Babylon

 

Margot Robbie in “Babylon.” Paramount Pictures/Scott Garfield photo via IMDB

Not since the Bible has wretched excess looked as excessive – or as wretched – as it does in “Babylon.”

Damien Chazell's three-hour epic vision of the birth of the movie industry shows what can happen when a young filmmaker experiences too much success – six Oscars out of 14 nominations – too early in his career. 

Granted, all those prizes were well deserved for “La La Land,” a shimmering, singular work that updated vintage movie musical formulas for a new millennium. But in this return visit to Hollywood mythmaking, he takes us behind the screen to watch the studio machinery cranking out the magic. It's an inadvertent reminder that sausage doesn't taste as good after you realize how it's made.

The story begins in 1926 when, on a dusty dirt road through the palm trees and sprawling citrus orchards of greater Los Angeles, Kinoscope studio is making movies. 

The “studio” is actually a converted ranch dotted with tents, corrals, animals, and hordes of yelling people cranking out one-reel silent pictures by the dozen. A jungle adventure films on a rickety wooden set, next to a comedy in a kitchen, next to a woman playing a stringed instrument in front of an Asian backdrop. 

Actors mime their lines to men shouting commands in megaphones as the hand-cranked cameras whir. Down the block is the Western saloon. On the surrounding hillsides, armies of knights in shining armor engage in battle.

A movie set is a magic place, says Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the studio's reigning matinee idol. He's talking to Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a resourceful jack-of-all-trades who has ingratiated himself to the star. Manny agrees; his eyes wide with wonder, he beholds heaven.

Also arriving on the set for the first time that morning is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie). She's a va-va-voom ingenue who already knows she's a star and is impatient for everyone else to notice. Trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) sits amidst the action, part of a jazz band accompanying the chaos.

Everything is frantic in all directions, and everyone gets covered in dust as the day goes on. By the time it ends – in golden light cinematographers call “magic hour” – once a thoroughly drunk Jack Conrad is helped up a hilltop to kiss the princess in front of a perfect sunset, they've got the picture in the can.

Chazell's rambling script interweaves these characters' careers as the industry goes through its own seismic shift with the arrival of sound. “The talkies” are not kind to Jack or Nellie, by now a box office queen whose New Jersey accent doesn't play well on the soundstage. Manny and Sidney on the other hand, take advantage of what sound brings to those patterns of dancing light on the screen.

Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) chronicles the trajectories of their shooting stars in her daily gossip column. She alternates with Jack Conrad, who's always searching for a deeper artistic dimension of the pop entertainment he provides, trying to sum up what all that movie magic “means.” For Nellie, stardom – like dancing, like sex, gambling, booze, coke and fun – are just doomed efforts to avoid looking in the mirror.

Chazell, like Steven Spielberg's alter ego in “The Fabelmans,” believes in movie mythology almost as a religion. He lavishes loving attention on every detail of those gold tinged early years of Hollywood, adding to the energy with exuberant tracking shots and cinematic and editing flourishes.

But it doesn't come for free. For all the wide-eyed optimism of “La La Land,” Chazell needs us to know he's not that naïve himself. So he shows us the decadence and depravity paid for by the earliest box office receipts, along with the alcohol, drugs and other sorts of abuse inseparably intertwined with superstardom and studio moguls' power from the beginning right up to today.

In the film's first minutes Manny gets covered by elephant excrement. It's a warning: prudes beware! This is what you're in for. The elephant is part of the entertainment for an orgy at a San Simeon-like mansion as raunchy as anything you've seen this side of an X-rating. 

Almost three hours later, a waxy-faced, yellow-teethed casino owner named James McKay (Tobey Maguire) leads Manny through another “party,” this one underground, the entertainment getting more and more depraved the deeper they go. It's there in case anyone has overlooked the Dante's Inferno metaphor.

“Babylon” is painfully aware of Hollywood excesses, but not its own. Scenes repeat and run too long. Way too long, between the rare moments of laughter that have put “Babylon” in the running for a Golden Globe for best comedy or musical.

“Babylon” has many glorious moments, especially when paying homage to movie magic, but its characters never really become characters for anyone to care about. The mood by the end is deep melancholy. 

It feels like we would all have been better off if Damien Chazell just hadn't stopped believing in illusions.