You don’t become a star, honey. Either you are one or you ain’t. I am.
So, you’re less than five minutes into Damien Chazelle’s rowdy ode to the excesses of early Hollywood when you get a nice close-up of an elephent’s butthole as it graphically sprays feces all over one of the characters, the camera lens and, let’s face it, you the audience member. You can either get up and walk out then or buckle up, because when Babylon is over, the one criticism you can’t give it is that Chazelle didn’t warn you.
What we have here is a certifiable epic, 3 hours and not quite 10 minutes of the stories various strivers charging around maniacally in early Hollywood, trying to become stars or stay stars or at least exist in the detritus of the stars. Babylon is a movie that functions with all the subtlety and nuance of a jackhammer. If the point of a scene is that old Hollywood people engaged in debauchery, it’ll just show you a scene of a girl giving a guy a golden shower and then snorting cocaine until she dies. The script contains lines like, “You don’t become a star, honey. Either you are one or you ain’t,” and “I think you’ve got the cameras pointing in the wrong direction,” and “Everything’s about to change.” But it uses this sledgehammer approach to storytelling to create a film that’s a magnificently immersive experience.
A lot of praise has to go Justin Hurwitz’s thunderingly jazzy score, Chazelle’s frenetic camera and Tom Cross’s maniacal fast-paced editing. Those things are all key to creating the overall tone of this film which is a ton of exhausted energy bordering on a kind of madness. The film opens with an epic Hollywood party that is explosive and frenetic on the surface; and then we get to go behind the scenes. There’s a late section of the film where things turn into a horror movie as a couple of our characters get initiated into an underground party, the “asshole of Los Angeles,” as a twitchy, incredibly creepy Tobey Maguire dubs it. It’s a party that gets more perverse the farther in you go; it’s a fantastic “descent into hell” sequence. It even has a jump scare and, yeah, it got me. Probably my favorite of these crazy sequences is a long, long sequence that cross-cuts between Margot Robbie’s character Nellie on her first day as an actress on the studio backlot and Diego Calva’s character Manny on his first day as a production assistant on an epic location shoot. This is bravura filmmaking, nothing short of pure adrenaline, fast, funny, gripping and emotional.
The performers are really on target here. Margot Robbie really has become something of an icon in my opinion when it comes to playing a very particular type of damaged woman and she gives an insanely over-the-top performance as the doomed striver, Nellie. It’s genuinely a character that I don’t think anybody but Robbie could have played, certainly as fearlessly as she does here. She’s not afraid to be abrasive and unlikable and it was a bold move to go as hard as she does here, because performances this big always run the risk of tipping over into parody, but this one never does. A sequence of her at a fancy dinner party where she’s expected to toe the line and rehabilitate her public image by putting on a classy and high-toned front is just fantastic; she captures it all: her anxiety and fear of the people and situation, her frustration at having to play a part for them, her growing anger over the condescension they show to her . . . and then, when it finally explodes into a cathartic melt-down, it’s acting as primal scream therapy. It’s a knock-out performance and I think Robbie’s brilliant.
Brad Pitt, on the other hand, gives an overall quieter performance. In an interesting way, I felt like Pitt’s character, aging star Jack Conrad, was kind of a brake on the movie. When he showed up, the film would pause to take a breath, something it rarely does anywhere else and I found the story of Jack Conrad, while it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, to be really well done. While I loved the movie’s really big set-pieces, like the third act descent into hell and the “first day making movies” scenes, I also really loved a lot of Pitt’s quieter scenes. There’s a great scene of him having a conversation with society gossip columnist Elinor St. John, well-played by a witty Jean Smart, where I think both actors are really wonderful. Chazelle has St. John lampshade that there’s nothing new here by pointing out that Jack Conrad is just the latest in a long line of celebrities that have lost their mojo and their careers for no real reason at all, but the scene works despite the well-trodden territory because of Pitt’s genuinely moving, but very subtle performance. Diego Calva is quite good as Manny; it’s a performance that doesn’t rise to the level of either Robbie’s or Pitt’s, but he has an affable stolidity and a cool charisma, and you want to see him succeed.
The rest of the cast is filled out with a metric ton of great performances: Jovan Adepo as a jazz musician, Li Jun Li as an Anna May Wong inspired Asian super-star, Olivia Hamilton as a rare female director of the silent era, Samara Weaving as a histrionic actress, P.J. Byrne as a scenery chewing assistant director; Tobey Maguire as a creepy, strung-out gangster with somewhat non-traditional tastes, if you know what I mean. Hell, you’ve even got Flea & Jim Gaffigan as slimy studio execs. And then there’s an uncredited Spike Jonze as an unhinged German director. These performances range from the more subtle (Adepo, Jun Li) to the operatic (Byrne, Maguire, Jonze), but they are all doing exactly what the movie needs them to do.
I found the characters played by Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li to be very underused and that’s not just a shame because I found the characters interesting and the performers were very good. It’s also kind of problematic since they’re the main people of color in the cast. Calva is Mexican, of course, so it’s good that his character is both so central to the story and also written in a non-stereotypical way. But it definitely feels like there’s a four-hour cut of Babylon out there and when the “extraneous” stuff had to go, it was “coincidentally” mostly the stuff that focused on the people of color. Another reason I suspect there’s a much longer cut out there is Olivia Wilde’s incredibly brief appearance of Jack Conrad’s first wife; one can’t help but wonder if all the Don’t Worry Darling drama led to her role being reduced in the editing. She’s literally only in one scene and it’s a scene where she and Pitt are arguing in the front seat of a car with the camera shooting them from behind, so you literally never even see her entire face in the scene. I mean, they definitely shot more than that of her; she wouldn’t have taken the part, I don’t think. Regardless, I liked everything they did with Adeppo and Jun Li, I just wish there had been more of it. Adeppo gives a really stunning silent performance in a scene where he’s required to wear black face, despite being, you know, black, because he isn’t “reading” as “black enough” on camera. And Jun Li is just the essence of cool, whether she’s crooning a double-entendre laden song or cooly revealing a switchblade in order to save the day. She’s got real swagger and I definitely want to check out some other things she’s done.
Anyway, I think that Babylon is a work of pure, unbridled ambition and I applaud Chazelle for it. It’s a movie that is most assuredly not for everyone, though it is trying to be everything: a sentimental drama, a suspenseful crime film, a horror movie, a comedy . . . no, a gross-out comedy, an epic, a farce and, you know, just for good measure, an ode to the transcendent art of cinema. And you know what? It works. It ******* works. As over the top and excessive as it is, I prefer Babylon’s wildness and unpredictability over La La Land’s perfectly coiffed romanticization any day of the week. Babylon is loud, repellent, abrasive, heartbreaking, beautiful, shocking and absolutely wonderful. I walked out of the theater with my ears ringing and my head spinning. My God, what a racket. 4 stars.
tl;dr – gleefully over-the-top in every way, featuring a phenomenal ensemble and with an energy level that is absolutely breathless, Babylon is bravura filmmaking in an epic style. 4 stars.