When the going gets tough, Hollywood has never shied away from reminding us of how its big-screen melodramas have offered us brief, triumphant respite from a century of real-world tumult and tragedy.
Most of the past postpandemic year, steadily safe-bet releases have taken the bombastic spectacle route and banked on the dedication of superhero obsessives and franchise fan bases to get bums back in seats.
Enter La La Land’s Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle, who tries the unenviable trick to combine the nostalgic self-obsession of Hollywood with the epic scale and ambition of a blockbuster in Babylon. His star-studded paean to the dying days of the silent era, a three-hour, go-for-broke, visually expansive and messy mix of 10% historical truth and 90% myth, is 100% entertaining and intriguing.
We begin in 1926, in the rural backwater of Beverly Hills, where the tone is set by Sisyphean attempts to transport an elephant up a hill, ending in the kind of scatological indulgence you’d expect from a Leon Schuster film. This is only the first salvo in recent cinema’s most memorably frenzied, Dionysian and technically dazzling opening 50 minutes as the elephant arrives at its destination — an A-list movie industry party at the home of a powerful Hollywood producer.
The party is drug-fuelled, sex-addled excess pulled straight out of the legends of the 1970s hedonist uberpalace Studio 54. It firmly sets up the film as what Chazelle describes as “a hate letter to early Hollywood” as a California factory of populist magic entertainments made by reprobate, creative visionaries at the peak of the silent era. There, as long as they made profits for the studios, they could indulge their excesses.
It’s at the party, between orgiastic abandon and cocaine-addled big-dream sharing that we are introduced to the three protagonists, whose lives will intersect, diverge and be consumed by the kingdom of shadows over the course of the film.
There’s the handsome, square-jawed, Mexican immigrant striver Manny Torres (Diego Calva, the closest the film offers to an audience surrogate), who will soon jump from elephant wrangler and general gofer to assistant, to the town’s biggest star, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who arrives drunk, gets much drunker and somehow still manages to drag his hungover, soon-to-be-divorced shell on set in the morning.
There’s also the brassy, still-a-nobody but certain of her star material Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie). With a little help from Manny and some sand-dune-sized piles of cocaine, she’ll soon become the lusty life of the Hieronymus Bosch-inspired, jazz beat scored bacchanal and walk out of it onto the set of her first film.
That’s all before the title of the film even appears and Chazelle follows it up with a bravado tribute to the chaos of early filmmaking in the days before sound forced everyone into separate sound-stages and much longer, more expensive shooting schedules. As the introduction of sound gets nearer over the course of the narrative’s next few years, it also signals the predictable demise of the three protagonists who have been unlucky to reach the heights of silent Hollywood just as the wave is about to crash.
The arcs in their journeys are taken liberally with knowing homage to the grand old dame of classic films — Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s 1952 technicolour love-letter Singing in the Rain. Nelly may be everyone’s desire-stirring silent screen sex bomb but with the arrival of sound her nasal New Jersey twang causes scales to swiftly fall from eyes and leaves her hopelessly trying to paper over the wild child image she’s so successfully milked. Conrad might have a killer smile and smouldering stare but when he opens his mouth, his stilted delivery makes him the object of ridicule. As for Manny, well he’s just too nice and sentimental for a ruthless industry where the cost of immortality is often complete personal destruction at the expense of moral ideals.
Along the way to its time-jumping film-history crammed finale, which unevenly mixes Oscar tribute video with tearful sentimentality, Chazelle offers a series of unforgettable set-pieces. They include a fight with a rattlesnake, a very funny dissection of the paralysing restrictions of early sound filming, projectile vomiting, and a descent into the “asshole of Los Angeles”, in the company of a terrifyingly vampiric Tobey Maguire.
Somewhere in the few breathing spaces offered in between all of this visually dazzling overload there’s a hindsight-spectacled judgment on the undeniable racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalist ruthlessness, which always lurked beneath the shiny veneer of the dream factory.
Chazelle’s film demands much from its audience and doesn’t always successfully deliver on all its promises, but ultimately it is a “balls to the wall” attempt to remind audiences of what films were and still can be without the easy traps of franchise expectations and CGI-drenched fantasy. It’s a ride, once taken, that is not easily forgotten and definitely worth the price of the ticket.
• Babylon is now on circuit.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.