Babylon

 

Director Damien Chazelle on the set

Chazelle with cinematographer Linus Sandgren

Chazelle with Brad Pitt and Diego Calva

Chazelle with musical composer Justin Hurwitz

BABYLON                B                                                                                                                 USA  (189 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Damien Chazelle

A child born in fifty years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like a friend, even though you breathed your last before he breathed his first.  You’ve been given a gift.  Be grateful.  Your time today is through, but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.                   —Elinor St. John (Jean Smart)

From the maker of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), Whiplash (2014), and 2016 Top Ten List #10 La La Land, which soared to 14 Oscar nominations, becoming the youngest ever Oscar winner for Best Director, this $80 million dollar extravaganza is not for the faint of heart, as this could also be known as Sodom and Gomorrah goes to Hollywood, becoming an exposé on the outsized ambition and outrageous excess in the early days of Hollywood, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity, where this bombastic saga takes on the grand-scale myths of Hollywood lore from yesteryear, like a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza selling a grotesquely exaggerated vision of reckless hedonism, becoming a walking travelogue through the hidden pre-Code secrets of an out-of-control industry.  Setting its sights on exposing the sordid, darker underbelly of Hollywood history, which they have been so adept at sweeping under the rug, the film bombed at the box office, where the more than three-hour run time for a Christmas release might be a factor, along with poor marketing, while historical films tend to be hit or miss with movie audiences, but the ostentatiousness and grandiose spectacle on display is much like Ruben Östlund in Triangle of Sadness (Sans Filtre) (2022), as both use projectile vomiting and diarrhea scenes for grotesque humor, seemingly on a similar wavelength of crude condescension, and while LA LA LAND was a love letter to the hopeful dreamers of Tinseltown, this feels more like a “Fuck you” letter to the industry, pushing the limits beyond all established limits, where it’s doubtful Chazelle will ever get the same opportunity again, so he shot the wad with this one.  While much has been made about matching certain fictional characters to their real-life counterparts, that’s not really a factor, as the boundaries between imagination and reality are blurred, where it neither enhances nor detracts from the storyline, becoming a multi-character tragicomic epic set at the twilight of the silent era, where if we learn anything it’s that Hollywood is a place of dreams and pain in equal measure.  Spanning from 1926 to 1952, this is an uneven, yet outlandish film that’s hugely ambitious, but never lives up to expectations, as there’s an emotional disconnect with all the characters, with blatant attempts at humor that mostly fall flat, and while there are moments of brilliance, much of this ends up feeling overly trite and predictable.  Bearing some resemblance to David Fincher’s Mank (2020), with both offering inside glimpses into a world of often drunk, drugged out, and chaotic individuals who thrive in the industry, each establishing behind-the-scenes connections to the lavish weekend parties of William Randolph Hearst, where his Hearst Castle becomes a resort for Hollywood’s royalty during the Roaring Twenties and into the 30’s, including stars, directors, producers, and writers, where California is viewed as both a Garden of Eden and a land of material opportunity, ultimately satirized by Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941).  On a desolate hilltop in the Bel Air desert, inside the fairytale mansion of Hollywood producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Harvey Weinstein), we are witness early on to the orgiastic frenzy of a 30-minute party sequence set to the exhilarating music written by Chazelle’s longtime musical composer Justin Hurwitz, Voodoo Mama (Official Audio) – Babylon Original ... - YouTube (3:59), which sets the tempo, something you might expect from Baz Luhrmann in The Great Gatsby (2013), a filmmaker known for his lavish extravagance, but this is an unrivaled, no-holds-barred scenario with quick cuts combined with longer takes that feels breathtaking in the way Linus Sandgren’s bravura 35mm camerawork simply glides through the Felliniesque bacchanal festivities like poetry in motion, where viewers are literally immersed in the excess, debauchery, and revulsion of the experience.  Shown on 70mm in a few theaters, yet compared to this, what went on in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) seems relatively tame.      

