Babylon

BABYLON   ***1/2

Damien Chazelle

2022

IDEA:  A veteran actor, a Mexican immigrant, a fledgling starlet, and a black jazz trumpeter navigate the choppy waters of Hollywood's transition from silent film to sound.

BLURB:  Movies about Hollywood may be a dime a dozen, but there are few if any as devilishly committed to eviscerating its glamour and mystique as Babylon. Chazelle’s rollicking, scabrous opus presents the early days of Tinseltown as a farcically debauched Wild West fueled by all manner of turpitude, abuse, and obscene excess. To make it here, he posits, is to leave morality at the door, to submit to a system of exploitation and debasement in the name of mass entertainment. Even then, longevity and success are hardly guaranteed. As a contemporaneous classic asked: what price Hollywood? Kicking things off with a Bel Air bacchanal before transitioning to the hilariously protracted pandemonium of a desert film shoot, Chazelle constructs much of Babylon as a series of self-contained set pieces that astringently undercut the romance associated with Old Hollywood. The director revels in pointedly sardonic juxtapositions. A bromide about making it to the land of dreams is followed by most of the principal characters waking up in shabby tenement buildings and boarding houses; an inquiry about the need for sound in movies is answered by a loud bowel movement; the shooting of a single take of a cheap early talkie, constantly bungled, is punctuated by streams of profanity before culminating in a negligent homicide. Like all of Chazelle’s films so far, Babylon is a portrait of mad endeavoring, in which the endeavor in question seems increasingly unable to justify the human toll of achieving it. Also like his other films, and in some ways to an even greater degree, it’s an exhilarating showcase of sheer outsize filmmaking mastery and gusto, marked by Linus Sandgren’s elaborate tracking shots, Tom Cross’s rhythmic editing, and Justin Hurwitz’s thumping jazz score. With its monster length, Babylon can feel pleonastic in its messaging and effects, and Chazelle’s handling of the character arcs within his multi-stranded narrative falls well short of the Altman- or PTA-level complexity to which he sometimes seems to strive. But this is thrilling, audacious stuff, a Hollywood philippic/valentine for which the dream factory is perhaps more accurately seen, at least for those inside, as one of nightmares.