Babylon

Babylon

Perfectionism is a theme that Damien Chazelle can’t seem to shake. His characters will go for perfect time, they’ll go to the moon, they’ll break their hands on drum sets and now, with his latest film “Babylon,” Chazelle shows us that they’ll also make Hollywood eat itself alive to chase after another dream. If “La La Land” was his swooning valentine to the movie machine and all its pitfalls, then “Babylon” plays like a deliberate counterpoint to those criticisms.

It’s a big fat 1920s-period piece about the movies and how often the magic of those flickering silver screen images is really just hard work, dashed dreams and lots of luck. Two different sequences in “Babylon” detail how much effort goes into two seconds of film either dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is set up or impossible perfection being sought when recording sound and it’s as if Chazelle wants you to know that none of this is easy, even though it looks like so much fun.

Is it worth it? That’s the question. Chazelle pays lip service to saying that this landing on the moon is one worth making, but he puts his characters (and us) through so much miserabilist getting there that it’s hard to believe him. This is a movie of stunning parts scenes, performances, tech elements but it feels like the honest touch needed to bring them together eluded Chazelle’s grasp.

There’s something to be said for unapologetically going for broke like this; I felt as manipulated and bamboozled by “Babylon” as the outsiders in this movie who are chewed up by Hollywood history by the end. You could argue that’s intentional a feel bad Hollywood movie is rare! But there’s difference between pulling back a curtain and just rubbing an elephant’s turd in your face.

And that’s how “Babylon” opens, with a man named Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of silent film. He’s trying to get an elephant to a crazy Hollywood party, a drug and sex fueled bash that only whispers about in the gossip rags of the era.

Chazelle uses this orgiastic bacchanal to introduce us to his players including an aspiring actress named Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who catches Manny’s eye just as her star is about to rise; jazz trumpet player Sidney (Jovan Adepo); and underwritten cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) but most notably his leads: suave silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who’s about to leave his third wife and will soon get slapped by talkies as the wheel turns on a new era of stars; and gossip journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart).

There are also recognizable faces like Lukas Haas, Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze, Jeff Garlin and even Flea flirting on the edges of this story.

This has an unquestionably ace cast, led by another fearless performance from Robbie and a star making one from Calva, but it’s Pitt who stands out, radiating a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a movie star for over three decades he’s seen guys like Jack Conrad come and go, and there is a relatable melancholy he invests his performance with here that gives the whole movie depth it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle’s tapestry approach is ambitious in how it focuses on the rising arcs of the outsiders Manny, Sidney and Nellie don’t understand they’re part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the movies (maybe less), while even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be.

All of them become power players in their own way Nellie holds the screen like few actresses other than Robbie could convincingly convey; Sidney’s musical talent rises as sound takes over silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on set, which allows him more decisions. There’s an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this movie is more about a love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also packed with an overwhelming mix of historical detail and urban legends; Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And again, it feels like the commitment of the filmmaker elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren’s fluid cinematography gives this thing most of its momentum his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz’s score might actually be the best original score all year long; he finds recurring themes for these characters that give everything else around it more the feel of opera a connection that makes sense for this particular story given its dark tone and tragic endings.

The production design walks right up to the line of feeling completely genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from editor Tom Cross, but that’s more a product of Chazelle’s occasionally unfocused script than anything done in the editing room.

Which brings us to that script. Babylon is like a test case for whether or not a movie can be just the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, talented ensemble and expert cinematography all are here, no doubt about it. And yet there are narrative elements presented by Babylon that feel hollow from the very beginning and only become moreso as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lesson into the final scenes.

A movie can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found Babylon hypocritical when it tried to play the “isn’t it all worth it” card that everyone knows is coming in these final scenes. Fans seem to be loving this ending, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle’s career.

It seems as though Chazelle is saying that we wouldn’t have “Singin’ in the Rain” if lives weren’t ruined during the switch from silent films to talkies, and aren’t we lucky to have gotten that movie? This is an extremely cynical, surface level approach to take toward movies. If he believes he’s lifting up a corner of the veil on a corrupt business, then he implicates himself as a cog in that perverted machine at the very end. It’s almost like he doesn’t care to think about how his beloved art will savage its own dreamers so much as while his wild party is still raging.

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