Today I’m reviewing Damien Chazelle’s all star black comedy epic drama. This behemoth of a movie clocks in at three hours and nine minutes in length and boy does it feel it! The movie has a lot of talent on screen with three leads in Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt and Diego Calva. Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy, a brash ambitious young up and coming star of the silent screen. Pitt plays “Jack Conrad” an established star that is somewhat jaded and often having marital issues. Calva plays the true lead, “Manny Torres” a Mexican immigrant and studio assistant, who eventually works his way up to executive.
Naked Ambition.
Babylon is an ambitious look at the transition in Hollywood from silent movies to talkies, but in practice it is really just a collection of loosely connected scenes. The movie begins with Manny transporting an elephant to a debauched, drug-fuelled private festival for the rich and famous within the industry. This opening scene is long and provides much of the footage from the trailers. It’s not entirely clear if this is a celebration of the debauchery of classic Hollywood, a condemnation of it or just an excuse to film things that look good in the trailer. My guess is a bit of all three. The scene sets up Manny’s first meeting with Nellie and sets the tone for the movie.
From here we follow the characters through a series of scenes depicting movie productions, drunken, drug addled parties and occasionally the events in between. Manny becomes close with both Nellie, whom he has fallen for and Jack, so the story is really Manny’s. This contrasts the hard working backbone of classic Hollywood with the debauchery and mental instability of the stars that struggled not to believe their own hype. The concept there is solid enough, but the film is less solid in it’s execution.
Brad and Margot.
Margot Robbie does not provide the best performances of her career as the walking disaster Nellie (Who mostly drives the plot on by being randomly outrageous and self destructive). She is however in the movies best scene. One that comes on a fraught movie set during an early “Talkie” where tension over the quality of the sound recording drives everyone on set to their breaking point, with one character not even surviving. The scene is about fifteen minutes and is pretty deep into the movie.
Pitt however is almost totally wasted as disillusioned actor Jack Conrad. He has a few good scenes early on but ultimately you could remove him from the entire movie without impacting the overall narrative. This is especially true considering the other two main characters have a romantic relationship and so Jack’s scenes feel very much like a third wheel.
Make it Epic!
The big problem here is that dark comedies don’t really mesh well with ambitious epic story telling. On a scene by scene basis this is somewhat reminiscent of a Cohen Brothers movie, but their longest film is just over two hours and for good reason. This movie doesn’t even have it’s opening credits until the 40 minute mark. It largely just plods along and the events feel disconnected. Many of the scenes themselves are actually very good and the majority feature ambitious, flamboyant set pieces, which makes the movie appear more of a showcase of the directors talent than a coherent narrative.
This is a good example of a movie scaling up without reason, with a story that would have worked better more focused and personal. There is possibly a good, far shorter movie in here, but instead of that we got a movie that is self indulgent, pretentious and tiring to watch. I can’t help but wonder as well if this is meant to be a criticism of past Hollywood excess or a celebration of it. I mean you only have to look on social media to see modern actors are on the whole no more stable than their 1920’s counterparts. I can’t help but feel the movie missed an opportunity to make a genuine statement on all that.
The Final Word.
Ultimately the movie is a let down. Some scenes may be 7/10’s but as a whole the best I can give this film is 5/10. Unless you have a new sofa you really want to wear an ass grove into, I’d give it a skip.
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