Review: Babylon
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Starring Diego Calva, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Tobey Macguire
8.5/10
Taking place throughout the late ‘20s and into the early ‘30s, a time when the silent era was leading into the talkies, Babylon paints an incredibly vast picture of this time in American cinema. Despite the hefty 189 minute run-time, the film zips along while never losing steam, as it fills itself with such great detail in bringing the audience into this wild, wild world of Hollywoodland.
The film follows Manny (Diego Calva), a hard-working and loyal assistant who has aspirations for producing his own films. During a massive party of debauchery, he meets aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) who by chance lands a small part in a silent movie. She uses both her deeply felt acting skills and her cunning manipulation to secure bigger and better roles, until she becomes something of an ‘It girl’ in Hollywood – but unfortunately, it’s right at a time when the silent era is ending.
Meanwhile, Manny’s quick-thinking skills save the production of a film, whose leading star, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), befriends and invites him to even more parties of utter hedonism. Although Jack is one of the biggest stars in Los Angeles, the transition to talkies will be the ultimate test to see if he can persist in the industry.
As it goes with most tales of Hollywood, everyone wants to be somebody. There’s an intensity to just how much each character wants to be a star, or to make movies, or to make money, or to simply keep a good thing going. It’s a touching tale for all, even though it’s going to end depressingly for most, and it never feels laboured or overly familiar, with enough time spent on each character and their fame and pain.
And all this “stars in their eyes” wonder resides in a world of intense degeneracy, complete with copious amounts of drugs, booze, and orgies. It’s a fascinating revelation of this film that gets overlooked in others – the carefree hedonism of Hollywood (both on screen and off) in the Pre-Code days, before the morality police came in with their Hays code, ridding Hollywood of its crudeness and instilling a dry Catholic-friendly sensibility.
This makes for a fascinating story of this time, though one that’s filled to the brim with crudeness, especially when mob boss James McKay (Tobey Maguire) is introduced to the film and invites us to the underground where the most heinous acts are performed to a cheering crowd. Some of Babylon may be depraved (actually, quite a lot of it), but it contrasts and mixes well with the more innocent side of how simply affecting the movies can be. Ending with an astonishing tribute to them in the film’s final moment, Babylon stands as a tricky, but immensely enveloping tribute to the art-form and its history, with little judgement, no matter how earned it may’ve been.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN