Margot Robbie should have had a good year. She appeared in two high profile, big ensemble cast pieces from high profile directors. I knew that was coming around this time last year, but I only knew the title of one and a a handful of other details beyond that, including that both would feature Margot Robbie in a main role. Now it’s about a year later, and I’ve seen both. David O Russell’s Amsterdam was a mediocre disappointment where only Christian Bale gave a genuinely good performance despite the rest of the talent in front of the camera. But there was still Damien Chazelle’s Babylon about the Hollywood silent era, and that looked even more promising, not least since the studio was releasing it at the end of the year, in time to act as awards bait.
I’ve generally liked Chazelle’s work, and this one is on my short list of “see it before 2023,” so here I am.
It’s the Roaring Twenties, and Manny Torres (Diego Calva) wants to work in the movies. He doesn’t want to act. He wants to make something that will last and mean something, and he sees motion pictures as the route to take there. But at the start of the movie, he’s helping transport an elephant up a mountain to a big Hollywood party, the sort that looks like the frat boys from Animal House set up a party scene for a production of The Great Gatsby. You name it, it’s happening at this party. And I mean you name it. That elephant defecated all over a guy before it even got to the party, and Chazelle’s camera caught that whole thing. So, let that be a lesson as to what kind of movie this is. As it is, Manny falls hard for party crasher and wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) before finding employment as an all-purpose assistant and fixer for major star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt).
From there, the movie basically follows these three through the ups and downs of the movie industry, with some additional attention given to jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), Cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), and gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart). Jack, for his part, believes the movies are a form of great art and more than the spectacle that they are in the slapdash silent era that made him a star. Nellie just wants to be a star and has some natural talent as long as her New Jersey accent can’t be heard. Manny, meanwhile, goes up the ladder behind the scenes, though he may be the one assigned to do the tasks other executives really don’t want to do. As much as Chazelle’s movie doesn’t shy away from the excesses of silent era Hollywood, it likewise doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of society at that time.
Around the halfway point of the three hour flick, talkies are invented, and from there, the movie goes in a different direction, showing how the different characters do or don’t adjust to the new technology. Hollywood fame is for the most part fleeting and hard to hold onto, no matter how big an actor Jack or Nellie might be. If anything, the point seems to be that there’s an impermanent thing about the motion picture industry, and there may be a way to somehow survive it, but it takes making certain kinds of decisions. Oh, and then a surprisingly creepy Tobey Maguire shows up as a particularly weird mob boss with his own ideas on both movies and parties that show that for all the debauchery in the opening scenes, there are much, much worse things out there.
Essentially, Babylon is a movie with a lot of excess, and how well the individual viewer responds to the excess will probably say a lot about how much they like the movie. There is something of a point to it, and some of the scatological bits here and there aside, it didn’t bother me. Heck, one online critic I follow suggested that even many of the negative reviews seemed to sort of enjoy the excess. It comes down to me accepting that the excess is there for a reason. I can see it, and since it worked as a sort of drug-fueled nonmusical remake of Singin’ in the Rain while acting as a meditation on fame, artistic immortality, and whether or not entertainment with mass appeal can matter or not, I rather enjoyed it for what it was. Yeah, it’s not on the level of Chazelle’s best, and it is obvious Oscar bait since the Academy loves movies that act as tributes to movies, but for what it was, I had a good time.
Grade: B+
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