As a cinematic study in risk and reward, the first four features from director Damien Chazelle just plain work, often dazzlingly. He knows how and when to move a camera. You know how rare that is these days? Steven Spielberg; Paul Thomas Anderson; a few others. And Chazelle.
His spare and lovely Harvard thesis project, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” led to the outlandishly intense music-school melodrama “Whiplash.” That begot the massive popular success of “La La Land,” a swell variation on themes laid out in “Guy and Madeline.” Then came the intriguing Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man,” which Chazelle directed (Josh Singer wrote the screenplay).
Now the filmmaker returns as writer-director with “Babylon,” which takes place at the intersection of Hollywood dreams and industry realities in a somewhat harsher realm than “La La Land.” In the first 20 minutes alone, we get a faceful of elephant excrement, an anonymous starlet peeing on a naked, giggling Fatty Arbuckle archetype and —because we’re guests at a wild Hollywood party in 1926 Bel Air, California — a nonstop parade of nude, cocaine-snorting revelers.
All this is strategic. Chazelle begins with a visual screech and ends with a man alone at the movies in a 1952 epilogue, lost in bittersweet wonderment. “Babylon,” all three hours and nine minutes of it, sings a song that says: Praise the art and pass the degradation. The contrasts of lightness and darkness are stark, blunt and finally wearying. Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.
Our de facto tour guide is a struggling Hollywood gofer, Manny Torres, played by relative newcomer Diego Calva. By luck and accident, at the decadent bash where he’s delivering a party elephant, blandly characterized Manny meets aspiring star and addict in the making Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie, mixing elements of Clara Bow with the wild-party eyes of Joan Crawford). Manny’s serendipity continues with a chance encounter with Hollywood’s stalwart matinee idol Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt. This man, modeled on silent film star and sound-era casualty John Gilbert, among others, takes Manny on as a personal assistant/fixer/driver/tender.
Through Manny’s astonished eyes we witness the glory and cruelty of the late silent and early sound era, as Jack’s star fades while Nellie fights to hang onto her fickle career. We’re dealing with the same themes as “Singin’ in the Rain,” only in a bloodier, pissier vein. At one point Chazelle riffs at length on the “Pierre, you shouldn’t have come” scene from the 1952 MGM classic, as Nellie grinds through take after take in a college comedy she’s making.
I’ll try to explain why Chazelle’s ambitious work doesn’t quite work for me. Largely it’s the tonal mood swings. The opening sequence, largely wordless, depicts Manny and some bit players struggling to get up a mountain road with an elephant that’s gonna blow any minute. We see the truck, at a tricky angle in long shot, nicely judged. Then comes the “payoff” (a tsunami of feces) and it’s, like, huh? Wha? It’s not meant to be “in period,” like a Laurel and Hardy short from 1926; it’s meant to shock. But it’s a misjudgment, the first of many in a movie — oddly, for Chazelle — lousy with ‘em.
The first of its party scenes introduces the major players along with trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo, stuck with a role of diminishing returns); an Anna May Wong archetype, Lady Fay (Li Jun Li); and a crafty, imperious Louella Parsons-brand gossip columnist (Jean Smart, always welcome). Mostly “Babylon” sticks to Pitt, Robbie and Calva, though the real protagonist is Chazelle’s notion of what Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” called divine decadence, light on the divinity.
The movie is an extended script problem, sporadically bailed out by its director. Line to line, scene to scene, cocktail banter alternates with violence, with a tin-ear sense of when profanity is funny and when it isn’t. The people on the screen never develop the sort of dimension or historical plausibility that even a freely anachronistic treatment of mythic Hollywood needs for anything more than partial buy-in. Pitt can’t naturally suggest the sort of verve or spirit associated with, well, you name it: John Barrymore, John Gilbert, the entire period. And “Babylon” is pretty lazy in its sexism regarding nearly all of the women; Conrad trades one haranguing impediment of a wife for another, and another, wasting the actresses’ time and talent in ways that have little to do with the obvious sexism of the time and place.
Robbie at least delivers, squeezing every ounce of unruly life there is to be found in Nellie. As for Calva, he’s essentially a player to be named later, adrift in a blank role. I found it hard to invest in Manny’s near-instantaneous mad passion for the flapper with the mostest, with so little sexual friction allowed to spark between the two.
At its most studiously grimy, “Babylon’s” depictions of Jazz Age depravity recall an oddlot of ‘70s films, and not good ones: Ken Russell’s “Valentino,” for example. Some viewers might take the swank, spectacularly appointed party scenes as reminders of Baz Luhrmann’s excess in “The Great Gatsby” or “Elvis” or, well, any Baz Luhrmann movie.
In theatrical terms, a dramaturge probably could’ve helped Chazelle realize “Babylon” more fully, just by asking questions and challenging some of the more errant change-ups. Manny’s innocence is designed, I think, to counterbalance the darker forces at play, notably the can-you-top-this underground climax — full of rats, one eaten by a subhuman carnival reject of a man, in yummy close-up, plus an alligator, not eaten. This literal descent into Babylon features, thank God, a brief, movie-improving cameo from Tobey Maguire, as an industry-adjacent underworld creep. But to follow all that with a sincere postscript to the magic and perpetual innovation of Hollywood — that’s a very tricky proposition.
Chazelle has sent, in effect, “Singin’ in the Rain” on a collision course with Nathanael West’s Hollywood nightmare “The Day of the Locust.” The closest anyone’s come to pulling that off is probably “Pennies from Heaven,” and both the original TV version and the later film version remain remarkable, stinging achievements. That Dennis Potter drama featured characters (and actors) lip-syncing to old Depression-era standards, often ironically. I’m still not entirely sure, after two viewings, why “Babylon” — far more than “Pennies from Heaven” — feels like the one doing the lip-syncing.
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'BABYLON'
2 stars (out of 4)
Rating: R (for graphic nudity, drug use, bloody violence, pervasive language and strong & crude sexual content).
Running time: 3:09
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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