Babylon
This is a long and frenetic film. It seems a deliberate choice by director Damien Chazelle as it covers the epic early days of Hollywood when the moving image was new and exciting and the world was going crazy for the celluloid gods of the silver screen. I am a fan of Chazelle’s earlier films: La La Land offered an entertaining take on golden age musicals with a dash of wistful melancholy; and First Man somehow combined a truly moving study of loss with the shiny excitement of the 1960s’ space race to the moon. Unfortunately, Babylon lacks the careful precision of those films and most of the emotional heft.
The film starts with an extended scene at a studio party where we are introduced to all the main characters but, more importantly, the most significant character of all: Babylon, or rather the Hollywood movie scene before it became respectable. The silent stars and all their retinues, studio bigwigs, wannabes and chancers at the party are agog with delight, disbelief and exuberance at this new-fangled medium that is changing the world. The party is all about excess, and features more bare flesh and bad behaviour than I have seen in a while … ever.
To be honest, the constant movement of the camera as it zooms in and out of the different pockets of madness at the party gave me a headache; and I found it hard to piece together the different strands. Chazelle gives us one point of reference, Manny Torres played by Diego Calva. He is a general fixer who is trying to make himself indispensable to the studio bosses as a stepping stone to a career in the movies. His first unenviable job is to transport an incontinent elephant to the party and then, in a clear nod to the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, he has to clear up a sordid scene involving the accidental death of a young woman.
The other two characters emerging from the madness and excess are Nellie LaRue played by Margot Robbie and Jack Conrad played by Brad Pitt. Robbie has real presence as a woman who simply wills herself from nowhere to become a luminous star just because she thinks she is a star. She is very good because in the silent era her big gestures, energy and sense of danger speak more powerfully to the audience than any dialogue could manage. Pitt has a little less to do than be himself. His character is a composite Fairbanks Jr and Valentino figure. He has charm but also a sense of ennui that he combats with heavy duty drinking and a series of doomed marriages. However, there is a striking early scene when we see him transform from wearied, incoherent walking hangover to powerful romantic lead when action is called and the cameras roll.
Jack takes to Manny and opens doors for him that eventually give him the opportunity to make his own films. Together with Nellie they form a powerful triumvirate in the movie business. But this isn’t called Babylon for nothing and their nemesis is familiar. You see, throughout the film Chazelle references Singing in the Rain, and similar to that film we see that some of those who were giants of silent movies don’t fit with the new aesthetic of the talkies.
After all the freneticism of the first half of this film, the talkies usher in a new era of industrialised film making and concern with image and respectability. There is a sense of loss as the film makers move to sound stages and the initial sense of possibility becomes contained. Chazelle has great fun showing the film making process out in the LA scrublands: it’s wild and always on the edge of disaster but it relies on artistic ingenuity and the larger than life screen presence of people like Nellie and Don.
In the final act of the film, the pace drops down as Chazelle looks at the losers and winners in the brave new studio world. I’ll not spoil it for those of you who might see this film. Suffice to say, though, it allows Jean Smart playing a Hollywood gossip columnist to explain the ephemeral nature of fame – you have your moment but then the audience’s attention turns to the next big, new thing, so just enjoy the ride whilst it lasts.
It can seem that Chazelle rather romanticises the pioneering early days of movie making. It can seem that way but in fact he also shows us the consequences of the chaos, the toll it takes on people and the shit, literally as well as figuratively, that accompanied this brave new world's burst of creativity. His message is straightforward enough and hammered home in the final scene – it’s the films that we should be romantic about and how they accompany our own lives, but just be aware that behind the curtain besides a little old man operating the controls there’s also a pile of dead bodies, literally and figuratively.
After my early headache, I can honestly say that there was always something to grab my attention. I wasn’t bored but, by the end, it didn’t add up to much for me. The emotion bursting out of Manny in the final scene should have been felt by the audience… well, sadly, that was not the case for me.