While we have seen this kind of satiric Hollywood history rehash before in the Coen brother’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), nothing really prepares us for the exaggerated histrionics and massive scale of this film, which dares to go where others refused to go, elevating bad taste to an operatic artform while luridly swinging for the fences in attempting to capture the shallowness and moral void at the center of this business.  Three central characters are introduced early on, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a star-gazing Mexican emigrant who dreams of making his way up the Hollywood ladder (“I just want to be part of something bigger!”) but remains stuck on the outskirts of fame, employed as an errand boy for media mogul William Randolph Hearst (Pat Skipper), where he runs into Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a loud and brashly impulsive, would-be actress from New Jersey appropriately dressed for the occasion, but she’s not on the invite list, so Manny whisks her inside where they partake in a mountainous pile of readily available cocaine before hitting the dance floor.  Manny falls instantly in love, enamored by all the stardom and glamor, but she’s just there for a wild time, becoming an instant hit, dazzling the eyes of party revelers and viewers, where the intoxicating sequence goes for the juggler, driven by the furious pace of the music, taking us on a roller coaster ride, setting the tone for what follows, Babylon (2022) - The Orgy Dance Scene | Movieclips YouTube (2:30).  While they are merely periphery players, the grand entrance is reserved for Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a matinee idol whose extreme arrogance and eccentric personality is modeled after John Gilbert, MGM’s biggest silent movie star and producer at the peak of his star power, the man who helped build Hollywood into the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that it is today.  Jack is the face of the movie industry, fawned over by adoring fans, with everyone trying to get into his ear, but he’s an unflappable character, clearly in his element in the midst of the delirium of surrounding chaos, with a propensity for getting wildly inebriated, yet shows up on the set the next morning ready to work.  In addition, the sequence features black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a lesbian Chinese-American cabaret singer modeled after Anna May Wong, dressed in a top hat and tuxedo singing “My Girl’s Pussy,” My Girl's Pussy by Justin Hurwitz in Babylon (2022) Cabaret ... YouTube (2:30), with both also craving the spotlight, while Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), a gossip columnist turned grand dame of Hollywood journalists, offers her own first-hand accounts of the day-to-day trials and tribulations, providing a checkered history that is filled with looming themes of transience and sadness, with Chazelle and his editor Tom Cross cleverly weaving these stories together while referencing some of the classic ensemble films.  Manny proves his meddle by devising an ingenious diversionary plan to escort a dead woman who has overdosed out of the party in plain view without anyone noticing, with Nellie chosen to take her place on the set the next day.  Jack takes Manny under his wing as his personal assistant, driving him home to his own palatial estate, becoming a trusted confidant, an everyman bearing witness to the idiosyncratic methods of making movies on an outdoor set with multiple productions shot simultaneously, fascinated by the pandemonium and complete disarray in what he sees, with a timeline separating distinctly different sets in operation, including a sprawling action sequence directed by Otto Von Strassberger (Spike Jonze in a German accent) that goes haywire, killing one of the actors (turned into a sight gag), as real weapons are used, suggesting it’s a Wild West out there, destroying all their existing cameras as well, but all that matters is that they got the shot, Getting The Shot Of The Soldiers Fighting - Babylon (2022) Scene YouTube (2:42).  Erupting out of this chaos, occasional magic occurs, as Manny saves the day by making an emergency run afterwards to secure another operating camera, a scene that borders on the ridiculous, and the miraculous, revealing the remarkable spirit of an era that has come and gone, BABYLON - First 8 Minutes Opening Scene (2022) YouTube (8:20).

