Damien Chazelle's sprawling "Babylon" is the flip side to his 2016 hit "La La Land." Both are movies about movies, set primarily in Los Angeles and focus on characters who dream. But where "La La Land" was all lightness, a gentle valentine to love and hope and the larger-than-life way that movies capture our hearts, "Babylon" is darkness. Set mostly in the years between 1926 and 1932, when the movie business transitioned from silent films to talkies, it's a tale of ambition and excess that's often sordid and ugly, literally starting off with a shower of elephant feces.
And yet, this story of a hedonistic lost Hollywood has the same thing at its core as "La La Land": a passionate love for the art of moviemaking, expressed both by the characters and by Chazelle himself through them. Depicting a time of excess, it's a movie full of excesses: its overlong running time (over three hours), its wildly elaborate party scenes in which masses of people seem to meld into one grotesque moving thing, its over-the-top closing montage in which colors seem to run like blood, its galloping pace. "Babylon" is a movie with a fever, and that fever is film.
A number of characters travel the sometimes arduous journey that is "Babylon" with us, many inspired by real-life figures from movie history. Three of them are central. Diego Calva is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant and behind-the-scenes underling eager to become part of something bigger, and ready to do whatever he needs to do to become a producer. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a stratospheric star of silent film finding his way in a new world. And Margot Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, a starlet in the making: canny enough to wangle her way into a Hollywood producer's party in a barely-there dress, naive enough to dance in glee under the starlight when she gets a movie offer. "Ain't life grand?" she says, in words echoed later in the film under rather different circumstances. All three give lovely performances, still points in this film's mad whirl. There's a moment near the end where Pitt exits a room, swaying and humming just the tiniest bit, dancing to music only he hears; a few minutes later, Robbie's character does the same thing elsewhere. They're both living in a movie, whether anyone's watching or not.
If all of these characters sound like predictable types to you, that's the point: Hollywood deals in types, and "Babylon" is full of scenes you've seen before: the earthy ingénue trying to act refined at a posh gathering; the chaos of an Old Hollywood set, where multiple takes keep getting ruined by something going wrong; the movie star whose marriage is not-so-secretly imploding. (There are also a few scenes you've never seen before, particularly one involving a snake that I'd rather not contemplate further.) But Chazelle drenches these moments in style, in music, in beautiful actors shrieking at the camera, in bigness; you watch not just for the story but for the immersion he creates.
I can't say I truly enjoyed watching "Babylon," or that I'd ever want to see it again, but I definitely haven't stopped thinking about it since screening it earlier this month, and there was a passage near the end that moved me immensely — by showing me something I've seen before, many times, made all the sweeter by the frenetic trashiness around it. I won't spoil it. Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist played with feline languor by Jean Smart (who deserved far more screen time), at one point employs the phrase "a maelstrom of bad taste and sheer magic." It's an appropriate description for "Babylon" as well.
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'BABYLON'
3 stars (out of 4)
Rating: R (for graphic nudity, drug use, bloody violence, pervasive language and strong & crude sexual content).
Running time: 3:09
How to watch: In theaters Friday
