Babylon—all three hours of it, not only disappoints. It offends. Damien Chazelle, Oscar winning director of La La Land, presents the lives of several fictionalized Hollywood wannabes and stars during the final years of silent filmmaking and the transition to sound films from the mid-1920s to 1930.
The result is shocking. Within the first few minutes, an elephant empties its bowels all over the heads of men trying to deliver it to a decadent Hollywood party. At the party, there are countless half-clothed and unclothed rollickers. One female character, an Asian lesbian, sings a song about rubbing a woman’s genitals. An obese man kills a young woman while they are having sex. A dancer appears to stick a bottle into a tight body part of his partner. We are reminded of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. It’s all so gross, so crude.
What do fellow film historians think? A few were excited to see a high-budget rendering of Hollywood during those golden years, but their hopes were dashed. Two of my historian friends actually stopped watching after five or six minutes, after the elephant pooped!
Scenes of silent filmmaking are a part of the narrative. The techniques look like production in the early teens. By the mid-to-late 1920s, filmmaking was quite sophisticated. Where was Chazelle’s research team? Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a Hollywood star who has drunk too much over the years, had too complicated a private life, and who is about to see his career fold. Pitt does a great job as a John Gilbert-type character who is played out. He almost makes this film worth watching.
Margot Robbie is the crass wannabe, Nellie LaRoy. She plays a sort of tough, determined woman who wears too much eye make-up and not enough clothing. She is cheap and she makes terrible blunders in her life. Robbie plays her with heart.
Another notable character is a journalist who seems lost in this disgusting world of Hollywood studio life as Chazelle portrays it. Elinor St. John, a Hedda Hopper type, is played by Jean Smart. Can Jean Smart do any wrong? What a wonderful actress she is!
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian writes that Babylon owes a lot to Baz Luhrmann, the writer/director of Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby, and Elvis. Absolutely! If Luhrmann had not come up with his distinctive visual style, and view of decadence, would there be this Babylon?
A crux of the story is the Hollywood experience of a Mexican American named Manny Torres, played with deep feeling by Diego Calva. While the first hour and a half of Babylon sets a mood, it is the second half where a story arises. That’s when the attention falls on Manny in particular, as well as Nellie and Jack. The story that comes to life is one of distorted and even nightmarish moments, misleading Hollywood legends and platitudes of movie history.
The low point for me, maybe the lowest of several low points, was an antisemitic rant on a sound set. What was the point? We cared nothing for the shouting offensive guy, and we knew nothing about the Jewish man he was berating. It came from nowhere. A more meaningful moment was the decision to insist the Louis Armstrong-like character, a brilliant jazz musician, wear burnt cork on his face to balance his skin color with his fellow jazz musicians. That was a sincerely moving moment.
Babylon is visually stimulating, with talented actors. At heart, however, it is a vulgar and boorish piece of baloney!
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
