A dwarf fires cream from a prop cock. Storerooms stack coke and heroin to the ceiling, urine junkies are treated to the sex of their dreams and defecating elephants are deployed to cover up all the dead escorts. These are just the opening minutes to Babylon, the latest pessimistic and poetically profane epic from a filmmaker often mistaken for an optimist. At least until now.
Damian Chazelle is best known for La La Land, the 2016 musical fable of two struggling LA artists relying on one on another to actualise, before ultimately choosing to end the relationship in pursuit of their glitz and glam dreams. It won several Oscars (but not the big one), and Chazelle’s fangirl fetishism for classic Hollywood was celebrated by many as the high watermark for ‘movies about movies’. With only three films to his name, Chazelle was all of a sudden the hottest name on the boulevard.
It speaks volumes then, that his follow-up feature First Man (2018) - the story of a man who flew to the Moon to manage the grief of his lost daughter and destroyed the rest of his family in the process - was largely ignored by awards bodies, and branded by many critics as a perfunctory, if dull biopic with none of the assumed spectacle. In Chazelle’s films, the passion has always comes before the person, and it came as a shock to some when he made clear this wasn't a virtue.
Babylon then, is the story of three romantic figures giving their lives and love to an ever-changing and utterly unforgiving art form. Chief among them is Manuel ‘Manny’ Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican assistant to several American stars who is told by his employers he will never work sets because he is already "exactly where he belongs".
Enter Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent movie star made to embody Gene Kelly in Singin In The Rain. Jack grows fond of Manny, or at least of his ‘get it done, no questions asked’ approach to assistant duties, and by association sets him on the path to becoming a Hollywood bigshot in his own right. That is, if Manny can get over his obvious affection for starlet-to-be Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a Jersey Shore bombshell who thrives in the silent era of big swing turns which leave little to the imagination. As she puts it, you’re a star or you ain’t, and Nellie’s every micro-movement is a performance.
Over a heavy three hour runtime, Babylon charts the courses of these characters through the boozing brutality of the 1920s and into the sobering, industrious Hollywood of the early 1930s. The film’s length is undeniably intimidating and guaranteed to kill any casual appeal, but it is necessary for what Chazelle is looking to do here. We feel the burnout in real time as orgies and excess give way to social mixers and wineries, with Jack and Nellie in the middle gradually collapsing into redundancy. Jack is too cheesy and Nellie too working class for a more ‘sophisticated’ new America, and of course Manny, the rare person of colour who rode their wave all the way to the top, is similarly caught in their whirlpool as they fall to rock bottom.
Both Whiplash and La Land strived to show us all it took to be a star, but Babylon keeps the clock running a little longer and asks what happens when that same star power runs dry. This question is best articulated by Robbie in a role which is undoubtedly the best (and rawest) of her career thus far. As an actor who has made a name for herself playing crass and common ‘girl next door’ types, Robbie’s secret weapon has always been her Sharon Tate aura and beauty. This is not to say she lacks talent, rather the opposite; her braver role choices have never affected her A-List status precisely because, in that bitterly Hollywood way, she presents too well on posters and carpets to ever have an image problem.
Nellie has also made a career out of performing as a rough and tumble wild child, but unlike Robbie she doesn’t have the elegance to hold the favour of a snobbier upper class. Her teeth are stained, her accent is harsh and her posture is totally at odds with 30s culture; in other words, she’s Robbie without the freedom to play ‘crass’ without bleeding her brand. Nellie comes into the film convinced of her stardom; she’s fun and messy, diving headfirst into that Harley Quinn-esque persona, but with each sniffy remark from a critic or colleague, Robbie scales this confidence right back. Nellie is cursed with self-awareness, becoming increasingly prickly and defensive instead of fun-loving and impulsive. As a result, her ‘common’ sensibilities stop being pleasurable for an audience. You either are a star or you ain’t, and the second Nellie stops believing in herself, she is dropped like a dead rat.
Babylon is a screaming work of hatred; the inverse of La La Land in every way that counts. Even the score, composed by Chazelle’s regular collaborator Justin Hurwitz, recycles many of the former film’s motifs for the nastiest scenes here, exposing the coldness and cruelty of this supposedly dreamer-first industry with the same sounds once used to celebrate its glory.
And yet, amidst the cynicism and despair of an industry which has given Chazelle so much to despise, Babylon finds one tiny light in the darkness, leaving us at the end of its three hours in Hell with the bulb of a chain theatre projector. To say more would be to spoil one of the year's most audacious finales, but the film finds a curious grey area for the art form it had teed up to condemn. Hollywood might harvest your dreams to make its movies, but in doing so it ensures they'll last forever. After all, a dwarf just fired cream from a cock. You don't forget something like that.
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