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Published: 10:57, February 03, 2023 | Updated: 14:10, March 08, 2023
All that glitters isn't cinema gold
By Amy Mullins
Published:10:57, February 03, 2023 Updated:14:10, March 08, 2023 By Amy Mullins

Babylon, written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt. USA, 189 minutes, III. Opened Feb 2. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Talented writer-director Damien Chazelle specializes in a certain kind of obsession. The frantic, hyperfocused, drumming antagonists in his 2014 breakout, Whiplash; the ambitious lovebirds who prioritize their passions in La La Land (2016); and the singularly focused space explorer in First Man (2018) all pivot on the kind of characters whose tunnel-visioned drive for success is their physical and/or emotional undoing. So it’s absolutely no surprise that Babylon — which has nothing to do with Kenneth Anger’s landmark 1959 gossip tome Hollywood Babylon — dives headfirst into the perceived hedonism of Roaring ‘20s Hollywood.

From minute one (in fairness, maybe minute six, but it’s the same scene), when we watch aspiring moviemaker Manny Torres (Narcos: Mexico’s Diego Calva) try to haul an elephant up a hill to a movie mogul’s bacchanal, even after the animal defecates all over him, Chazelle’s poison-pen ode to the silver screen wallows in its ruinous excess.

If you’re looking for a crash course on Hollywood history, you’re in luck. Babylon starts in 1926, in pre-Hays Code Hollywood, on the cusp of sound when Technicolor was but a suggestion. Manny helps a Clara Bow-type starlet, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie in what is easily her least-engaging performance), get into the aforementioned party, thus kicking off years of unrequited love. During that time, Manny tries to break in to the business despite being viewed as the help, and Nellie spends her career fighting her trashy roots and drowning in decadence. Manny gets his big break at studio Kinoscope thanks to hard-partying superstar Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a John Gilbert riff, who’s good friends with the Asian-American Marlene Dietrich, Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), and who’s forced to watch his star fade.

(PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

This is hyperlink filmmaking. Type “Hollywood golden age” into Wikipedia’s search bar and go. The rest of the characters are thinly veiled spins on the era’s most notorious figures; they are also sketches. In between Chazelle’s ultra-kinetic virtuoso set pieces, the halfhearted attempts at creating fully fleshed-out characters we can like, or even understand, falls well short of the mark.

There isn’t a moment in Babylon that hasn’t been done before, better and less assaultively, even by Chazelle himself. Trading in re-creations and archetypes is fine when they’re taken in new directions, to say something fresh, halfway witty or insightful. But we know where each character is going to end up the minute they appear on the screen. As with La La Land, there’s nothing new here, and only the wisp of a message (something about the magic of the movies), but at least that film had the decency to throw in a bit of a twist ending while cleaving closely to its roots.

At a bloated, self-indulgent three hours, the numbers alone make it impossible for Babylon to be devoid of highlights. The gilded opening sequence will get the attention, but the second 30-minute block — a day in the life of Kinoscope — is arguably the standout, with bitter-rival starlets, sozzled leading men and frantic German artistes colliding in an orgy (not that kind this time) of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants creative mania. A superior Act Two segment gets into the weeds of filmmaking at the dawn of the sound age. More of both scenes’ playfulness and focused storytelling would have served the film well. Instead we get a rambling pastiche of moments that add up to a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing (to cop a phrase) — no matter how profound Chazelle seems to think they are.


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