Pitt and Margot Robbie, and many razzle dazzle setpieces, help lift a story in no hurry to engage with the true-life nastiness of its era
amien Chazelle returns to that la la land in which he made his big breakthrough, with a turbocharged but heavy-handed epic about the secret chaos and excess of 1920s silent-era Hollywood on the verge of talkie extinction, inspired by some well-known anecdotes and further embellishing the apocryphal rumours and tales. It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably, though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings.
Chazelle is also concerned to restore some of the minorities who have been erased in Hollywood’s history, as well as be more candid about the sordid realities, but he fudges the new #MeToo conversation about the Hollywood golden age: all the raunchy sex here is very much consensual.
There are plenty of great scenes here, particularly an outrageous setpiece in which Nellie, always up for a dare, fights a rattlesnake in the desert after one of many orgiastic parties; this is a contest that leads to a very erotic encounter with Lady Fay Zhu. She is also great when Nellie has a speaking role in a perky college-gal comedy; she does take after take with the director of photography melting in his soundproofed ”sweat box” enclosure.
Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.
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