'Babylon' goes straight to your veins, then heart, then brain
Paramount
You can absolutely think it sounds ridiculous to describe anything as “Boogie Nights” meets “Singin’ in the Rain.” Or to wonder how a filmmaker can simultaneously celebrate the remarkable power of movies while indicting much about the industry, exploring the ability to create and destroy, prop up and tear down, cast and cast aside, in all its swirling glory and ruthless consumption. Deliberate and wise in all the ways a maximalist like Baz Luhrmann is vapid and exhausting, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s (“Whiplash,” “La La Land”) “Babylon” is THE MOVIES in big, sweaty, swooning, tragic capital letters. And the rare three-hour movie you could watch twice in a row.
Margot Robbie, in another starring performance that feels like a new discovery, plays Nellie, an aspiring actress in the mid-1920s who’s already sure that she’s a star–it’s something you can’t become but simply something you are or aren’t, she says. She sneaks into a big-time Hollywood party thanks to Manny (Diego Calva of “Narcos: Mexico,” excellent), who has about as little clout as someone at this high-profile carnival of debauchery can have. (Manny helped secure the elephant, which is somehow one of the more restrained methods of entertainment on hand.) This event, which Chazelle gives dizzying life with the same astonishing flair he brought to the opening sequence of “La La Land,” will launch each character’s trajectory into moving pictures, and the results range from screamingly funny to surprisingly moving to immensely complex in its look at a world that replicates humanity but doesn’t always practice it.
This isn’t to suggest Chazelle is the first person to acknowledge the high stakes and cold realities of this industry. But few have brought such exhilarating contradictions to a portrait of people drawn to the development of an escape and yet inevitably victimized by the implicitly ticking clock of fantasy. Also featuring typically excellent, mature work by Brad Pitt as aging star Jack Conrad, “Babylon” considers the constantly expanding potential of movies as well as their limits as influenced by both the values and instincts of the people both making and watching.
Also recalling Chazelle’s “La La Land,” the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar” and more, “Babylon” doesn’t quite sustain its buzz, perhaps deflating instead of dialing into characters that ultimately remain a little too broad. But Chazelle brings both empathy and harsh truths to the idea that human flaws make it something like a miracle any time great love or a great movie emerges out of nothing–while wondering what we gain and lose when looking to art as an artificial source. “Babylon” is about how we delight in the ways movies lie to us, that anyone can love without complication, that something filmed is immortal. New ways push against old institutions. Multiple revolving doors determine the life cycle of creativity, and the timeframe of a legacy.
Most filmmakers can’t even fathom this many big ideas in a project so gutsy in its technical and historical scope. As with much of his previous work, Chazelle is an essential chronicler of fierce dreams and heartbreaking compromises. In “Babylon,” subjective taste and objective identity collide, with movies never seeming more human than when they pursue euphoria and make it seem like time can stop, only to, no matter how high the peaks, eventually reach a point when the lights turn on, and you go and determine how to engage with what else is out there.
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