BABYLON

 

BABYLON

 

          No doubt the most controversial film of the year, at least so far (remember, it’s only January, the month when most of the reviewers have already used up their 10 Best of the Year lists), Babylon deals with one of Hollywood’s favorite subjects, itself.  The movie explores some of the most notorious moments from the last days of the silent pictures, when the industry reached a kind of pinnacle of art before the transformation wrought by sound at least temporarily forced them into a kind of aesthetic retreat.

          Any moviegoer bludgeoned by the special effects that nowadays pass for filmmaking in all those comic book/superhero movies might find some satisfaction in Babylon, which reminds us of the high level of skill achieved in those days before what were initially called “talkies.”  Although bulky and clumsily edited, the movie displays numerous entrancing moments of actual filmmaking and some equally surprising moments among its several loosely connected stories, all of them revolving around a small group of characters.  Babylon in fact consists more of discrete moments and sketchy plotlines that now and then tie the people together; the editing, as a result, tends to paper over a number of holes in the narrative.

          As a kind of visual overture, the picture opens with a couple of defining sequences, one involving an elephant that suffers an apparent attack of diarrhea as its trainer is standing behind it, directly in the target area, so to speak.  That moment prepares the way for another later scene, in which the major female character, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), projectile vomits all over her snobbish host at a high toned cocktail party.  Nice.

          The most striking part of the overture, however, involves a massive, drunken, drug-fueled, orgiastic party at a Hollywood mansion.  In a long sequence that challenges anything directed by Cecil B. DeMille in his best Sex Life in Ancient Rome movies, hundreds of people dance, drink, snort cocaine, fight, fuck, etc.  At one point a stripper unveils more than her body, opening a large cylinder, from which a dwarf emerges, jumping up and down on a pogo stick shaped like a large penis: top that, Cecil B.  Underlining the dictum that a rifle hung on the wall in the first scene of a story/play/movie, should be fired by the last scene, that elephant shows up, uninvited, lumbers through the doors, and pretty much breaks up the party.

          The several actual plotlines of the movie draw together a fading matinee idol, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the outrageous starlet Nellie LaRoy, and a fledgling filmmaker, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), all of whom interact at some point with each other and many of the other characters.  Presumably based on some actual figures from Hollywood’s past, they follow some of the patterns of those people’s lives, notably Jack Conrad, who seems a version of among others, John Gilbert, an actor whose career effectively ended with the onset of sound. 

Although somewhat exaggerated, Babylon shows some of the deleterious effects of that addition of sound, especially the transfer of power from the director to the sound engineer, who maintained, with great difficulty, the necessary silence on the set so that nothing, including the noise of the camera, could interfere with the recording of dialogue.  The outcome, of course, immobilized motion pictures for a while, abandoning the sweep and movement and freedom of silent cinema, for static, enclosed, talky filmed plays.

Despite its awkward and sometimes amateurish editing, the movie provides a sometimes wildly entertaining glimpse of the world of silent cinema.  Its exaggerations at times actually seem something like a tribute to the process, the art, the people of the industry and 1920s Hollywood, even with an occasional moment that indicates the darker side of the subject.  In one fleeting scene the picture shows the squalid reality of an ordinary actor, whose life and context differ drastically from the profligate extravagance, the opulent mansions, the snazzy cars and clothes of the great stars.  But in Babylon, as in Hollywood after all, nothing succeeds like excess.

 

 

THE FABELMANS

 THE FABELMANS

 

          Difficult as it may be to accept, and despite his career and reputation, Steven Spielberg’s film/memoir The Fabelmans hardly matches up to anything like his best, or even his less than best work.  The picture deals with the childhood and young manhood of Sammy Fabelman, a surrogate for Spielberg, whose life mirrors that of the director, from the time he sees his first movie and like so many kids, falls in love with the art; unlike most, of course, he ends up devoting his life to making movies and ultimately, as we all know, becoming the most successful director in the history of cinema, a fact that makes this film so surprisingly disappointing.

          The film’s progress resembles the usual pattern of such works, taking young Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) from childhood through adolescence and finally to his first moment in an actual Hollywood backlot.  Some of the most entertaining parts of that progress naturally involve Sammy’s essentially self-taught education in filmmaking.  Regarding his interest as a hobby, his father Burt (Paul Dano) buys him his first camera, one of those Super-8s known to every beginner; Sammy moves on from that device to ever more sophisticated equipment.  He displays both his growing competence and his ingenuity when he makes some dramatic action films employing his Boy Scout troop, with special effects involving toy guns, dirt bombs, firecrackers, and more important, infusing some of them with emotional content.

          Perhaps the most important work he accomplishes, however, creates the odd connection between his passion for the art and the family dynamic that really forms the central subject of the movie.  Since Sammy’s obsession with the camera occupies so much of his time, in addition to his action films he also makes home movies.  While editing one of those films of a family campout, he notices on the background of a clip some romantic interaction between his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and the family’s best friend and courtesy “uncle,” Bennie (Seth Rogen), which in effect upsets his whole world.

          That glimpse of the scene, a kind of low-rent, amateur version of some brilliant moments in the works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Brian De Palma, really changes the meaning of the film, possibly without the director fully realizing it.  The Fabelmans then becomes something like a study of Mitzi’s life and character, fully revealed in the process of Sammy’s filmmaking, an attractive, supportive mother, an unfulfilled pianist whose music nobody in the family takes seriously, a woman who yearns for another kind of life.  At that campout, with no particular urging, Mitzi performs a not particularly graceful interpretive dance with a vaguely, perhaps innocently, even rather sadly erotic appeal.  The dance, the not quite translucent nightgown revealing her body, the rather clumsy movements combine to create the most genuinely touching moment in the entire film.

          The connection that his footage reveals establishes a hostility in Sammy that puzzles his mother until he finally runs the snippet of film through his projector for her, showing her walking into the woods with Bennie, sharing an embrace.  It also underlines the Oedipal strain in Spielberg’s films, touched on lightly in E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial and overpoweringly present in A. I. Artificial Intelligence.  The relationship with his mother, which finally fizzles (his parents eventually divorce), really constitutes the emotional center of the picture.

          As Sammy, now played by Gabriel LaBelle, grows older and his filmmaking develops along with his personal progress, he understandably uses it as a way to impress his high school classmates, who mostly seem hostile and anti-Semitic.  His California high school, incidentally, looks just like all the other Hollywood institutions of secondary education, stocked with blond, fit, attractive WASPs, all of them looking much older than teenagers.  When he finally comes of age—the director skips over a lot of years and events—he somehow manages to find a toehold in the film industry, which leads to one of the best moments in all of The Fabelmans.  He gets the chance to meet John Ford, played by David Lynch of all people, and learns his first real lesson about the business and the art of bigtime cinema.  The film ends on that entertaining and wholly delightful note, with Hollywood and grand success in the young man’s future.