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Babylon (2022)
Firmly Against: Damien Chazelle's Babylon
Babylon is a stupid, thematically-scattershot film that I will continue to hate for a long, long time. The explanation is long, but bear with me, because it totally lines up with what the thing is trying (and failing) to do/say. It's a hatred linked with my love and respect for the enjoyment and production of movies, for all the triumphs and perils that they represent, on the screen and for the real people working long hours in front of and behind the camera to make them.
Honestly, shame on Chazelle for recreating such an exciting and volatile period in Tinseltown- the early sound/pre-Hayes-Code-era- as (at turns) a raunchy comedy, and as an uneven, lifeless melodrama. All of the comedic/satiric bits fail to land or are heavy-handed to the point of being exhaustingly stupid; then, the personal/introspective side just doesn't have enough focus, or doesn't stick at all. It's pretty-looking sometimes, and there are some neat setpieces, and the score is nice (Manny and Nellie's theme is achingly bittersweet). But that doesn't do nearly, NEARLY enough to justify the trainwreck that follows. The pit in my stomach set in with the elephant scene, which is where the trouble begins...
The rattlesnake bit half way through is a nice microcosm of this movie. It's bloated and unnecessary, goes on too long without being funny or really doing anything effectively. Chazelle later doubles down on this strategy, and tries to hammer down a point, with Nellie's struggle to fit in socially among the Hollywood elite at that house party- her puking being a metaphor for her disgust at the whole deal she's gotten herself into, and her inability to restrain herself for the sake of keeping up appearances. Gold star for middle-school symbolism, Mr. Chazelle! Very subtle, very smart.
Brad Pitt sleepwalks through the whole movie, Jack's barely-masked disillusionment with his life/career and ultimate suicide being without impact as a result. Generally unbelievable work and one of Pitt's weaker roles. Manny's story is equally unsatisfying and seems to have been constructed as a simple counterbalance to Nellie's dysfunction(a grab-bag of the industry's female stars at the time: she's perhaps Mae West for being too salacious for the press; Norma Desmond, for the career mismanagement; Greta Garbo, for leaving it all behind once at the top), which could've been done better, but wasn't. Robbie still manages to do well with the middling material she's given, which is saddening. Sidney Palmer's character feels like a total afterthought, an irony for a movie about a time in which black actors were all but relegated to servant/maid/porter roles. And Elinor St. John is a boilerplate stand-in for real gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper, or (her rival) Louella Parsons.
To top it all off, in the third act, Chazelle flashes-forward and has us sit down with Manny to watch an endlessly superior, far-funnier film about the transition from silent to sound: Singin' in the Rain (yes, even on a satiric/commentary basis: Don Lockwood/Lena Lamont's 'fake couple for the public that privately hates each other' dynamic; chasing fame at the cost of your identity/moral scruples; Kathy Selden's difficulty breaking into the industry, being used and sidelined by established stars and studio bosses and their interests). Oh, but he's not done yet! He generalizes it- treating us to a pathetic montage of *more* wonderful films across time, far better than his own (the end of which, we're finally reaching- thank god). I liked Chazelle's Whiplash a lot and it set up rather high expectations for this movie. But I never saw La La Land, and because of Babylon, probably never will, out of spite and as a result of how he literally dropped elephant poo on an opportunity to depict a very interesting time in Hollywood. There are many worse films, technically speaking. But this one pissed me off, and I truly do hate it with a burning passion, simply for the niche missed opportunity that it represents. I'm glad it lost money.
So to finish off this review and be productive: what should we watch instead? For the price that fame extracts from its troubled stars: Sunset Boulevard, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. For good comedy about the same thing, and the industry transition from silent to sound, and the difficult process of breaking into the industry: Singin' in the Rain (already mentioned, but again, I find it very funny that Chazelle almost hands this recommendation to the audience on a platter by having Manny watch it in the theater). For the latter theme, but as a more nuanced, dramatic take: the Janet Gaynor/Frederic March version of A Star is Born (side note: the recent Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga remake was a worthy update), or Mulholland Drive. For the anxiety-of-Hollywood-production/management angle that Manny brings to the table: Sullivan's Travels, The Player, maybe Hail Caesar (Josh Brolin's Eddie Mannix was a real person; cool to see some version of that story told, even semi-fictionalized).
There's simply no reason to watch Babylon, as it is so easily outclassed by other things, things that Chazelle has the humility to include snippets of within it. An homage that does so little right, and so much wrong, that it fails to justify its reason for existing, or escape what precedes: the people, the place, the foundational cultural moment in American entertainment to which it is indebted. A farce, a sin, a total travesty of a film!