Babylon

Babylon is the latest from director Chazelle, who is most well-known for La La Land and Whiplash. It’s currently one of the bigger films of note with 3 Oscars nominations for production design, music, and costume.

Set in Hollywood during the 1920s in the age of silent cinema. Babylon follows Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) an actor at the height of his career, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) an aspiring actress with a gambling problem who shoots to fame, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), an odd job man also trying to work in the film industry who falls in love with LaRoy, and Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) a journalist through whom the film documents the transition of Hollywood.

This film has understandably divided audiences given the marketing suggested a Gatsby meets Wolf of Wall Street film, and while there are certainly themes of this, it also plays with themes of horror and some frankly disgusting scenes to the detriment of the film and my senses. It culminates in a final montage with bright flashing images that are hard to watch and come without any warning. While the film touches on newer ground, it never develops them to a satisfactory level for every character, instead, it relies a little too heavily on spectacle, which it does deliver.    

After the success of Whiplash, a small independent film that won 3 Oscars, and La La Land which won 7. The mistake here was giving Chazelle free rein. This film needed boundaries. For example, it’s unnecessary for the opening scene to depict an elephant violently emptying its bowels all over someone for Diego Cavla’s character Torres to push it up a hill – it’s revolting. As is a later scene where Robbie’s character is trying to assimilate herself into the new social society of a more conservative environment and is violently sick all over the place and at least one of the guests.

That aside for a moment, this film still contains the ingredients of a classic Chazelle piece. With snap camera movements between characters, emotional depth, and intensity, with a jazzy banging soundtrack that I immediately downloaded when I left the cinema.

Past the elephant and you’re treated to a roughly 30–45-minute party sequence, one that deserves a big screen and quality sound system. It’s a true spectacle without limits, from elephants to nudity of both men and women, to public sex scenes, excessive drinking, and a person of short stature handling an inflatable working penis. Combine this with pumping jazz music, beautifully detailed costumes, and marvellous attention to detail, you can immediately see why it’s been nominated.

Set in the period between black and white silent films and talking pictures, it’s an interesting transition the actors must make from relying solely on their physical acting and beauty – Robbie and Pitt are obviously two of the most beautiful beings on screen – to also needing to hit their mark and deliver lines convincingly.

Post the fun of the party and Robbie’s character has been hired to star in a new film taking place the next day. Here we’re introduced to this open space of production, where sets are made next to each other out in the desert and the focus becomes the technical achievement of film production. It’s manic, it’s fast, it’s hilarious and brilliantly brought together by Chazelle. If you love films, you just want to dive straight in.

Robbie’s character is getting her start by using and owning her sexuality and terrific acting skills. With an intense but fantastic quick cut scene between Robbie and the director, trying to squeeze as much emotion from Robbie’s character as possible, and suddenly you’re witnessing how dam good Margot Robbie is.

Meanwhile, Pitt’s character is brilliantly waffling to his assistant, drinking copious amounts of whiskey, and making sure his words are documented by his poor assistant. Once he emerges, clearly completely smashed, there’s a hilarious sequence where the entire crew are pushing him up the hill. But once it comes time to shoot, he’s in the zone.  

There’s a brilliant scene later in the film where Robbie’s character is making her first talking film. She needs to hit the mark exactly and speak at the perfect volume to be heard by the microphone above her. From once being filled with confidence, she’s now clearly nervous and is learning her lines backstage. The tension is palatable as any small sound is heard by the microphone. Take after take and you can see everyone glistening from the extreme heat given off by the new machines and the stage lighting. It builds to a crescendo when they get the take and the sound and celebrate and you’re totally in the room with them.

Note: I didn’t know they needed to be so exact to record the dialogue. The clear diction and placement of the actors in films from that period makes so much more sense now as to why everything was so over pronounced and clearly articulated. It’s this exploration of the technical side that I love about this film.   

Though both Pitt and Robbie are truly excellent, and while I was moved by Pitt’s storyline, an aged actor driven by his desire to entertain the common man, but who also struggles to find a place in the new world. I don’t think Chazelle knew how to bring Robbie’s character arc to a satisfactory close. She’s a free spirit, who I assume is modelled on Marylin Monroe, even going so far as to have her mother in an asylum. After her quick rise to fame, she struggles to reassert herself in a new age of cinema and is quickly dismissed as being overly sexual in a new conservative social society and given the ‘my fair lady’ treatment, and thus, her spark and character disappear into drink and gambling. 

Which would be fine if it weren’t for the contrast between her ending and that of Pitt’s character. Both are cultural icons, but one has had a long career, and the other a short fuse, both should have earned mythic status, yet Robbie’s character is given a metaphorical ending while Pitt’s character is so brutally direct and literal.  

This film is 3 hours long. And its fundamental problem is that for a film about an industry of storytellers, it chooses to focus on re-treading very worn ground, rather than focus on the flashes of richer intrigue we get from the characters which tease us with newer ideas that aren’t fully explored. A making it in Hollywood film, contrasted with the decline of old stars, while witnessing the short ride of others, while they lose themselves in the parties and struggle to stay relevant in an ever-evolving industry.

Where the film lost me is at the introduction of Toby Maguires’s character and the most disturbing party sequences. Robbie’s character runs into a gambling debt with a mob boss (Maguire) and she turns to Calva’s character Torres for help, who being hopelessly in love with her chooses to be her knight in shining armour.

Now that Hollywood has become more conservative, it’s forced the once liberated parties underground where mob bosses like Maguire run them. They’re these mutated parties spread over 3 levels and wouldn’t be amiss in Dante’s Inferno, with wild crocodiles, bloody cage fighting, lurid sex acts, and a bodybuilder eating live rats while people throw money at him. This is the rejected segment of society, and suddenly it’s a Cronenberg film. It’s done well, Maguire is brilliant, and it was thoroughly disturbing, but it’s not the film I came to see and totally removed me from the narrative – you must work hard to bring yourself back into the room.

As the end of the film draws near, there are moments and key emotional points that should be more poignant. But whether I was distracted by the dungeon scenes, or whether they simply weren’t quite developed enough, never hit the mark for me and it goes from very messy and over stimulating, to very formulaic as characters go their separate ways.  

Where it somewhat redeems itself is with Diego Calva’s character Torres. Who hit every mark he needed to, I believed in his love for cinema, and for Margot Robbie’s character. After escaping the mob boss he’s forced to abandon his Hollywood dream and flee to Mexico. He returns many years later with his family to visit the studio where he worked and the final note is played by his revelation.

The film's final sequence is a montage of clips from the conceptual drawings of early cinema to modern day films like Avatar, accompanied by the film’s signature drum beat. It felt like something I would have seen and studied at university and it’s clearly Chazelle’s love letter to cinema, which isn’t a criticism, we study these things for a reason.

It should be a beautiful moment witnessing Torres’s moment of revelation, as he sees his contribution to cinematic history. And while it does carry some weight, it loses some poignancy due to the manic overstimulation of the third act. 

OVERALL, 3/5

A spectacle of cinema that favours the aesthetic more often than it should. Led by an exceedingly brilliant cast it ultimately falls short of delivering more development, treading overly familiar territory. The film is far too long, never earning the 3-hour benchmark. It needed to cut the elephant, the bodily functions, and Toby Maguire’s entire section so the third acts hit harder and focus on the characters more.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this film, but from Maguire’s debauched party I struggled to connect to the final act, which was confusing and such a sensory overload.