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.
