Babylon (2022)
I have a love/hate experience with this. It offers plenty of beautiful moments, hilarious scenes and great performances. But it also has overly long pointless narratives, has the subtlety of a sledgehammer, annoying montages and revolting grotesque scenes framed as something elegant and beautiful.
The opening scene of course has the shocking effect it is supposed to have, showing the over the top parties with sex, drug and jazz. What felt weird about that is the show of absolute depravity but shot in this pleasing Hollywood golden glow. I think the intent is we should feel conflicted about what we see, but the length of it was just exhausting.
The film mostly grew better from there on, though it doesn’t slow down at all. The long crazy montage from the movie set was equally taxing but had more to offer. Just hilarious with all the behind-the-scenes stuff from silent movie making, which of course is a spectacle of noise. No microphones yet, giving a fun contrast to what comes later.
It is pretty evident that Damien wanted to show the history of Hollywood in a less than glorified light than Singin’ in the Rain, and boy does he do that, but the portrayal of the people working with movies in 20s also seems unnecessarily overly unflattering. Especially how we see several times people literally dying on set, and no empathy is shown from anybody. They are portrayed as someone without any respect at all for human life, which I somehow doubt is a fair representation of everyone working in Hollywood back then. Even though we all know safety standards and working conditions were very far from what we have today.
The saving grace for this movie relies a great deal on Diego Calvas as Manny, the young Mexican immigrant who just want to work in the business somehow. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are doing fine as their respective characters, but Manny is the only one who has at least some growth and complexity. Jovan Adepo also had some great moments as the black jazz musician, but isn’t given enough time on screen.
Depicting a similar story as The Artist, Babylon does it better - though it has similar issues with screaming its symbolism without any respect for the audience to understand subtleties. Like Nellie puking on everyone at a fancy cocktail party or Jack Conrad seeing the audience laughing at his talkie-movie in the cinema. I admit I prefer a director that is a bit more subtle, but Damien just screams his points across. As a loveletter to cinema, it falls miles behind a movie like Cinema Paradiso. The whole montage in the end with clips from everything between The Passion of Joan of Arc to Avatar was just extremely cringe. I don’t mind the 3 hour length, but a couple of longer scenes could easily have been trimmed or removed completely. Like the snake fight and the drug money scenes. Both didn’t do much, except slightly advancing a needed plot point.
Despite having a lot of criticism for this film, I can’t deny I was engaged in one way of the other all throughout - and it did help watching it split over a couple of nights - unlike The Artist which felt partly like a waste of time, but as said it doesn’t come anywhere near the status of Cinema Paradiso either.
Rating: 3