Review: Babylon

Image courtesy of Paramount.

With the sole exception of his Neil Armstrong movie, Damien Chazelle's films typically involve characters involved in the performing arts - and often ones who strive or buckle under the heart- and back-breaking aim for perfection. His latest, the three-hour-plus early Hollywood epic "Babylon," is no different.

This is a work of ambition and scope that has a lot of moving parts and - quite frankly - I was impressed that Chazelle was able to keep track of them all and continuously propel them forward, even if some strands that were more interesting don't get all the attention they need and some others should have been left on the cutting room floor.

"Babylon" is often enjoyable and intriguing - but for a film that swings for the fences, there are also a fair amount of misses. The result is a compelling epic - perhaps, among the last of its kind to get bankrolled by a major movie studio, considering how poorly movies for adults are faring these days - that doesn't always work, but it wins points for the sheer audacity of it all.

However, Chazelle's aim for audacity occasionally feels forced. Search around the internet and you'll likely find some writings on how debauched the early days of Hollywood were - for example, Kenneth Anger's tome "Hollywood Babylon," which may or may not have lent this film its title - and how freely the booze and drugs flowed and how many of those in the industry at that point were libertines.

Well, "Babylon" kicks off in a raucous way - first, with an elephant spewing shit all over some poor guy - and the camera lens - who is tasked with bringing it to a wild party in the Hollywood Hills. That party is filled with copious male and female nudity, drugs of all types, and even a woman taking a piss on a naked fat man's face. Chazelle's attempt to portray the Roaring Twenties as some 20th century Sodom and Gomorrah feels a little over the top.

But once its multiple stories kick in, it becomes intriguing. At the opening party, we meet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a wannabe starlet and - let's face it - narcissist who wants to become a famous actress at all costs. She briefly befriends Manny (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who wants to experience being on a movie set and is helping bring the elephant up the hill to the mansion at the film's beginning. The two won't meet again for some years, but a bond is formed.

There's also Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an aging leading man who remains a top draw during the last days of silent films, but who becomes more of a liability when the talkies come around in 1927. There are a few other side characters - a saucy Asian cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) who is modeled after Anna May Wong; Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a Black jazz trumpet player who becomes a movie star; and an aging gossip columnist (Jean Smart) who proves to be less cynical than some of the famous ones who actually existed.

There's a whole lot going on in this film - and much of it is interesting: the workmanlike portrayals of early movie sets, an amusing scene in which a cast and crew literally suffer after making the transition to sound, the obsessive nature of a director who wants to catch the golden hour on film but is short a camera, how Lady Fay and Sidney not surprisingly come face to face with discriminatory practices on the films on which they work, and some very well done conversations late in the film between Pitt's aging movie star and, first, Smart's gossip columnist, and then later, Lady Fay.

Robbie gives a solid performance as the newcomer who is able to make herself cry with ease - she's modeled after Clara Bow - although her character is written to be abrasive, while Manny spends much of his time looking pained as he cleans up her messes. The two actors have a natural chemistry, but their story - even though it's the main one - often gets lost in the shuffle. 

Among the more minor issues are some dialogue that sounds more like it's from the 2020s than the 1920s (a man calling another man a "whiny bitch"), and there's a scene in which Nellie offends a group of rich people at a snooty party that rings a little hollow. The film boasts a final montage of how cinema has progressed over the years - and while it starts out well ("A Trip to the Moon," Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou" and "The Wizard of Oz" are in there), I wouldn't exactly have ended it with a number of special effects-driven blockbusters.

The film's biggest flaw is how it wears its influences on its sleeves - with "Boogie Nights" being a film that especially gets pilfered in the process. I could forgive the suicide of a character halfway through the film for similar reasons as in Paul Thomas Anderson's film, but a scene late in the picture featuring a bizarre Tobey Maguire as some L.A. underworld figure feels ridiculously similar to the Alfred Molina sequence in "Boogie Nights" - which is a shame because it's a well-shot and atmospheric sequence otherwise.

"Babylon" is far from perfect - but I'll take this insanely overstuffed film about Hollywood's early days over much of what Hollywood dumps on the masses these days. I admire Chazelle's ambition and his ability to hold all of these plot threads together and - for the most part - make them compelling. The film has its flaws, but it still has much to recommend.