Excreting elephants, bawdy brawls, clucking chickens, and that’s just the first scene (and that’s also my alliterative ability used up for the present moment). The Damien Chazelle joint has never been known for being ‘loud’. Sure, Andrew’s drumming is loud and clear in Whiplash, the musical numbers are frequently bold and brash (shoutout to my main man Squidward Tentacles, just in case you got that niche SpongeBob reference) in La La Land, and there’s some amazing booming sound design in First Man. I’m talking ‘loud’ as in big scale. Whiplash and First Man provided engaging, intimate character pieces of talented but tortured psyches, while La La Land provided similarly determined characters striving for the big leagues in 1920s Hollywood.
Chazelle transports us back to the same era, but all of that glossy tinge is dead and gone, replaced with the decadence, sleaze and grotesques behind Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ of cinema. Our supposed lead character is Manuel ‘Manny’ Torres as he rises through the movie industry, acting as an avatar as the narrative charts the move from silent cinema to the ‘talkie’. But an avatar is all we really get; we root for Manny, sure, but we know next to nothing about his background or motivations. And this isn’t a positive factor as might be recognised in various silent hero characters, since we are allowed minimal time to observe Manny before other characters are introduced to an ever-expanding mix. Margot Robbie gives a decent performance akin to her Once Upon a Time in America role as Sharon Tate, and Brad Pitt provides respectable comedy chops as in Bullet Train, particularly during a filming sequence where he continues to engage in deadpan phone conversation while narrowly avoiding death by impalement from a launched spear.
Babylon also represents Chazelle’s first foray into 18-rated territory, but this doesn’t represent any increase in quality, unfortunately rather the opposite. The opening scenes of excess and extravagance make an impression, but not much more than that, essentially serving style over substance. There is an intriguing and disturbing vignette in the latter half involving Tobey Maguire that was tense and effective (scary Tobey Maguire is scary), reminding me of my favourite offbeat sequence in One Upon a Time in America where Brad Pitt comes across the Manson family for the first time. By and large though, Chazelle works best in smaller scale, intimate studies, and Babylon surely ain’t that. The three-hour running time is way too ambitious, and its purported ode to the magic of cinema is thinly veiled. Sure, we hear the ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’ declaration from The Jazz Singer as the advent of sound comes into the moving picture, but the heart just isn’t there. The film is already a box office bomb, having so far returned just over half of its original budget. Babylon? Babybomb, more like.
(I’ll get my coat)