Babylon

Whatever else this film will be remembered for, it can't be denied that this is uber-confident, scintillating filmmaking from Damien Chazelle. It starts with an elephant shitting all over some dude and charges along at a pace that only allows a breath around 45 minutes in. This is a film that does not give one single fuck, and it's not like this Chazelle fella is Nolan or Spielberg or Cameron, or someone who can call the shots. I may be wrong (wouldn't be a first) but it seems like he had nobody to rein him in. Usually, that's a red flag (à la Tarantino) but here it works wonders. 

Babylon is set in the early days of Hollywood - 1926 to 1932 for the most part - and it focuses on a wannabe actress, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie); a matinee idol, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt); and a young Mexican fix-it man, Manny Torres (Diego Calva). These three, and others such as gossip writer, Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), singer, Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) and musician, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), all appear in the opening party scene in a fine example of character introduction. It's an incredibly flamboyant first sequence, that segues neatly into the second great set-piece - location shooting in the dusty hills of Los Angeles. There's a montage between these tent poles of some of the main players getting on with their lives - in an Asian laundry, a horrible bedsit, a poky green-room - that attempts to portray the seedier side of early Hollywood, but it's soon jettisoned for the glitz. 

The balancing act between drama and high farce holds forth in this first hour or so, even longer when the ridiculously fun 'snake mission' sequence is taken into account. After that, the film lurches into a Scorsese version of Chinatown, a roundly positive eventuality in my book. Chazelle has a happy knack of keeping his foot on the pedal and, much like the final section of his breakout, Whiplash, he cranks the energy levels and manages to keep them worrying the peaks. The coming of sound films in 1927 has varying repercussions on the protagonists, and the bacchanalia of the start of the film slowly morphs into something more puritanical. Obscene orgies are just not acceptable any longer. This is underlined by the appearance of a gangster and his horridly grotesque 'party' down an old mine - the 'arsehole of L.A.', as he calls it. It's pretty clear that these two wildly different soirées that bookend the film illustrate how society's perceptions of enjoyment have changed over the course of the movie.

The main characters are based on real people, some obvious (Fatty Arbuckle, Anna May Wong) and some not so (Dorothy Arzner, Dudley Murphy). This IndieWire article explains more. A few of the supporting characters are a bit under-served but at 3 hours plus, I can understand why. The pictures, shot by Linus Sandgren, look fantastic and the editing but Tom Cross is also first rate. Robbie and Calva are excellent (she must be so tired after that shoot) and Pitt has rarely been better - he won the supporting Oscar for Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, but he was basically playing himself in that. Here, he takes his rusting charm to another level. He's getting better with age.

On a minor downer, I reckon the coda when Manny comes back to L.A. in 1952 was slightly unnecessary, trowelling on thick the love letter to old Hollywood. This and the whole debate Pitt has with his theatre wife (Katherine Waterston) about 'high art' are really the only dud notes for me, though not dud enough to diminish the film too much. Babylon is bombastic, hilarious, spectacular, debauched and utterly mesmerising. 3 hours seemed like 30 minutes.

Babylon is showing in most cinemas now. If you fancy a bit of old-school razzle, see this on the big screen.

See also:

Chazelle's Whiplash (2014) is fantastic, and a close relative to the above could be Michael Hazanvicius's The Artist (2011).

(Film stills and trailer ©Paramount, 2023)