Damien Chazelle directs a frustrating, glorious, messy epic in 'Babylon'
"Babylon" - ½
Early in the exhaustingly ambitious epic "Babylon" - Damien Chazelle's furious, curious satirical assault/love letter combo to Hollywood - an elephant takes a huge dump on a main character's head (and by extension, ours), indicating that we could be in for a bumpy 3-hour, 8-minute ride.
This sleazy and pleasy debaucherous tale of Hollywood's sound-era infancy constantly operates at two frames short of the economically dreaded NC-17 rating.
This becomes clear in an outrageous, early orgy sequence during which a young party girl performs a golden shower on a chubby performer - no doubt inspired by the infamous Fatty Arbuckle - before overdosing.
A Mexican studio employee named Manny Torres (Diego Calva) gets the unceremonious job of quietly moving the body. He becomes a useful tool for the studio as well as our de facto main character among a formidable ensemble cast, including Brad Pitt as a handsome matinee idol (not much of a stretch) and Margot Robbie as a sexually charged, good-time party crasher.
They supply the perquisite star power in this frustrating, glorious mess of a movie sometimes hard to watch, but impossible not to.
Chazelle sold his screenplay to "Whiplash" (my No. 1 film of 2014) by placing a mini-cliffhanger at the bottom of the pages, ensuring readers would continue to turn them.
He applies this same tease technique to "Babylon," ensuring that no matter how many times characters babble on about the importance of movies, or how convoluted the plot becomes, we simply want to know what happens next.
Pure cinema? Sure.
Great cinema? Not necessarily.
"Babylon" concludes with a middle-aged Torres weeping while watching a sentimental montage to The Movies, a Kubrick-esque flash-barrage of our most treasured movie moments of the 20th century.
It's more magical and touching than anything that has come before, and it suggests Chazelle subversively puts movies on the same level as sausages and laws: you don't necessarily want to see how they're made.
Set during the 1920s when sound revolutionized (and destroyed) the silent movie industry, "Babylon" mostly follows Torres as he inches his way up the Hollywood power list. He meets the seductive, scantily clad Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) by helping her get into the aforementioned orgy where she's practically the only female wearing clothes and not participating in the carnal carnival.
Later in the story, the cool and confident silent matinee star Jack Conrad (Pitt, slathering charm over mounting desperation) wrestles with his marriage, his career and his first bad reviews written by a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who delivers the movie's most memorable speech, an acidic summation of the corrosive truths about Tinseltown.
A talented black trumpet player named Sidney Palmer (played with restrained hostility by Jovan Adepo) tops an appropriate acknowledgment of nonwhite contributors to Hollywood's successes, although his character provides little more than toe-tapping filler, backed by Justin Hurwitz's jazzercized music (voted Best Score of 2022 by the Chicago Film Critics Association).
Linus Sandgren's eye-popping, caffeinated cinematography goes from fluid to lurid as his lens captures the widescreen opulence of a 1950s epic and the horror-film atmosphere of a deep dungeon from hell where a drugged-out gangster (a disturbingly demented Tobey Maguire) forces Torres to witness unspeakable entertainments, all two frames short of an NC-17 rating.
As I watched "Babylon," I wondered just how Chazelle might have improved 1979's hard-core epic tale "Caligula" starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole.
Not two frames short.
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Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Tobey Maguire
Directed by: Damien Chazelle
Other: A Paramount Pictures release. Rated R for drug use, language, nudity, violence, crude sexual content. 188 minutes