues. This fast-paced style of editing is forcibly shoehorned into the film’s quieter moments, and this minimizes their impact, even though they are some of the strongest scenes. Babylon oscillates so rapidly between cacophony and dead silence, that it’s like the film forgot that life also exists in the in-between.
Robbie is the film’s standout, and this role will likely earn her yet another rightfully deserved Oscar nomination. The scene that includes her character’s first day on a film set is pure star power. Like her character, there’s something magnetic about Robbie’s presence that makes her an effortless lead to follow. Similarly, Adepo and Li command the scenes they’re in, but they are barely treated as more than tertiary characters. Instead of giving a significant amount of screentime to two people who represent marginalized groups trying to make it in Hollywood in the 1920s and ’30s, Babylon places far too much of its focus on an aging white guy who cannot figure out how to catch up to the fast-changing world.
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And that brings us to Pitt. He’s essentially playing himself, but rocketed back in time. He’s the suave movie star who once exuded glitz and glam. The only problem is that Pitt has now lost his sheen. His character is supposed to be unable to handle the transition from silent film to talkies, which causes a noticeable decline in his acting talents, but his “bad” performance is indistinguishable from his “good” one. Even when Pitt is simply existing, the audience can see him overthinking his next line or his next movement. Compared to the effortless acting from Robbie, Li, and Adepo, Pitt is uncomfortably stiff.
Babylon is pure excess, to its own detriment. Chazelle became so lost in frolicking in the playground of the 1920s Hollywood he’s created that he forgot to tie it all together into something meaningful.
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