Babylon: At Some Point, Even Drug-Fueled Hollywood Orgies Can Wear Thin
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C+
Let’s get this out of the way first: Though the studio has chosen to release Babylon as part of the Christmas movie season, this is distinctly not a family film. Take the name seriously.
Babylon, the latest from Oscar-winning writer/director Damien Chazelle, is a wild ride. It’s a star-studded, sprawling extravaganza, about Hollywood at the end of the silent era, as the talkies swept away the glories of most of a generation.
Ambitious in the sweep of history that it chronicles, it’s a sometimes entertaining, often sordid movie about movies in the earliest Hollywood era. At a running length of just over three hours, it both makes its point, and overstays its welcome.
Margot Robbie in Babylon’s opening act party scene.
Babylon, which is loosely split into three parts with completely different moods, gets at the era through a series of characters. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, the highest grossing star of the silent era: handsome, rich, powerful, but also a hard partying alcoholic who changes wives seemingly every time he starts a new picture.
At the other end of the spectrum is the gorgeous frizzy-haired wild child, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who has no connections, no experience and no inhibitions and wants to break into the movies and be part of the scene.
And then there’s the film’s anchor, Manny Torres, (in what should be a break out role for Diego Calva). He's a young handsome Mexican with big ambitions in the industry. As the movie starts, he’s an assistant to an assistant, working for whoever owns a big mansion somewhere in the sticks of what will one day be part of Los Angeles. The mansion is where the invited party people, and the hottest stars mingle in all night Bacchanalian parties.
This is Jazz Age partying at its most untethered. In the main ballroom of the mansion, the crowd, big stars, wanna-be stars, party people and society-folk drink champagne by the bottle, snort cocaine, abandon inhibitions and clothes and indulge in group sex into the wee hours.
On stage, a jazz band plays, lurid stage shows happen, the slinky Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a fixture of the movies and the party scene, sings lascivious songs about her girlfriends.
It’s Manny who opens the doors to Nellie LaRoy, letting her into the party and allowing her into a room with a mountain of cocaine that fuels her attention-getting behavior.
By sheer luck, that attention leads to her first movie role and sets her up for stardom. He falls in love with her at first sight, although it never seems mutual. But that unrequited relationship partly shapes his storyline.
Manny also falls in love with movie-making and decides he wants to be a producer in spite of being soundly discouraged by his boss (played by Flea of the Red Hot Child Peppers). Manny will prove everyone wrong.
There are other characters of note in this epic: whose stories broaden the picture and speak to the diversity of early Hollywood. There were women directors in the era. While not a main character, Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton) is one of the studio’s main directors.
The handsome Sidney Palmer, (Jovan Adepo), a black trumpet player in the jazz band at that party mansion, is hand-picked to star in movies aimed at the black movie market.
And, of course there’s a gossip columnist/magazine writer and industry chronicler, Elinor St. John, (Jean Smart) who affects a semi-British mid-Atlantic accent, and who both witnesses the mayhem (the parties, the film shoots, the rise and fall of its stars) and participates in it.
For the first hour the film is past paced, and fun, with a comic, sometimes manic rhythm. Chazelle takes us from the wild partying to the set, and gives us a look at how productions in the silent era of the twenties, were shot.
We see a sword-and-sandals epic starring Jack Conrad, shooting a massive action sequence, using natural light in daytime. Men from skid row have been brought in as extras to play warriors in unchoreographed fight scenes. They wave swords and try to dodge getting trampled to death by players on horseback, while the cameramen try to keep up before the sun sets.
In the second hour, Babylon shifts more deeply into the characters. Nellie, talented, undisciplined, with a major chip on her shoulder, throws herself into fame, addiction and partying. The hard working Manny moves up the ladder and becomes a studio exec as the silent film era ends.
And Nellie and Jack try to morph their careers in the wake of talkies. It’s not just actors getting used to the new technology. Chazelle gives us a sense of how the films were shot, how the crews struggled to adjust to shooting with sound.
The scenes on the sets are of the most compelling, and most fun. Sets were dangerous places. This is primordial Hollywood, with no labour standards, no regulations, no unions, no protections.
In the final act, the era of silent films is over and the stars who were the faces of some of the most popular movies, once beloved by audiences, must reckon with their future. Tobey Maguire shows up as a heavy duty criminal boss, a twisted drug dealer, who takes the film to a level of debauchery largely unseen in mainstream movies.
There’s a lot to admire here, Babylon takes on an underserved era of movie history in all its crazy glory. with real gusto, Chazelle, who is a careful and deliberate filmmaker, spent 15 years researching the silent era before writing the film. Babylon is part history and part homage.
For the fast-paced, frenetic first hour, Babylon is comically entertaining. The problems start in the second hour, when the pace slows down.
Even though what we see progresses the story, the characters’ reactions and behavior becomes increasingly predictable, and just not that interesting. And the movie starts to wear.
It’s really well cast, down to the smaller speaking roles, which include Olivia Wilde, Katherine Waterston, Lukas Haas, Jeff Garlin and Max Minghella (as Irving Thalberg)..
All the leads are strong. Margot Robbie in particular takes on a character who is gratingly annoying, which makes her riveting to watch for a long time. But at the same time, there’s a point where her character’s exploits run out of steam, and even her committed performance isn’t enough.
Babylon could, arguably, have lost half an hour of running time and not compromised the point. As well Chazelle adds a coda at the end of the film celebrating movies, from the silent era to the 21st century, mixing characters from Babylon with actual movie clips, which, for me, just felt superfluous and exhausting.
That Chazelle loves and respects the era is evident. He’s fully committed with Babylon, and for a long time that spirit drives the film and makes it compelling. But how much is too much? There’s a point where the film loses a sense of forward motion, and it staggers under the weight of its ambitions.
Babylon. Written and directed by Damian Chazelle. Starring Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo. In theatres December 23.