Directed By Damien Chazelle
Starring – Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Jean Smart
The Plot – A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language
POSITIVES
This is Damien Chazelle at his most epic and grandiose, permeating a passionate direction with energy and exhilaration that truly makes this an immersive engagement throughout Hollywood’s cinematic evolution. What’s vital to discuss here is the detail, with the mayhem and macabre of drunken parties and simultaneous cinematic excursions conveying a danger and recklessness of that we’re not used to seeing with films displaying the golden age of cinema. Each frame of this film contains so much to look at and experience while sifting through Linus Sandgren’s versatile cinematography that it’s impossible to do so in one lone watch, with much debauchery and maniacal madness persisting through a very lived-in and spontaneous sequencing of sets. The corresponding color pallet is grungy and weathered, intentionally removing the tinsel from the familiarity of the golden age, and the deviation and experimentation of the editing schemes leads to many impressive long takes that constantly bottle the tension and urgency of the engagement, while visually allowing us to get lost in the aforementioned spectacle of the immense scope. This is all orchestrated with a big band and jazz musical score that is of Chazelle’s comfort food for previous projects, but here exerted all the more fluently within the gimmick of the period piece, with the trumphets and horns of the percussion inscribing a smooth surrounding to many storytelling montages. On the realm of that topic, the script isn’t without its problems, but when it does get it right relaxes conventionalism in narrative structure for an emotional love-letter to all things cinema, across three respective decades. From the ruthlessness and relaxed realities of the silent film age to the stuffy conservatism of the talkies, Chazelle articulates through the entire spectrum, leaving room for the kind of cunning commentary along the way about the direction of the business that bares with it an uncanny similarity to our own politicized agendas of current day. Though the characters are charming without being honorable, we invest in their respective plights because of the industry’s eventual manner of blacklisting each of them from the business, demeaning their values in ways with an almost overnight change that happened without their knowledge or even approval. This helps to cement a few remarkable turns in the air of this ensemble piece, but for my money none more prominent Robbie’s thunderous turn as Nellie LaRoy, or the buzzworthy breakthrough of Diego Calva at the forefront of the narrative. Robbie is the most combustible element of this ensemble, wreaking havoc on everything and everyone in her path as the continuous life of the party, and Calva’s art imitates his life as a second unit director turned star in real life, here quietly stealing the captivity from his blockbuster cohorts with all of the heart and ambition of the embodiment of the American dream.
NEGATIVES
Most obviously to the engagement, this film is simply too long at 185 minutes, leaving an indulgence for excess that occasionally cripples the ambition. For my money, the film is problematically imbalanced between its respective halves, with the second and more dramatic sacrificing the tenacity and fun of the engagement for a direction that diminishes its appeal. I understand that this is obviously the intention of the evolving story beats, but when it comes at the sacrifice of the film’s infectiously rampant spirit that at least initially drew us to the allure, it’s not exactly proactive towards appealing to the cause, creating more drag time during the third hour than the first two hours combined. It’s certainly easy to see what could easily be hemmed or omitted from the finished product as a whole, but in my opinion there’s simply too many characters sharing time for the focus, with some nowhere near as compelling or even insightful towards the developments of the world-building. In addition to the run time, the jarring materializing of the film’s many tonal shifts created an internally tedious investment to the experience, conjuring a rollercoaster of emotions, yes, but the kind whose shifting occurred far too frequently to feeling anything but frenetic. I do feel like there is a place for both the crazy and serious moments of the script, but when they come with the kind of derivative returns that makes them weaker with each plunge of pursuit, it leaves the investment a bit alienated by the sentiment, in turn cementing an exhausting embodiment by film’s end. Finally, and perhaps most problematic to me, the film has a consistent desire to gross out the audience with every kind of bodily fluid that the production can imaginatively conjure. Whether in the fecal explosion of an elephant in the film’s opening five minutes, the fetishizing of a man who loves to be urinated on by his sexual oppressors, or Margot Robbie dejecting enough vomit for a floor mat and studio executive respectively, everything here is unnecessarily vulgar, repeating the disgust with a glee for depiction that involves camera smears, candid close-ups and first-person perspectives that continuously indulge in the stomach-churning instances of the affair.
OVERALL
“Babylon” isn’t the exceptional Oscar darling that it was marketed out to be, but it is a cinematically ambitious and entertainingly debaucherous affair from Chazelle, who continues his prominence with the single biggest scope and scale project of his career. Though the experience is exhausting from the over-indulgence of a three-hour runtime and limitless gross-out gags, the script is surprisingly sentimental on its thirty-year journey, bringing to light the rise and fall of stardom that is so often out of the control of the celebrity in focus.
My Grade: 7/10 or B-
From the moment I saw the trailer, I new this would be cinematic chaos for multiple reasons. On one hand, I love seeing seeing Chazelle’s direction adapt to a film that feels like the polar opposite of La La Land. Both films scrutinize cinema but in a wildly different ways and this one is much more cynical which is part of the reason why I enjoyed it so much. Mad props to you for giving credit to all the main actors who were so enjoyably unhinged in this movie. On the other hand though, I completely agree with you that this is a very indulgent film in terms of runtime and structure. I feel like it could improve on rewatch, but I also don’t see myself rushing to see this one again. Sad to hear that it bombed at the box office. Excellent review!
Really need to decide if I want to invest any time into this movie. As much as I like chaotic debaucher and out right fun. There’s also a part of me that could get easily bored. I enjoyed the review and gave me a lot of insight and things to think about when deciding on actually watching this film,.