‘Babylon’ Review: Hollywood excess overshadows class nuance in Damien Chazelle’s eye-catching spectacle
Damien Chazelle has followed up on the success of 2014’s Whiplash and 2016’s La La Land with Babylon, a feature film which charts the transition in Hollywood from silent film to those with sound between the 1920s and 1930s. Boasting an all-star cast, the film features Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li.
The opening sequence is a well-documented party-come-bacchanal at the mansion of the executive of Kinoscope Studios, at which we are introduced to Manny Torres (Calva), a Mexican immigrant tasked with delivering an elephant to the party, and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a working-class woman from New Jersey, who ardently desires to become a film star, even though she already believes she is one.
Also in attendance are the African-American jazz trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Adepo) and Jack Conrad (Pitt), a titanic name in silent film. We then quickly see the intensity with which silent movies are produced, with several being made on-site simultaneously. Fortunately, both Manny and Nellie have been offered jobs in the next round of productions – Nellie on screen and Manny behind it. However, the film industry changes drastically when the onslaught of technological innovation rears its ugly head around the corner. The well-oiled machine of silence runs into more than a few teething problems, as do its players. Other long-serving industry figures lament the passing of the old days: “I knew Proust,” one declares, watching over the “idiots” of the then-modern silent film era from atop the empty Hollywood Hills.
The simultaneous telling of the characters’ stories works well, with each of them weaving in and out of one another’s lives. Perhaps the essential feature of Chazelle’s narrative is pointing out the distinction between the wealth of those already established in early Hollywood and those from underprivileged backgrounds desperate to make a name for themselves and escape the squalor of the 1920s – particularly Nellie. However, the focus on the excessive lifestyle that working in cinema provides can tend to overshadow the plight of such characters. In terms of dramatic quality, Babylon shines when we are afforded an intimate connection with the inner emotional workings of characters like Sidney Palmer.
One particularly pertinent scene arrives when both Manny and Sidney are working on a musical film production with an entirely white cast. Manny asks Sidney what he thinks of the film, and Sidney calmly explains, “I think the cameras are pointing the wrong way,” highlighting just how bad the extent of whitewashing was in cinema – and for how long it remained an issue.
There are moments of a complete lack of subtlety in the theme of class infiltration, such as when Nellie violently vomits at a pretentious upper-class party (there is plenty of toilet humour in Babylon). Although, at the same soirée, she is unknowingly mocked when asked what she thinks of the author George Eliot, replying that she admires his works.
Arguably, Babylon is at its best during moments of excellently performed comedy. However, this leads to the contention that it can sometimes feel that two films are occurring at the same time: one charting the ridiculous excess of early Hollywood, another showing the dramatic struggle of the working class as they attempt to climb the social ladder and are prepared to go to degrading lengths to do so – particularly in the case of Sidney Palmer.
Within the film, there are references to the future ages of Hollywood that we would come to know and love. At one point, Pitt looks remarkably like Marlon Brando, while the colours and textures (not to mention the action) of the opening bacchanal party and its later counterparts are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
In sum, Babylon showcases Damien Chazelle as a fine director with a keen eye for all the hallmarks of a cinematic auteur: good editing, an excellent score (the main theme is lovely) and snappy camerawork (as previously shown in Whiplash). However, its runtime should be shorter. It cannot dive quite deep enough into the true nuances of the characters with whom we empathise because of the several threads of the story – despite eventually tying them up somewhat. Perhaps that in itself, though, represents the mess that Hollywood had become during the transitional phase of the 1920s and 1930s, going from utter professionalism to amateur trial and error and (eventually) back again.
