The book of Isaiah reads: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the carved images of her gods he has shattered to the ground”. It’s unsurprising that Damien Chazelle’s follow up to his massive critical and financial successes takes the name of the biblical doomed city, to showcase the heyday of Hollywood, and the late 1920s movie industry.
Babylon is a grand cinematic epic that charts the disparate but interconnected lives of a handful of movie industry types, as the business itself teeters at the fulcrum moment of sound hitting cinema. The story ostensibly follows Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva), a hard working, sharp-thinking man who by lucky happenstance manages to land himself a job assisting movie heartthrob, megastar and serial-divorcee Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). Manny also catches the sisterly attention of aspiring young starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie). Interwoven between them are a bevy of smaller tales, and throngs of characters filling out the sets, parties, and offices that fill the characters’ time.
But as the title suggests, this is a tragedy and often an unsubtle and blunt one. It’s plain from the opening scene of Manny helping to push an elephant uphill, while it farts and rains liquid shit all around him, that this life isn’t all it’s pretending to be. And what’s more, everything will come rolling back down eventually. In fact, one of the most obvious problems of the film is that the glitz and glamour of it all is often as shallow and lifeless as the people and industry it portrays.
Chazelle is more than competent at creating visual splendour with running long-takes that sweep around rooms or across sound-stages and backlot sets to a staggering effect. The problem is that this also has the effect of battering the audience to the point of boredom at times. The more percussive and smartly edited scenes are far more effective. One in particular as Nellie struggles with speaking and acting in a new “talkie” movie. The crisply clear sounds of every rustle, buzz and footstep echoing with her heartbeat as technical issues necessitate take after strenuous take. It’s a moment of brilliance, that hooks in far better than the laborious opening party that fills the screen with every imaginable debauchery for almost 40 minutes of the film. It’s not pointless as it neatly introduces almost the entire cast and their characters plausibly and smartly in one scene, but it is such an assault on the senses that any feeling of fun is lost.
The greatest sin committed by Babylon is the squandering of early promise that this might be a film about the supporting people behind Hollywood. The forgotten poverty-level climbers and struggling artists. The film hints briefly at this tantalising possibility at the end of the opening debauchery, as the various artists and crew slink away to their homes of varying levels of opulence. Particularly those who vanish from the elegance into the poorer quarters of the city. But almost immediately the film is back amidst the lights and the madness of the industry, focussing on the A-list stars and relegating the rest to fleeting cameos until later in the film. Of course, this is an ensemble film, spanning years of story and as such necessarily must weave back and forth between storylines. But it still feels like a wasted opportunity late into the film when Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) fall into focus suddenly after only being briefly featured for much of the film.
The other misstep is that the film thematically tries to pull things together in what is clearly supposed to be an exhalant tribute to the magic of cinema. And in many ways the entire piece is just that, as almost all the characters who are fictionalised are based in some part on real people. But also the film borrows heavily from Singin’ in the Rain to an almost ludicrous extent, but knowingly and openly doing so as it literally shows a character watching that film. The issue is that it just doesn’t land or entirely make sense, and the effect is one of a missed target. A squandering of riches, as the cast are beat perfect in their roles, particularly Pitt and Robbie who have done variations on these characters before, but aren’t breaking any new ground. Calva on the other hand is exceptional, as are the massively underused Adepo and Li, who steal scenes and warranted far more prominent roles.
It’s a shame as there’s a lot to like in this film, and in this modern televisual age, it feels like this would have been a story far better suited to being a limited TV series. Instead, much like the rich fat cats this film tries to mock, it’s a sham. A fancy fur coat with no knickers on underneath.
In Cinemas Nationwide