Babylon Review: Damien Chazelle Fatuously Takes the Piss Out of Old Hollywood

Barely a minute into Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s manic blend of poison pen and love letter to Old Hollywood, an elephant takes a massive projectile dump, its pulsing anus spewing sludgy excrement in extreme close-up. Both the characters and the camera lens get drenched (read whatever meta-meaning you’d like into that), and the next three-plus hours do their darndest to live down to the expectations set by this scat-shooting opening salvo.

Chazelle’s Kenneth Anger-like proposal is that the silent-era dream factory was a demented and depraved abyss, yet hellishly fun as long as one remained in freefall. He lays out this jaundiced thesis via the frenetically staged introductory set piece, a raucous all-night party at an estate on the outskirts of Los Angeles, circa 1926, to which that poor pachyderm is delivered for, ahem, shits and giggles. Everyone in attendance is suggestive of a real-life figure, though the names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, as well as, presumably, to avert libel suits.

Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is the bawdy wild woman reminiscent of “It” girl Clara Bow, while Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the top-of-the-world heartthrob who recalls silent movie legend John “Great Lover” Gilbert. There’s also audience surrogate Manny Torres (Diego Calva), the starry-eyed outsider who suggests Bow’s friend and brief inamorato Gilbert Roland, though the character’s on-screen path differs greatly from his real-life, Mexican-born counterpart.

There are plenty of others, too, from the ever-swanning gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), an amalgam of British novelist Elinor Glyn and American journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, to Sapphic Anna May Wong simulacrum Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). Playing such frivolous fake-versus-real guessing games certainly helps to distract from the lunatic monotony of the film’s first 30 minutes, with all the capital-P perversions on display—from a Fatty Arbuckle-esque guest getting pissed on, to a garrulous LaRoy and Torres snorting mounds of cocaine, to a writhing wall-to-wall orgy in the mansion’s grand foyer—coming off like a pseud cineaste’s imitation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Babylon is all exclamation points. Chazelle adores delirium and the calamitously grand gestures of obsessive people, be they fucboi jazz aficionados or, as in First Man, Neil Armstrong. Here, LaRoy, Conrad, and Torres represent an unholy trinity of film-world fanatics, each addicted to the hectic magic of moviemaking, and it must be said that Robbie, Pitt, and Calva at least fully commit to realizing Chazelle’s vision, dimwitted as it finally proves to be.

One of Babylon’s more compelling sequences involves the trio’s day-in-the-life experiences at the fictional Kinoscope Studios as they frantically work on their respective projects from dawn to dusk. More guessing games can be played here (is that a Dorothy Arzner avatar directing LaRoy through her first vehicle?), though Chazelle is clearly in his element, using the compressed time frame and feverish editing to build a rudimentary yet still effective sense of suspense. LaRoy cries on cue time and again. Torres helps his Erich von Stroheim-ish boss get a crucial shot before the sun goes down. And Conrad rallies from a hungover stupor to swooningly smooch his co-star. The labor pains are all worth it. Movies…now more than ever!

Chazelle doesn’t shy away from the hell that comes with the heaven of artmaking. If anything, he loves the road to perdition too much, as if the inevitability of self-destruction is holy writ. He also adores his rise-and-fall narrative clichés, and with the coming of sound (damn you, Jazz Singer!) the bottom begins to fall out for the characters, leading them down a boulevard of broken dreams peppered with addiction, paranoia, societal shunning, and late-night rattlesnake jousting. It’s in the film’s protracted back half that the anxieties of influence really begin to show, particularly in the shameless way that Babylon steals from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, itself an egomaniacal clearing house of aesthetic and thematic hand-me-downs.

It’s shocking how much of a copy of a copy Babylon is. One of the major characters meets a similarly staged, portentously telegraphed fate as William H. Macy’s cuckold cameraman from Boogie Nights. And a late sequence involving Manny’s visit to Babylon executive producer Tobey Maguire—playing a sweaty, drug-addled fop named James McKay, who scuttlebutt has it may be an especially unflattering version of Charlie Chaplin—redoes the Anderson film’s infamous drug-deal-gone-bad sequence, right down to a loogie-hocking henchman taking the rhythmically disruptive place of Boogie Nights’s firecracker-tossing houseboy.

Chazelle appears to be saying that there are no original stories left to be told, and that the progenitors of those tales were unrepentant hedonists anyway, so we might as well just wallow in the excess like a pig in filth. His torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.

Visualizing a future of cinema that none of his pastiche characters will live to see, Chazelle traces an extremely Western canon line from Singin’ in the Rain to Vivre Sa Vie to Persona to a certain James Cameron-helmed blockbuster that just so happens to have a belated sequel out this year. It’s a flourishy final summation that should inspire as many death stares as eyerolls, the Film School 101 equivalent of that laughable five-minute environmental lecture that Steven Seagal gives at the end of his only directorial effort, On Deadly Ground. And it reveals Babylon for the sham piece of puffery that it is, a hubristic, down-in-the-muck advertisement for an ultimately dewy-eyed vision of the silver screen—one that long ago lost its luster.