"I hate when people put fucking toppings on ice cream."
Damien Chazelle's Babylon takes us on a journey to early Hollywood, where we witness the transition from silent films to talking pictures in the roaring twenties. We come face to face with orgies, elephant shit, cocaine, spanking, Bacchanalian dancing and chairs being tossed out the window. And that is all in the first set piece which foreshadows the tone of the film, the excess and the carefree decadence that is sure to implode. Through stunning visuals and a haunting score, the film portrays the dark and unsettling reality behind the glitz and glamour of the industry. Just like the positives and negatives of the film itself, the chaos of Hollywood makes for fascinating yet contentious work. All this wilderness tailors the audience into a division, while Babylon is both messy and dazzling, it can also be disorienting. After experiencing it for a second time in the cinema, I couldn't help but wonder: does the incredible story and breathtaking score outweigh its significant flaws?
We enter Chazelle's world through two ravenous figures, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and Manny Torres (Diego Calva). The intro is by far one of the longest I have seen but it is glorious. It is 1926 and movies are being made in the desert, Manny makes ends meet by delivering an elephant to a party being thrown by a studio executive, and Nellie as a would-be actress crashes the party by literally crashing a car into the statue. We are also introduced to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) who is already an idol of the silent screen, and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) playing in the hired jazz band but trying so hard to perfect his music. The characters develop and intertwine, as they quickly ascend to the top they fall just as quickly, but some are wiser than others and saw the future that awaits them.
As Chazelle insists, the twenties are propelled to the border of believability, the anarchic energy fuelled by Margot's daring, endlessly spiralling and sympathetic figure leads the movie onwards. In spite of Margot's brilliant dancing, the best-set piece is one that truly fleshed out the contrasting nature of the subject at hand. Between Conrad's mediaeval combat and Nellie's saucy last-minute replacement in The Wild Child. The immense battle was orchestrated with thousands of extras on the beautiful California hills and to put that in contrast with an emotional barroom scene filmed in one of the many booths hammered together is pure movie brilliance. Scenes like this fill up the film and it only reminds me of Chazelle's Oscar-winning La La Land, this is sort of like the opposite of the Bambi-eyed paean to artists in a sense but somehow not at the same time. However, at this point, there are still more than two-thirds of it left. A dizzying series of concentric plots spiral out of control, and the ensemble of characters expands and starts to feel nauseating. Nellie's quick triumph to the top begins to falter due to her scandalous nature and ergo behaviour; Conrad's image begins to fade away with age and alcoholism as he struggles to keep up with newer trends; Manny's desire to rise to the top compels him to make many morally doubtful decisions.
Chazelle provided us with more deeply rooted references to the world of cinema such as the previously mentioned Sydney Palmer who is obviously meant to be Curtis Mosby, and Lady Fay Zhu is of course the Asian American idol Anna May Wong. Almost all the characters have historical analogues and with many blending into Hollywood history, but Chazelle turns everything up a notch on an already rapid and shaky past. Mixing fact with fiction, giving the dialogues a contemporary snap, and cracking down on the ways how the industry has stayed the same for 100 years. I was moved and truly stunned by this beautiful depiction the first time watching, still, at one point it just became a drag, there was too much being captured, and the nostalgic feel was squeezed out of every second. I was, to an extent, exhausted.
Is it a mistake to believe that Babylon presents an excess of glory purely for excess's sake? The extremities of the scenes remind me of descriptions and events from F. Scott. Fitzgerald's portrait of the Jazz age. Everything looks, sounds and feels overcooked, I have a sensation that the contents are hidden away by the spare-no-expense gigantism which quite accurately reflects most of the big-name productions. It could be seen as an obnoxious and self-indulgent assault on the senses with the spare moments in between only to tout the magic of movies. As pretentious as this may sound, I think this major flaw of the film is actually its biggest merit, and vice versa. Chezelle set out to make "a hate letter to Hollywood and a love letter to movies." He does exactly that by putting two very contrasting extremes together, making you feel like the world is spinning endlessly out of control just like how I suspect he let go of the film's development to have that specific flow to the plot.
Chazelle has no doubt crammed a lot in even for a three over long feature, he could have paid more attention to the beauty and pleasure of the silent film era, or he could have developed the characters deeper instead of putting all the heavy lifting on LaRoy or Conrad, but this is certainly not for everyone. My favourite line describes my emotions for the whole film, and it divides everything, so to end with the same line -- "I hate when people put fucking toppings on ice cream."
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