Babylon (2022) There's two ways the above sub-title of this post serves as an apt description......
I could use it to refer to the poor elephant in the film's opening scene, who lets loose with a Niagara Falls of diarrhea upon the head of its trainer......a sight you'll never unsee....
Or I could easily use it as a metaphor for the film itself.......an 3 hour elephantine epic of delusional grandeur, stuffed to the rafters with endless frenzied debauchery......a nearly unwatchable three ring circus laid out like a goulash mixture of Federico Fellini, Ken Russell, Baz Luhrmann and Quentin Tarantino.
Writer-director Damien Chazelle (of "La La Land") wants it every which way with this film.....first, to rub your face in his warped, funhouse-mirror depiction of 1920's Hollywood......blizzards of cocaine, rivers of booze, depraved bachanalles, and gallons of projectile vomiting. Woo-hoo.
If you can survive about 2 hours and 45 minutes of that stuff, Chazelle then has the nerve to beg you for an emotional response to his final sequence......a sentimental summing up of the magic of movies and eternal iconography of their images.
Is this guy kidding us or what? He hopes to wring tears and sighs out of an audience as if they've just been sitting through "Cinema Paradiso"?
Trust BQ on this....'Cinema Paradiso' this ain't.....
Here's actually what you do sit through before Chazelle lurches into his unearned warm 'n fuzzy 'Aren't Movies Wonderful?!!' finale.......
Edited like a music video on meth and accompanied by relentless jazz to a pounding beat, we're thrown into a giant Hollywood party that's more like a trip through Dante's Inferno or maybe hell itself in Milton's "Paradise Lost".
In the middle of this wanton, dissolute bash, we meet the film's leads, silent movie heartthrob Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), drug-addled and ego-crazed wanna-be starlet Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie) and ambitious, movie-loving gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva), eager to work his way up the Hollywood ladder to producer.
As Tinseltown's on the verge of the momentous, earth-shaking switch to "Talkies", the film maintains its feverish, frantic depictions of what was once called "a lunatic asylum run by the inmates" .Damien Chazelle takes that phrase way too literally....
There's a lengthy sequence showing the unbridled freewheeling chaos of silent film production in the still undeveloped wilds of California, but like everything else in the movie, it's overlong and overdone......(but then again, that's hold true for almost every scene in the film.)
From there it's on the talkies, with Robbie and the crew labor to complete one shot in one of the first studio 'sound stages'. Botched take after take, they're all driven to hysterical rage by the initial primitive technology of live sound recording. A bravura sequence alright, but its length almost brings you to the same breaking point as the cast......
On and on it goes, with Pitt nobly attempting to bring some depth and subtext to his role. Robbie hurls herself into playing Nellie with perpetual fearless abandon, but it's exhausting to watch her. After awhile, her bug-eyed, top-of-her-lungs portrayal makes her look like she's still doing Harley Quinn in 'Suicide Squad ' outtakes. .
Somewhere around the halfway mark in the running time, "Babylon" finally calms down enough to present at least one well written thought out moment.......in which seen-it-all gossip monger Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) succinctly explains to a crestfallen Jack Conrad that his reign of movie stardom is as doomed as silent films themselves, but that he'll get to live forever on celluloid. A beautifully crafted scene and as performed by Smart and Pitt, it's as close to clear, perceptive drama as this film ever gets.
As far as the other actors.....I'll save Tobey Maguire any further embarrassment by not going into any detailed description of his ridiculous turn as an ebullient, demented gangster whose a big fan of a hellish hunk who chomps down on live rats. Please......don't ask. If only Maguire had been content with his credit as one the film's co-producers.....(more than of enough of a stain on his IMDB credits)
I suppose all avid movie buffs should subject themselves to 'Babylon' at least once. For those of you who prefer not to stray off the path of mainstream movies.....you'll need courage, patience, and strong stomach if you dare to endure it. Be afraid. Be very afraid. 1 star (*).
No comments:
Post a Comment