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Babylon (18, 189 min)
Qualification: ***
Verdict: Puffy and Nutty
The late 1920s in Hollywood was a time of bloated, self-indulgent excess. So it’s fitting, though of course not deliberate, that Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, is open to the same accusation.
Chazelle, who is still just 38 years old, is a writer-director who already has some major achievements under his belt. His last three films, Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016) and First Man (2018), garnered no fewer than 22 Academy Award nominations between them. Indeed, La La Land won the coveted statuette for Best Picture. . . if only for a minute or two before one of the big blunders of Oscar night ended up in the hands of the intended winner, Moonlight, instead.
But when everything you’ve touched has turned to critical or commercial gold, fewer and fewer people are willing to tell you to control it, to suggest that your drama takes place during those seismic years when silent movies gave way to silent movies. . talkies don’t really need to take place in what feels like real time.
The late 1920s in Hollywood was a time of self-indulgent excess. It’s fitting, if not deliberate, that Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is open to the same accusation.
Still, within its three-plus hours, there’s plenty to enjoy, including a bravura start and a brilliant finish.
Babylon opens in 1926 in Bel Air, now one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but then mostly a barren desert. A handsome, humble and hard-working Mexican immigrant named Manny Torres (Diego Calva) has risen to the challenge of transporting an elephant to a bacchanalia party, setting the stage for one of the loudest bowel movements you’re likely to see on the big screen. screen.
The party is a wildly extravagant orgy of decadence (if possible, visualize a dwarf in a phallus-shaped jumper and you’ll get at least part of the picture), and it’s there that we first meet reckless, irresponsible wannabe star Nellie LaRoy (Robbie, with license to exaggerate), and jaded, aging morning star Jack Conrad (Pitt, sporting the obligatory Douglas Fairbanks mustache).
Margot Robbie plays the role of a reckless and irresponsible aspiring star, while Brad Pitt plays the jaded and aging morning star Jack Conrad.
Oddly, but strikingly reminiscent of their characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), their respective stories don’t clash much for the rest of the film. But Manny connects them by falling head over heels for Nellie and also going to work for Jack, relentlessly climbing the greasy pole to become something of a studio hotshot himself.
With Nellie also triumphing, this sounds like a straight forward linear narrative, only Chazelle doesn’t do it like that. A kind of dramatic incoherence sets in, with one visually stunning piece linked only tenuously to the next.
Babylon opens in 1926 in Bel Air, now one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but then mostly a barren desert.
The party is a wildly extravagant orgy of decadence (if possible, visualize a dwarf in a phallus-shaped jumper and you’ll get at least part of the picture).
Supporting characters (one played by Olivia Wilde, another by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin) come and go, though some are much more compelling than others. A Hedda Hopper-esque gossip columnist named Elinor St John (Jean Smart) shares one of the film’s best-written scenes as she bluntly explains to Jack why her star is fading.
And Tobey Maguire makes the most of what is little more than a cameo as a gang boss to whom Nellie, a compulsive gambler, owes money. For all the delights of these sequences, however, Babylon all too often feels like an overly sprawling sketch show, and ultimately rather less than the sum of its sometimes seductive parts.
Chazelle strives to keep everything rooted in historical fact, with casual references to the likes of Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin and Gary Cooper, and dramatizing the 1927 New York premiere of The Jazz Singer, the first film with fully synchronized sound.
Yet I reeled trying to shake off not just the onset of the cramps, but also the vague, disheartening feeling that the ending had just tricked me into thinking Babylon is a better movie than it is. That ending, without giving too much away, takes us back to 1952, when Singin’ In The Rain is playing to a captivated Los Angeles audience.
Chazelle deftly uses it to proclaim his own passion for the medium, not as Steven Spielberg does in next week’s giveaway The Fabelmans, but by bombarding us with a dizzying montage of images that spans nearly the entire history of cinema.
It’s a great show. But it inadvertently encourages the idea that perhaps Singin’ In The Rain told the story of the advent of talkies with far more discipline and charm.
ALSO SHOWS
Lancashire hotshot taunts townspeople
the netflix movie Dave’s Bank (12, 107 minutes, ***) is ‘based on a true story’, that of self-made millionaire Dave Fishwick (Rory Kinnear), who overcame opposition from uptight London plutocrats to set up his own independent bank in his hometown of Burnley, lending money to local people. and reinvesting all profits in the community.
Director Chris Foggin and screenwriter Piers Ashworth also brought us crowd-pleasing Fisherman’s Friends in 2019, and Bank Of Dave follows pretty much the same formula.
Rory Kinnear plays self-made millionaire Dave Fishwick in the Netflix movie Bank Of Dave.
Replace the Cornish pies with Lancashire stew and you’ve got a strikingly similar tale of regional villagers triumphing over the metropolitan establishment, to the swaggering London cove who falls for the beautiful local lass.
I was initially annoyed with hackneyed dialogue that made me roll my eyes, as a brilliant lawyer named Hugh (Joel Fry) is ordered by his boss to travel to meet Dave and the pair banter as city dwellers always do. in movies like this, with brats. North Watford jokes and just a vague awareness of Burnley pantomime… ‘don’t they have a football team or something?’.
Little by little, however, the story and the acting won me over. Kinnear is utterly handsome as Dave, and writing like a Lancastrian, he just about manages the accent.
He gets solid support from Fry, and from Phoebe Dynevor as that obligatory attractive local, while Hugh Bonneville enjoys his cameo as a stuffy fat cat, determined to prove that only the “right” people should run banks, not people with flats. vocals It is a sweet and uplifting film.
Alice, honey (15, 90 minutes, ****) is the opposite. Coercive and controlling behavior by men towards their female partners has been in the news this week, following horrifying revelations about former police officer David Carrick.
But this film, an auspicious directorial debut from Mary Nighy (daughter of Bill Nighy and Diana Quick), shows us vividly (thanks in no small part to Anna Kendrick’s terrific performance in the title role, as a woman with a domineering boyfriend) how psychological rather than physical abuse evolves.
Sacred Spider (18, 116 min, ***) it brings us back to the physical with a vengeance. It is a gripping Iranian-language drama based on the true story of a serial killer on a violent religious crusade to cleanse the streets of prostitution.
I saw it at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and I can confirm that it is not quickly forgotten.