Jack sends Manny to New York to see Al Jolson in THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) and report back on the new sensation of talking pictures, which would change the industry, driving most of the silent era actors out of business as their overdramatic theatrics don’t play so well in sound pictures.  While Jack wants to be part of the future and make accommodations to the changing times, his wooden acting doesn’t play so well with audiences, which throws him for a loop, as he’s never tasted anything but success before.  Nellie becomes an instant silent film success, a rags to riches character based on starlet Clara Bow, the scandalous “It-Girl,” but her shrill Jersey accent never plays well in the tightly restricted atmosphere of a sound studio, where she is the living example of the growing pains that came with the transition into unchartered territory, Babylon (2022) Retake Scene Over & Over Again YouTube (3:05).  The film depicts a time when Los Angeles was a desert community of rootless transplants growing into a world-class city, where Hollywood in particular was operating in a no-holds-barred kind of world, wilder, more aggressive, while still tinkering and experimenting with an industry format that was still being built.  For instance, there’s an early scene of the beginning stages of the infamous number that would eventually end up in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan’s Singin' in the Rain (1952), regarded today as a masterpiece of the classical Hollywood musical.  But in the early stages actors were used to simply standing in place and singing, not moving around or dancing, where motion was not yet integrated into the medium.  In this side-by-side comparison, Jack reveals his personal reservations as Chazelle’s film is seen juxtaposed against Charles Reisner’s THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929, Singin In the Rain 1929. Babylon comparación. - YouTube (1:14), while there is yet another version of the same song, Singing in the Rain - YouTube (4:18), offering an unusual historical perspective.  Chazelle unabashedly shows the dark side of the industry where even the mighty must fall, viewed as inevitable, as gossip columnist Elinor St. John will explain to a devastated Jack Conrad why his career is over and how insignificant that ending will be to Hollywood history, Best scene of Babylon YouTube (4:50), which is even more tragic considering ninety percent of all silent films are estimated to be lost.  Manny eventually finds a place as a movie executive, but does so at the expense of his moral integrity and racial identity, as he ends up passing for white, ignoring his own family for years, though they live nearby.  This plays out in devastating fashion when it comes to musician Sidney Palmer, a black man who actually made it in Hollywood, until the moment when the powers that be decide his skin is too light for the camera, and may not play well in the South, setting the stage for the indignity of “blackface,” a racial subtext within the industry that still lingers today.  As Palmer, Jovan Adepo is able to express all the humiliation and psychological damage that Hollywood has inflicted for generations, Manny Makes Sidney Palmer DARKEN HIS FACE - Babylon (2022) Movie Scene YouTube (3:00), transitioning perfectly into another sequence, Sidney Palmer Plays The Babylon Theme Tune Perfectly - Babylon (2022) Scene YouTube (2:30), offering a poignant eulogy for a forgotten era.  One of the most grotesque twists is a surrealistic descent into the dark underbelly of the beast, a subterranean dungeon where the layers of Hell resemble Dante’s Inferno, described as the “asshole of Los Angeles,” where the depravity of the industry on steroids is a fantasy crime scene selling its soul to the highest bidder.  For the finale the film jumps ahead thirty years and finds an aging Manny revisiting his former stomping grounds, where its cleaned-up image turns into a CINEMA PARADISO (1988) moment of movie rapture with a spellbinding montage of movie clips that is nothing short of sensational, Babylon (2022) - The Ending Montage Scene | Movieclips YouTube (2:57), offering a one-of-a-kind exposé that can be as stupefying as it is enthralling.  

Note

Prior to shooting the film, from the fall of 2018 through the spring of 2019, Chazelle and executive producer Matthew Plouffe organized private screenings in empty theaters to screen 35mm prints of films they felt consciously tried to push the boundaries of cinema while expanding the viewing experience.  Included in this eclectic mix were the following films, D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916), William Wellman’s WINGS (1927), G. W. Pabst’s Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928), Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941) and TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), Federico Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), Luchino Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER Part II (1974) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), Michael Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and There Will Be Blood (2007), and Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000).

