Margot Robbie
“BABYLON” My rating: B (In theaters)
188 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Babylon” is filmmaker Damien Chazelle’s recreation of Hollywood in the last days of silent movies and the dawn of the sound era.
It is a riot of excess and ambition, a trip to a La La Land where Prohibition-era parties devolve into Roman-style orgies, where an elephant erupts in a diarrhea gusher and a beautiful woman projectile vomits on a rich man’s priceless carpet.
With nearly a dozen major characters whose careers are tracked over a raucous decade, the film has a running time of more than three hours and is packed with mind-blowing set pieces, some of which work on the viewer’s sensibilities like a dose of LSD.
It is simultaneously too much and just right, though as it enters its third hour you might wish for something resembling an actual plot.
At its core, “Babylon” is a tale of unrequited love. Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a Mexican kid who serves as a fixer for a Hollywood bigwig. On one memorable night of bacchanalian excess circa 1926 he makes the acquaintance of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a beautiful substance-fuelled party girl from the poor side of town.
These two outsiders are on parallel tracks to fame and fortune, Manny as a studio exec who excels at cleaning up messes, and Nellie as a steaming hot star whose off-the-charts sex appeal is matched only by her effortless acting (in one memorable scene she asks her director if she should produce a tear with her left eye or her right one).
Manny — essentially a sweet guy despite the dark side of his employment — is doomed to worship Nellie from afar. She’s too in love with her vices (drink, drugs, gambling, sex) to notice his adoration, though Manny’s the guy she turns to whenever she gets in over her head.
Meanwhile everywhere you look in this film there’s a colorful character shouldering his/her way into our awareness.
Foremost among them is Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad, a Hollywood leading man in the Douglas Fairbanks/Errol Flynn mold who remains charming and erudite even when plastered…which is most of the time. He becomes young Manny’s mentor and our favorite on-screen presence, a wildly attractive bon vivant with an undercurrent of resigned self-awareness and a roster of ex-wives.
Brad Pitt
We get a Hedda Hopper-ish gossip columnist (Jean Smart), a black jazzman (Jovan Adepo) who finds limited fame a not a little racism starring in musical shorts, a Chinese actress (Li Jun Li) who exudes exotic other-ness, a creep called The Count (Rory Scovel) who seems to provide all Hollywood with drugs and an even creepier gambler (Tobey Maguire) who takes us subterranean slumming in a segment right out of Dante.
Interspersed with Chazelle’s fictional characters are real-world figures like Irving Thalberg and William Randolph Hearst.
“Babylon” is roughly divided between the movie-making segments (including a fascinating look at the maddening unreliability of early sound technology) and behind-the-scenes cavorting.
In many ways the film is scrupulously realistic, yet it’s overflowing with fantastic elements, not least of which is a musical score more redolent of the boppin’ late ’40s than the 1920’s.
There are a few laugh-out-loud moments (many provided by Pitt), but the overriding tone is one of seen-it-all cynicism. Chazelle (“Whiplash,” “La La Land,” “First Man”) clearly is fascinated by the early history of the movies, but he draws the line at sentimentality.
At a certain point “Babylon” becomes a victim of its own diminishing returns. For all its eye and ear candy and its insider’s dissection of the Hollywood machine, and despite some really fine performances the film remains emotionally neutral. We may be diverted by these characters, but we’re not moved by them; their downfalls seem less tragic than a case of just desserts.
It’s probably fitting that a film depicting a world without morals should itself lack a moral. Still, in the final analysis we’re left feeling a bit empty.
Entertained, but empty.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 