Babylon

dir: Damien Chazelle

2022

Well, that was a lot of film. It was definitely not one of the best flicks of last year, but it was definitely one of the most films of the year.

It’s three hours and 10 minutes long. I pity the bladders of anyone that saw this on the big screen, and didn’t want to miss a thing thinking something important might happen. I watched this in the luxury of my unheated lounge room, perched on the edge of a milk crate, on an old black and white 30cm television, just like the makers intended, just to make the experience really authentic.

I’m not a film snob. I don’t pretend to know more than anyone else about the history of cinema, or the transition of the industry from the silent era through to the so-called ‘talkies’. In fact, it’s info I try to actively avoid, because, honestly, who gives a fuck. But it’s impossible for me to have been watching movies for as long as I have without picking up some reverence for the art form and its history, even if it mostly seems like I only watch movies to kill time and have something to bitch about online.

I daresay Damien Chazelle also has some reverence for American movie history, but then he’s also a big la de da Hollywood film director, and can make and shape his efforts to say whatever it is that he wants to say about it.

And what does he have to say about it? Seeing movies on the big screen is glorious and transcendent. Working in the so-called film industry is like being showered in elephant shit at the beginning, doing okay for a while, and then you get brutally booted just for the fuck of it at the end.

In other words, nothing we didn’t already know, which we’re told non-stop for over 3 hours.

I maybe don’t have any real knowledge of what the 1920s looked like, but I have to say there were very few scenes in this flick where I felt like I was watching something set in the 1920s. And the weird thing about that is that the production goes to extreme lengths to achieve its version of authenticity, at great expense, with a great deal of effort.

And I found pretty much none of it convincing.

Especially, especially, especially…I have to say, the element that was least convincing, this feels so disloyal and unAustralian, but it’s Margot Robbie, I’m so sorry.

She is, again, sorry, she’s terrible in this. I don’t get it, unless the whole point is that she’s playing a terrible actress. She also looks like nothing from that era that I’ve ever seen, like no other person alive in the 1920s. Maybe she’s an alien who’s been kicked off the UFO for being too annoying.

She plays Nellie LaRoy, so named because she thinks the “La” makes her sound more classy. She’s from New Jersey, and sounds like it, and despite living in grinding poverty has somehow made it to a big Hollywood party in the Bel Air hills (though stealing someone’s car helped). Even though she is in no way connected to the film industry yet, she insists she is a star already, and as luck would have it when some other starlet dies or nearly dies, she is picked at random out of the crowd by a producer because she seems like she’s having the most fun out of everyone in the room.

This room has hundreds of people in it, and at the point when she’s picked, every person in that room is either fucking, doing drugs, committing some other kind of crime, playing music, leading an elephant through the room or carrying a body out surreptitiously.

Not a single person is on their phone, or doing a Sudoku puzzle. It’s a tremendously orgiastic moment, a nexus point, from which we follow the lives of particular people, with different levels of interest.

And, like a lot of such moments, we spend the next 2 and a half hours not at that fever pitch, having to put up with a whole bunch of crap that’s nowhere near as enjoyable.

Nellie’s fortunes begin, or at least rise from this moment. Manny (Diego Calva), who’s the one that got her into the party, and was the one who got the elephant for the party, is now also on track for some kind of Hollywood career as a gopher / fixer / general dogsbody.

And then there’s a trumpet player, an Asian American actress probably based on Ana May Wong who sings a lovely song about how much she enjoys stroking her girlfriend’s pussy, and a chap whose career is peeking as a star of silent cinema, Jack Conrad, who’s marriage has just ended, but who is minutes later dick deep in someone new at that “crucial” moment I was talking about.

Brad Pitt playing a character based on John Gilbert (with a different but no less sad death at 38), is effortless. He effortlessly plays a guy at the top of his game who is beloved across the world for being one of those weirdo Rudolph Valentino types that women adored and men envied. The guy he’s based on married or bedded or both legends like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, so he has to have known what he was doing.

It might be easy for him to play a classic era film star, but that doesn’t make his performance any less compelling, especially compared to…whatever the fuck it is that Robbie is doing in this flick. Even though he’s obviously wealthy and adored by the masses and the studio, we sense even early on that he can only go downhill from here.

Nellie’s first role, mere hours after the end of the party she was at, compels her to swing for the fences, as they say, and she gives the director (Olivia Hamilton) everything she could possibly ask for. She even, at one stage after multiple takes, asks her to cry, but only a single tear, from one eye. How does one even…? But Nellie can do it, and that means she becomes a star, straight away, on the spot.

At the same time Jack is on the set of some epic where there are thousands of extras and a director (Spike Jonze) screaming in heavily accented English profanities, as Manny desperately tries to keep the production rolling, running around doing absolutely everything to keep his head above water. Because the production is so chaotic, some extras die, some horses die, and all of the cameras get smashed. Manny even has to drive all the way back in to town in order to procure another camera, which even requires stealing an ambulance.

It works. Everything works. Everything is honky dory. Until…

What I’m leaving out is that this first hour of showing us what it was like is exquisitely crafted chaos. It looks like chaos on the screen, but we can see an extreme amount of effort went into planning and choreographing all of that stuff, just to give us a glimpse into the insane complexity of what filmmaking even in the silent era was like. There are a lot of elaborate set pieces, physical humour / visual jokes, references to historical figures and ye olde movies, and slapstick bullshit.