Every movie referenced in the 'Babylon' ending montage  Calum Russell from Far Out magazine

• The Horse in Motion (Eadweard Muybridge, 1878)
• Cat Galloping (Eadweard Muybridge, 1887)
• The Arrival of a Train (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895)
• Annie Oakley (1894) – Thomas Edison’s earliest Kinetoscope
• Birth of the Pearl (F.S. Armitage, 1901)
• A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Ferdinand Zecca, 1902)
• The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
• Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1911)
• Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
• The Champion (Charlie Chaplin, 1915)
• The Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915–1916)
• Joan the Woman (Cecil B. DeMille, 1916)
• Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)
• Voice of the Nightingale (Ladislaw Starewicz, 1925)
• Le Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, 1924)
• The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
• Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy, 1929)
• Hollywood Review of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929)
• Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929)
• The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
• Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (Sergi Eisenstein, 1944)
• Tarantella (Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren & Ted Nemeth, 1940)
• Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)
• Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
• Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, Merrie Melodies, 1953)
• This is Cinerama (Mike Todd, Michael Todd, Jr., Walter A. Thompson and Fred Rickey, 1952)
• Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) 
• Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929) 
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969) 
• Dreams That Money Can Buy (Hans Richter, 1947)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied, 1943)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
• My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) 
• Lucia (Humberto Solás, 1968)
• NY. NY. (Francis Thompson, 1947) 
• Borom Sarret (Ousmane Sembène, 1963) 
• Le Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, 1924)
• The Black Vampire (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953) 
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
• Week-End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
• Matrix 1 (John Whitney, Sr., 1971)
• 0–45 (TV Cultura de São Paulo, 1974) 
• Sunstone (Ed Emshwiller, Alvy Ray Smith, Lance Williams, Garland Stern, 1979)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
• Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991)
• Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
• The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999)
• Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1965)

Fences

FENCES           B+    

USA  (138 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Denzel Washington           Official Site

Like being hit with a ton of bricks, this film has an awesome power, yet the agonizing truth is the protagonists are stuck in a period of history where the most they could hope for would leave them standing still, as there was no possibility whatsoever of progress being made in black America.   That is the economic reality from which this film was spawned, where few understood this as well as playwright August Wilson, where this is the only one of his plays that he ever wrote a screenplay for before his death in 2005.  First, a word about playwright August Wilson, who is to the black community what Eugene O’Neill may be to the whites, both Pulitzer Prize winners who are known as gifted writers of dialogue, among the greatest ever, where Wilson’s poetic language chronicling the black experience in America is actually described as “music.”  Having never formally studied theater, Wilson credits the blues, specifically Bessie Smith’s rendition of “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine,” Bessie Smith - Nobody In Town Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine YouTube (3:22) as a defining moment in his life, as it made him recognize the poetry in the everyday language of black America, providing the inspiration and freedom to use that language in his own writing.  Wilson is best known for his unprecedented cycle of 10 plays, known as the Century Cycle, one set for each decade, that chronicle the black experience in the 20th century.  Chicago’s Goodman Theatre was the first theater in the world to produce the entire 10-play cycle, spanning from 1986 to 2007, where two of the productions were world premieres.  All but one take place in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an economically depressed neighborhood where Wilson was born in 1945 and spent his youth.  Fences was originally a 1983 play, winning the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for the author, the other being The Piano Lesson (1990), which was turned into a made-for-TV movie in 1995, where the play opened on Broadway in 1987 winning Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Actor (James Earl Jones) and Best Featured Actress (Mary Alice), returning in 2010 where it won Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play, Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Actress (Viola Davis).  In a deal with HBO, Denzel Washington is bringing all ten of August Wilson’s plays to the screen, releasing one per year, where he will be the executive producer for them all, though this first venture is with Paramount, with Washington acting, directing, and producing, bringing over most of the Broadway cast and crew already familiar with the work, where five of the six featured characters originally appeared on stage. 

