Babylon

Movie Name: Babylon
Year of Release: 2022
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Diego Calva, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo, Lukas Haas, Max Minghella, Samara Weaving, Tobey Maguire, Eric Roberts, Rory Scovel, Jeff Garlin, Katherine Waterston, Ethan Suplee, Olivia Hamilton, Flea, Olivia Wilde
Genre: Drama
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 1
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Synopsis and Review

After the critically well received "First Man" which somehow never truly found its audience, writer/director Damien Chazelle returned with a bigger canvas/opus, focused on the movie industry itself, in the roaring 20s as the talkies were changing everything in that industry, including upending the lives of its big players. The narrative while focusing on the threads of a few key characters, chooses it's core emcee to be Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant who is intent on working in the film industry. While arranging for the transportation of an elephant to a wild party, he meets and becomes enamored withe Nellie LaRoy, a young ambitious and full of personality woman from New Jersey who declares herself a star even if she's never been on a movie set. As a result of attending that party, everything changes for them. Nellie gets recruited to shoot a film, while Manny becomes friendly with Jack Conrad, a big star at MGM, who also helps him secure a job at Kinoscope. While Nellie becomes quite popular, aptly documented by gossip columnist Elinor St. John, Manny also climbs the studio ranks, starting to even get directorial gigs. Things start to change for Nellie with the advent of sound in films, where she has considerable challenges dealing with the technical aspects of film making,  which mixed with her drug use and gambling start destroying her reputation. To pile on her issues, her father, who is also her manager is poorly managing her funds and her relationship with Fay Zhu (a Chinese-American cabaret singer) is also cut short at the insistence of the studio, due to stricter morality codes that have come into play. Another character that is a focus of attention is Sydney Palmer, a fantastic musician in his own right, who suddenly sees himself in Hollywood, but also witnesses the other side of the dream. Nellie gets in trouble with gambling debts, and desperately asks Manny for help. At the same time Jack Conrad realizes his time at the top is coming to an end and there's nothing he can do to change it.

"Babylon" is one of those features that is ripe with ambition. It has a plethora of plot threads, each competing for attention. What it doesn't seem to have is a bit of a quality barometer for the narrative that is trying to build and editing capabilities which would enable its director to recount it both succinctly and with substance. It's a film that depicts the excess of Hollywood in the 1920s, when the film industry was growing and establishing itself, how stars and fortunes were easily made. In parallel with this it also depicts its uglier side, by showcasing the racism, misogyny and sheer mercenary aspect that ruled everything and everyone working in it. None of these topics are new and have been of course the focus of multiple films and tv shows, however director Damien Chazelle infuses the film with a frantic energy that supposedly illustrates the vibe and debauchery taking place, though in an apparent quest to be somewhat graphical, taste level of any kind has been something that he has chosen to avoid. It's a very self-indulgent film, where there are entire sections devoted to plot points that add absolutely nothing to the characters or to the narrative itself (case in point, the entry scenes with the Elephant, the snake biting situation, the gangster showcase of the pits of hell, and the list goes on). There is something interesting about these characters and the journey they experience, but the director chooses to focus more on the noise and the clichés one associates from that particular time period, though not much from the great depression is touched upon or even illustrated (no misery porn here). There's not much dimension given to the central characters, or the supporting ones for that matter, which is even more surprising considering this film goes on for over 3 hours (though it feels like double that time). It's genuinely perplexing how someone read this script and thought "I want to see this on the screen", and this sentiment doesn't come from the characters or parts of their journey: it's more of a sentiment towards a film that at some point turns into a pedestrian intellectual reflection on the power of film (and sadly it taints all the films it brings into its jarring mess). The cast, particularly Margot Robbie, Jean Smart, Katherine Waterston, Rory Scovel, and Lukas Haas manage to get out of this mess unscathed, the same going for the cinematography from Linus Sandgren, but this is a low point for all the people involved in this film. Avoid.