Damien Chazelle's sprawling "Babylon" is the flip side to his 2016 hit "La La Land." Both are movies about movies, set primarily in Los Angeles and focus on characters who dream. But where "La La Land" was all lightness, a gentle valentine to love and hope and the larger-than-life way that movies capture our hearts, "Babylon" is darkness. Set mostly in the years between 1926 and 1932, when the movie business transitioned from silent films to talkies, it's a tale of ambition and excess that's often sordid and ugly, literally starting off with a shower of elephant feces.
And yet, this story of a hedonistic lost Hollywood has the same thing at its core as "La La Land": a passionate love for the art of moviemaking, expressed both by the characters and by Chazelle himself through them. Depicting a time of excess, it's a movie full of excesses: its overlong running time (over three hours), its wildly elaborate party scenes in which masses of people seem to meld into one grotesque moving thing, its over-the-top closing montage in which colors seem to run like blood, its galloping pace. "Babylon" is a movie with a fever, and that fever is film.
A number of characters travel the sometimes arduous journey that is "Babylon" with us, many inspired by real-life figures from movie history. Three of them are central. Diego Calva is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant and behind-the-scenes underling eager to become part of something bigger, and ready to do whatever he needs to do to become a producer. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a stratospheric star of silent film finding his way in a new world. And Margot Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, a starlet in the making: canny enough to wangle her way into a Hollywood producer's party in a barely-there dress, naive enough to dance in glee under the starlight when she gets a movie offer. "Ain't life grand?" she says, in words echoed later in the film under rather different circumstances. All three give lovely performances, still points in this film's mad whirl. There's a moment near the end where Pitt exits a room, swaying and humming just the tiniest bit, dancing to music only he hears; a few minutes later, Robbie's character does the same thing elsewhere. They're both living in a movie, whether anyone's watching or not.
