Babylon (2022): “Boogie Nights” meets “Singin’ in the Rain.” Or to wonder how a filmmaker can simultaneously celebrate the remarkable power of movies while indicting much about the industry, exploring the ability to create and destroy, prop up and tear down, in all its swirling glory. Deliberate and wise in all the ways a maximalist like Baz Luhrmann is not, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s (“Whiplash,” “La La Land”) “Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times.
Margot Robbie, in another starring performance that feels like a new discovery, plays Nellie, an aspiring actress in the mid-1920s who’s sure that she’s a star–it’s something you can’t become but simply something you are or aren’t, she says. She sneaks into a big-time Hollywood party thanks to Manny (Diego Calva of “Narcos: Mexico,” excellent), who has about as little clout as someone at this high-profile carnival of debauchery can have. (Manny helped secure the elephant, which is somehow one of the more restrained methods of entertainment on hand.) This event, which Chazelle gives dizzying life with the same astonishing flair he brought to the opening sequence of “La La Land,” will launch each character’s trajectory into moving pictures, and the results range from screamingly funny to surprisingly moving to immensely complex in its look at a world that replicates humanity but doesn’t always practice it.
This isn’t to suggest Chazelle is the first person to acknowledge the high stakes and cold realities of this industry. But few have brought such exhilarating contradictions to a portrait of people drawn to the development of an escape and yet inevitably victimized by the implicitly ticking clock of fantasy. Also featuring typically excellent, mature work by Brad Pitt as aging star Jack Conrad, “Babylon” considers the constantly expanding potential of movies as well as their limits as influenced by both the values and instincts of the people both making and watching. Also recalling Chazelle’s “La La Land,” the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar” and the classic "A Star is Born." But Chazelle brings both empathy and strange truths to the idea that human flaws are forgotten any time a great love or a great movie emerges out of nothing–while wondering what we gain when looking to art as an artificial instead of a real source. “Babylon” is about how we delight in the ways movies lie to us, that something filmed is immortal. New ways push against old institutions. Multiple revolving doors determine the life cycle of creativity, and the timeframe of a legacy.
Most filmmakers can’t even fathom this many big ideas in a project so gutsy in its technical and historical scope. As with much of his previous work, Chazelle is an essential chronicler of fierce dreams and heartbreaking compromises. In “Babylon,” subjective taste and objective identity collide, with movies never seeming more human than when they pursue euphoria and make it seem like time can stop, only to, no matter how high the peaks, eventually reach a point when the lights turn on, and you go and determine how to engage with what else is out there. Like most American institutions — in politics, in religion, in family-focused suburbs and packed-together urban spaces — the institution of Hollywood has a seedy underbelly. It’s just that in Hollywood, the scandals feel juicier, like continuations of the stories we’ve seen onscreen. “The dream,” Joan Didion once wrote of Hollywood, “was teaching the dreamers how to live.”
Chazelle accomplishes this by continually and, seemingly, anachronistically referencing the future throughout the film. Visual and narrative references to other movies made later appear throughout (like Singing in the Rain, My Fair Lady, and Phantom Thread); by the end, the continuum is made explicit. This is a movie about how Hollywood casts a spell on all of us, while also churning through talented yet damaged performers. Much of that churn is predicated on technological changes, as well as the shifting tastes of the country. Most of it is just about money: who brings it in, who doesn’t, and who executives guess will maximize profits while causing as few headaches as possible. That’s the sense in which Babylon is a profoundly humanist film, mourning the tragedies that litter Hollywood histories. But it’s also a worshipful film, one that gladly buys into the Tinseltown dream, the spell, the mystery of it all.
No comments :
Post a Comment