Four years after his gentle, moving biopic of Neil Armstrong, First Man, director Damien Chazelle has returned to his jazzy Whiplash and La La Land roots with a chaotic, frenetic, violent, vulgar and ultimately underwhelming 180-minute ode to the golden age of Hollywood with his new film Babylon.
Across its mammoth three-hour run time, the film interweaves the lives of three characters: Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a rough around the edges Jersey girl with dreams of making it big on the silver screen, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), Hollywood’s leading man who struggles to adapt as the movies business embraces sound and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant determined to do whatever it takes to carve out a career in the pictures.
Starting in 1926 with a party scene that lasts the length of most normal movies, the film spans the roaring twenties to Hollywood’s transition to talkies; we see LaRoy and Torres’ stars rise as Conrad’s begins to fade. Margot Robbie does her best to give an extra dimension to a character who from the first minute to the last seems determined to irritate everyone. Relative newcomer Diego Calva gives the best performance of the three leads but as the scenes flash by with the pace of the 20s movie-making business, he becomes less and less likeable so any jeopardy in the final act is largely dashed away.
One of the most interesting characters is Sydney Palmer, a jazz trumpeter who goes from slumming it at Hollywood parties to being a movie star. Sydney is played brilliantly by Jovan Adepo (Overlord, Watchmen) but sadly the film doesn’t find time to give him much more than the occasional crash zoom into his trumpet bell.
The film is at its best during its huge set pieces which seem to feature an impossible amount of extras, long takes and whip pans. Frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz produces another award worthy score to keep the tempo going just as scenes seem to be losing steam. The two parties involving elephants, snakes and a lot of drugs, as well as an extremely tense scene as the studio struggles to adapt to recording sound prove to be the most engaging, outrageous and hilarious.
In the midst of the chaos Chazelle finds time to bake a mini horror film into Babylon, with Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) making a brief appearance as a gangster who takes Torres on a hellish trip through LA’s dark underworld. The scene is terrifying and brilliantly crafted but feels too jarring and is unwarranted. Quentin Tarantino attempted a similar scene in his own Hollywood story, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, but where Tarantino managed to make the genre-bend a gentle curve in the story, Babylon feels more like a right angle. Only leaving you disorientated.
The scene sums up what makes Babylon a frustrating experience: a lot of it is good, some of it is great, but Chazelle never manages to tie it all together. Its lead characters are never endearing or engrossing enough to pull you into the scenes not reliant on wow-factor set pieces. In his last film, Chazelle took a character study of the first man on the moon and turned it into a deeply personal and human story. Any lessons learned from that seem to have been lost. The director found more warmth on the surface of the moon than in Hollywood, despite all the glitz and glamour.
2/5 Stars
Image Credits – The MovieDB