The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of Babylon

Over the Top: Film Review of Babylon

To call Damien Chazelle’s Babylon an exercise in excess would be a hyperbolic understatement. From the first surreal sequence of an elephant being transported through the California desert to one of the wildest and most decadent bacchanals ever presented on film, Babylon begins with one of the most incredibly detailed and well-choreographed large-scale scenes in cinematic history. Watching it on the big screen, I thought that a first-time viewer of D.W. Griffiths epic Intolerance might have felt the same way witnessing the larger-than-life spectacle. It was truly—even for a jaded movie fan—a revelatory moment.

Babylon takes place in 1920s Hollywood and presents four partially interrelated storylines. Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a Mexican studio gofer who slowly works his way up into a directorial role. While delivering the elephant—this is no metaphor—he meets the exuberant Nellie Del Roy (Margot Robbie) crashing the party at a Kinoscope studio executive’s mansion in hopes of getting her big break. She is a beautiful, headstrong, earthy, and irrepressible aspiring actress—and soon catches the eye of the executive producer.

Also at the party is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a charismatic and successful but troubled film actor who is one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. Playing at the party is African American trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who performs with a Chinese American songstress Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Lu). If this sounds like a sprawling overwhelming epic undertaking, it is. Mostly. Although the stories of these artists intersect, interweave, and interwine, the narrative finally becomes unwieldy, fragmented, and somewhat disjointed. This Hollywood story is simply too big for a single movie.

However, the production values are at times absolutely stunning. After the breathtaking spectacle of the Hollywood bacchanal, the next sequence takes us to the Kinoscope shooting lot, which—because the films are silent—has shooting sets piggybacked literally one on top of the other. A Western is being filmed next door to a slapstick comedy next door to a melodrama. Since there was no sound recording, there was no worry about one shooting schedule infringing on the next. Action is layered upon action in a style reminiscent of Robert Altman.

A battle scene for a “costume piece” starring Jack Conrad is another massive, staged extravaganza. Hundreds of extras gleaned from skid row and back alleys were commissioned by the studio to take part in the huge battle scene—very like one of the epic sequences in Intolerance. And, as depicted in Babylon, several extras actually did die during the filming of in Intolerance. Art imitates life imitates art.

Writer and director Damien Chazelle has maintained that much of the film is based on actual players in 1920s Hollywood. Robbie’s Nellie Le Roy is loosely based on the escapades of Joan Crawford and Clara Blow, the “it” girls of their time. Although each of these actresses did not share the same tragic fate as Le Roy, Crawford got her start much as Nellie did.

Jack Conrad’s career in Babylon very much parallels that of John Gilbert, a silent film star who did not make a successful transition to talkies. In fact, much of Bablyon deals with the sometimes traumatic technological shift from silent films to talkies. Studios had to rebuild, sets had to retool, and actors and directors had to adapt. An elaborate—and overly prolonged—sequence filming Nellie in a college comedy depicts the difficulties of ironing out all the technological wrinkles. Sydney’s rise is based on real-life African American jazz musicians who built careers on making the rounds of the industry parties. Manny and Lady Fay’s characters are also based on real-life Hollywood personalities.

The exuberance and headlong decadence of the film’s first half is balanced by the downward spiral of those whose careers were destroyed by the advent of talking pictures. Jack suffers an agonizingly slow realization that his career is over while Nellie’s stubborn refusal to become a “lady”, along with her drug addiction and gambling problems, result in her untimely demise. As he states in a Den of Geek article, Chazelle drew upon the experiences of historical templates for his characters, specifically Jeanne Engles and Alma Rubens as young doomed actresses. Another actress, Thelma Todd, suffered an early demise, being found dead in her car.

During the first orgiastic party scene, another young actress dies of an overdose of an overweight comic actor, a scene very much reminiscent of the real-life Fatty Arbuckle incident, in which drunken revelry resulted in the death of a young woman—and Arbuckle’s subsequent sensational trial for murder. There are more than a few other parallels between Babylon and Hollywood history in the film, but this movie is less of a document than it is a love story. In his ambition to reconstruct a vision of the free-spirited and untamed film industry before it came under the sway of puritanical morality of the Hays Code, Chazelle, as he did in La La Land, pays homage to these wild early days of Hollywood before morality in the movies became highly regulated, and with the advent of talking pictures, accents and interracial relationships became taboo.

Chazelle’s determination to place his vision on film is laudable, but, like transporting the elephant to the party on a broken-down truck, and although the film in many ways succeeds, the full realization of Chazelle’s vision turns out to be a bridge too far. As beautiful as the production is, and as compelling as his characters are, the story is simply too far-reaching and expansive to fit in one three-hour narrative.

Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is a marvelous and spot-on performance. From her introduction as she crashes a car at the mansion, to her charismatic exuberance and reckless physicality, Robbie embodies the careless independence of a beautiful woman with absolutely nothing to lose. When confronting her idiotic and freeloading father (Eric Roberts), she embodies a marrow-deep anger possibly rooted in something deeper than paternal negligence.

Brad Pitt is the perfect casting for the suave and elegant Jack Conrad. In many ways, the personas of Pitt and Conrad’s screen personas intersect. They are both cool, confident, untouchable, and seem perennially amused. As Manny Torres, Diego Calva is unsquelchably earnest and ambitious. As he states to Nellie early on in the film, he wants to get into the movies to be part of something bigger. And he does.

Near the end of the film, as Manny is watching Singing in the Rain, the MGM musical about the advent of the talkie, the very subject of Babylon, the Hollywood of the trauma he witnessed and lived through is glossed over and candy-coated in the pastels of make-believe, just as Babylon itself is a view of that era through the lenses of our own time.

Babylon is a marvelous piece of filmmaking. It is always a story which bites off more than it can chew. It is too long, too ambitious, and filled to bursting with history. But, like Hollywood itself, it is too compelling to pass up.