Babylon film review
Babylon film review — Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in ambitious promise to Hollywood.
Damien Chazelle’s fourth film is an attention-grabbing formula to silent movie history
The elephant will soon be in the room. In the opening scene of the callow, glittery Babylon, a large pachyderm is conveyed on a small truck up a Hollywood hill. It is 1926. At the end of the road is a movie business party, a crazed bacchanal where the crowd includes a kingly matinee idol, played by Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie’s free-spirited starlet. At the end of the elephant awaits something even messier: a studied OMG moment. It is still only a preface to the main event, a writhing throng of sexual deviancy, hot jazz and drug abuse.
We have a problem. The sight of a teetering elephant in LA speaks to something of Damien Chazelle’s ambitious, attention-grabbing hymn to silent movie history. So does the party. The director has clout. His third film, La La Land (2016), was an acclaimed box office smash. Here though, his work recalls a near-contemporary: Baz Luhrmann. Which is to say, anarchy stage-managed as a Broadway show, the screen filled with riotous libertines fresh from the performance schools of 21st-century America. “This was Hollywood?” we are meant to ask, aghast. “Yeah, this is Hollywood,” we shrug.
The hopeful word the marketers have applied to Babylon is “divisive”. There is, it is true, a lot wrong with the movie. As per that overture, it plays out in frantic, uneven set pieces. Whole 20-minute sections could — should — be cut. But others, yes, are fun. The morning after the night before, Chazelle delivers his cast to a chaotic desert movie set where a dozen different silents are shooting. For Robbie, a slapstick melodrama. For Pitt, a battlefield costume epic. This time, the choreography fits. By sunset, everything is in the can and only one extra has died.
Babylon yearns — or thinks it does — for the time the movies were feral, made by maniacs. That’s important. It behoves us to remember this all-conquering art form grew up a step away from the fairground. Chazelle duly gets to how sound wrecked paradise. But it isn’t sound itself that spoils things, as much as what it announces: the dead hand of good taste.
Which makes it a little irrelevant that the history is shaky. Film scholars may be surprised by Chazelle’s claims that Babylon is the product of deep research. Again, though, moviemakers always gilded the lily. The priority is the bigger picture.
More damaging than not knowing the facts is not getting the point. “What I do means something,” Pitt rages midway, but the film can never say quite what. On one hand, something irretrievably precious is being lost. On the other: oh well, aren’t the movies great anyway?
Then again, would any true celebration showcase its stars like this? Pitt and Robbie aren’t asked to play characters as much as do party pieces. And if Diego Calva brings pep to the third major character — a quick-thinking factotum — his part is also underwritten for a film with 189 minutes of script.
With Hollywood now a century older, the appeal of Babylon is obvious: a grandstand statement from a director who, at 37, is decades closer to young audiences than a Steven Spielberg. The plan backfires. Instead of Wunderkind genius, we get the giggly flippancy of the Kind and the treacly Wunder of an extended ad for cinema itself. The Academy middlebrows are still the target after all. And if the running time is a tribute to 1920s excess, Chazelle should have listened harder to his old ghosts.
★★★☆☆
