One consequence of films arriving here weeks after their US debut is that American critics have already exhausted every cliche. Like The Fabelmans and Empire of Light, Damien Chazelle’s effluvial journey through the early days of Hollywood is, apparently, a “love letter to cinema”. Too many reviewers have also enjoyed telling us that the director of La La Land and Whiplash is “swinging for the fences”.
Maybe. That baseball metaphor suggests that no possibility exists between unqualified success and total humiliation. You either score a home run or get caught in the outfield. What we actually get is an intriguing, infuriating, sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous oscillation between those two extremes. It features some of Chazelle’s very best work. It features some of his clumsiest follies.
We begin with a statement of intent in the most malodorous terms. Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant to southern California, is helping transport an elephant to a prototypical “wild party” in 1920s Hollywood when the beast empties its bowels on both his head and ours. (Strawy nuggets adhere to the lens.) At the booze-fuelled, coke-enhanced event he meets up with a rising star named Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie, obviously) – a loose variation on Clara Bow – and is drawn into a scandal not unlike the one that finished “Fatty” Arbuckle’s career. Manny and Nellie brush beside the career of suave star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, equally obviously) as the arrival of sound threatens to upend the festivities.
After 15 minutes of loosely choreographed debauchery, even the most devout Chazelle enthusiasts will find themselves wondering if they can endure all three hours to come. The director and his team are making no great attempt at verisimilitude. Contemporaneous film professionals swore like longshoreman, but not quite in the hip portmanteau fashion we encounter here. This is the silent era filtered through late Federico Fellini and seasoned with the uninhibited swagger of postclassical Hollywood. It just about functions. Then it creaks. Then it wearies.
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Just when you are set on giving up, however, Chazelle swings us into a day in the life of a Hollywood studio. The extended episode is a jarring, clattering masterpiece of creative chaos. A western over here. A melodrama over there. A small army is kitted out with swords and ordered into battle for a martial epic. We get confirmation that, at this stage of the industry, before consortiums took over, women were still healthily represented in all areas of production.
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That glorious set piece is beautifully complemented by a later, infuriatingly amusing sequence – in this case, accurately reflecting the history – where Nellie, now star of an early sound comedy, is driven crazy by the tyrannical demands of the audio technicians. Even a creaking surgical pin can trigger a retake.
The message is clear(ish). A rogue, guerrilla art form, established when Bel Air was still desert, is giving in to mechanical discipline and bourgeois sensibilities. Yet something else is going on in Chazelle’s brain. Penultimate descent into an off-the-leash closing phantasmagoria, involving demonic meetings in alligator-infested sewers, looks to be making more unhinged accusations about the rearrangements to come. Where did that come from?
That predilection to disorder is repeated in a screenplay that never satisfactorily solidifies relationships between the three principals. Robbie and Pitt know how to inhabit those archetypes. Calva is charming as the eyes of the audience. But all three struggle to be more than shiny spheres in a clinking, blinking pinball machine.
It ends with a bizarre exercise in self-congratulation – one you might love on Thursday and then dismiss as utter pap on Friday – that appears to undermine everything argued up to this point. Yet, for all its confusion, Babylon really does function as celebration of an increasingly threatened medium. Scored heroically by Justin Hurwitz, and designed to within an inch of its life by Florencia Martin, Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as he indulges in a bit of its own.
This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting.
Babylon is released on Friday, January 20th
