Babylon – Review
188 Minutes, Rated R
Written and Directed by Damien Chazelle
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, then listen or watch as he and Valerie Cameron from What To See With Val discuss the film in more depth.**
Synopsis:
From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
Oh, Babylon…
Damien Chazelle, he who gave us the love letter to Hollywood with La La Land, is back with another paeon to Hollywood greatness/madness: Babylon.
Another 3+ hour epic for this holiday/awards season viewing, Babylon feels every single minute of its collosal runtime.
Honestly, there is some good stuff in here, even if this is little more than a bloated version of Singin’ In The Rain. The performances are good, especially Brad Pitt as the aging silent film star struggling with the emergence of sound. It’s certainly much better than Margot Robbie’s silent sex-pot who simply can NOT make the transition to having to actually talk on screen.
Also enjoyable is the sequence where Robbie is doing her first talkie and we see the technical challenges of it all, from overheated sets (too much fan noise) to cameramen in hotboxes (the cameras are too loud), to the ticking of watches being picked up by the precisely–and I mean precisely–placed overhead microphones.
It was a sound technician’s nightmare.
It is a very pretty film, though. Some of the camerawork borders on genius, and nearly every shot taken in a vacuum is frame-worthy…
But overall, the film is simply too long, too aimless, and too gratuitous in almost every way to be a truly enjoyable experience. The opening Hollywood orgy, for example, runs a full 30 minutes and contributes perhaps 3 minutes of character and story development, and that’s all before the film’s title card hits the screen.
There is an overlong and completely unnecessary subplot involving Tobey Maquire that does nothing except add to the–stop me if you’ve heard this–overlong run time.
Diego Calva’s Manuel is an intriguing character, rising from gopher to fixer, to assistant, to producer, to near visionary, before falling again to the bottom, fleeing his beloved Hollywood just to avoid, well, bad things.
It is, just like Chazelle’s Hollywood, too much. Too much of everything except a streamlined story. It is as enamored of itself as the Hollywood it depicts, and while that may be the point, it doesn’t make it a good movie.
Babylon opens wide in theaters December 23 and stars Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, and Olivia Wilde.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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