It’s okay. It’s fine. I guess maybe it would have hit different had I sat in an audience filled with David Strattons or Margaret Pomeranzs, who all would have nodded knowingly at all the detail and the references. Maybe they would have even guffawed, or tittered artfully at all the “jokes”.

Who knows? I don’t. I didn’t get to watch it with an audience, so I don’t know if an audience for this would have found it funny. I imagine many of them, if they got through that first half hour of filth, would have sat there in stone cold silence like I did, getting the references, but not caring.

It is at this pinnacle of silent cinema’s success that the rules of the ballgame change: Jack goes to use the amenities somewhere, and some studio exec says something about the so-called “talkies” that are coming, and Jack drawls “do you really think people want sound in their movies?” at the exact moment when someone in a stall unleashes a horrific sounding dump.

At that moment, I wished sound have never been introduced to the movies. And I also thought however highbrow Damien Chazelle thinks he might be, he’s not above the dumbest and laziest of toilet humour.

As Manny is sent to New York in order to see what all the fuss is about with a movie called The Jazz Singer, he bumps into Nellie again, and she takes him to a sanitarium so that there can be an odd scene with her mother, who’s been committed there, which is handled so pointlessly that I wondered why they bothered. It doesn’t add anything to her character, if anything it detracts.

But the important thing is afterwards Manny sees what impact sound has on audiences: It’s a revolution, people are going to go berserk for it, and everything will have to change.

Nellie’s first attempt at making a talkie occurs in an entirely new type of set and environment. They’re filming in a studio, but there’s no cooling, because the microphones would pick it up. The camera has to be enclosed in a soundproof booth, which means it’s a hotbox / death trap for the cameraman. They don’t do sound in post yet, so she has to walk to her mark, say her lines, walk to another mark, and make sure her voice is clear enough for the recording.

It’s agony, for everyone, including the audience. We start to suspect, like Nellie does, that maybe this movie stuff is all going to be too hard, and should be for someone else.

Jack, too, is finding it hard to transition in this new era. When he does the stuff he always did, people just laugh, even when it’s serious dramatic scenes. How did the world change and grow, and leave him behind?

It takes another old hack (Jean Smart) to explain it to him, because his heart can’t accept it.

The studios think than Nellie sounds like a braying, dumb donkey, so she senses she’s on the outs, so she takes even more drugs and gets into even more debt, which is less of a character arc and more of a continuation of how she started. But throwing up on William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies certainly doesn’t help her case in between swearing at all of them for looking down on her.

Everyone’s life sucks except Manny’s. But even then, when he tries to save Nellie from herself, when her tries to intercede with a deranged and possibly syphilitic criminal (Tobey Maguire), all his hopes and dreams of Hollywood ascendency are destroyed.

But wait, what? I thought this flick was about what a cruel bitch Hollywood / fame / the movie industry was. Manny’s ultimate fate is determined by the fact that a gunman takes pity on him.

And so the final section of the flick is a Manny, still alive, going to a cinema and watching Singin’ In the Rain, and then seeing somehow a montage of a bunch of great movies, many of which come sixty, seventy years later.

And he even sees scenes from Babylon, the film we’re watching.

Get the fuck out of here with this pretentious twaddle, including your own flick in the pantheon, and using musical motifs from your other fucking movie La La Land, that flick where a white guy saves jazz, throughout this movie, much to my disappointment. I can’t fault Diego Calva’s performance at all, he’s really solid in a flick which mostly requires him to just hold a facial expression for a good long while, yet he’s way better than most of the other people on screen. Pitt is fine as well in his sad, alcoholic role, doomed from the start. Some other people are okay.

But the film seems to be dependent on the fact that we buy that Manny and Nellie are somehow soulmates or star-crossed lovers. I’m cheap as fuck, but even I at my drunkest wouldn’t be able to buy that. I couldn’t even really buy that Nellie remembers Manny’s name, let along that he could have been the one to “save” her, if she wasn’t so much of a fuck up.

The two characters who could have had far more interesting characters arcs, being Lady Fay Zhu and the trumpet guy are given short shrift because everyone is convinced (except the audience) that Nellie’s character is the interesting one, and we need more scenes of her ranting at people or running around in a circle as a rattlesnake sinks its fangs into her drunken throat (was that scene meant to be…funny?) I would like a four hour cut of the film that has no Nellie and lots of Madame Orient and Timmy Trumpet, that would be grand.

This flick’s last hour is utterly pointless, and doesn’t feel like it should have been in this film. I know that amidst wanting to make a movie about the golden era, Chazelle also wanted to make his Boogie Nights, and that last section certainly tries to grasp the energy of the disastrous attack on the drug dealer / Wonderland killings, but it utterly fails, for my money. I don’t think people will be talking about Damian Chazelle like they do about Paul Thomas Anderson after this – he’s still going to be the Whiplash guy for a while longer. I don’t think even people who liked Paul Thomas Anderson’s earlier flicks still talk about Paul Thomas Anderson like he’s anyone that great anymore. Licorice Pizza was okay but…

I wish I could even call it a glorious failure, but I don’t even think it’s good enough to be called that. At best I was amused, sometimes I was curious about where things were going to go, but ultimately I think I felt let down by a monstrous production that wasn’t worth my time or attention, signifying little in the scheme of things.

5 times Babylon reminded me that while I have a high tolerance for filth, that I don’t have much of an appetite for it out of 10

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“And this boy, who breathed his first decades after you breathed your last, will look at your image and think he's found a friend.” - Babylon