Set in a working class district of Pittsburgh in the 1950’s, the timing of the work is appropriate, as most white Americans have nostalgic recollections of the 50’s, including Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, Sputnik and the Space Race, Las Vegas, the Rat Pack, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the advent of television, including a nostalgic tribute to the decade with the Fonz and Happy Days (1974 – 83), with seven of ten Republicans today fondly preferring America as it was in the 50’s, remembering it as an era of prosperity and good schools, living in the safety of the suburbs where there were no problems to speak of and the American Dream was still alive and well.  Black Americans have an entirely different view, as they remained segregated by a separate and unequal society unable to earn a living wage, as they were unable to live or eat or go to school with whites, attend the same church, or even the same hospitals, requiring separate bathrooms and accommodations, where nearly 100 years after the Civil War, blacks remained legally discriminated against on every front, forced to live in shabbier sections of town where life expectancy was considerably lower while forced to take the jobs whites didn’t want.  It is in the heart of this racial and economic discrepancy that August Wilson sets his story, a conversational chamber drama that showcases the larger-than-life personality of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington), a 53-year old garbage collector who struggles to financially make ends meet, living pay check by pay check, arriving home with his friend and work partner Bono (Stephen Henderson), both chattering away while pulling from a shared pint of vodka, feeling upbeat and hopeful, as it’s Friday, the end of the week, and more importantly it’s payday.  Troy’s character speaks nearly uninterrupted for the opening twenty minutes of the film, where we quickly learn he dominates his household with an iron fist, where his natural charm is drowned out by his bitterness, enraged that he’s routinely passed over by less qualified whites on his job, remaining haunted by lost dreams, where he was once a promising ballplayer in the Negro Leagues with hopes of playing major league baseball, but his career was derailed by racial prejudice and a prison sentence until time simply passed him by and he was too old to play.  While he still has the braggadocio of an athlete, claiming he was better than today’s black ballplayers and seen a hundred men play ball better than Jackie Robinson, Bono cuts through the myriad of self-delusions with the sarcastic quip, “I know you got some Uncle Remus in your blood.” 

Troy’s vacillating moods comprise the rhythm of the film, with various characters jumping in and out of the picture, including his long-suffering wife of eighteen years, Rose (Viola Davis), who chimes in when he’s stretched the truth too far with his embellishments, but the humorous mood turns on a dime to one of righteous anger when his grown son arrives, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), a jazz player who barely scrapes by, asking to borrow money, which is met with unending contempt for his habit of always arriving on payday.  It’s Rose that eventually gives him the money while reminding Troy that college recruiters are arriving for his younger son’s next high school football game, where Cory (Jovan Adepo) might be offered a scholarship.  But Troy dismisses his son’s chances, reminding him that whites won’t let him into their game, so he may as well look elsewhere to earn a living.  His own failed experience taints the view of his son’s existing possibilities, actually undermining his son’s chances once the opportunity arises by refusing to sign the permission slip allowing recruiters into his home, denying his chance to go to college, which only exacerbates the hostility and anger Cory feels towards him, thinking it’s only jealousy because he might be a better athlete than his father was.  These relentless mood shifts of lost hope and broken dreams recur throughout, leading to an intense examination of the harsh realities of their lives, which doesn’t get any better, becoming a deep-seeded, psychological examination of systematic despair, where the fence he intends to build, supposedly to keep others out, is actually a suffocating experience locking them in at the same time, becoming a metaphor for all the obstacles placed in their path, like how to survive on the other side of the fence, as blacks are routinely excluded from white neighborhoods, with racism so ingrained into society, causing blacks to have to learn to play by a different set of unspoken rules that exist only for them.  That is the underlying moral dilemma of the film. 

Troy has a mentally damaged younger brother with a metal plate in his head, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), whose brain was damaged by shrapnel while serving as a soldier in World War II.  We learn that Troy bought the house he lives in by taking the money that was Gabriel’s compensation for his injury, while Gabriel rents a room somewhere and wanders the streets aimlessly, seemingly rootless and homeless, the kind of person people walk past on the street without giving him a second thought.  Plagued by guilt, yet bordering on the supernatural, Troy believes he’s gotten such a raw deal in life that he’s actually fought with the Devil just to survive, becoming a ghostly presence bogging him down, eating away at him, where we learn to appreciate what he’s overcome, but at the same time despise the meanness and domineering attitudes that come with it, as the hard-headedness and lack of sympathy that he displays towards others feels punishing, especially when it’s aimed at Rose, who is among the more selfless creatures on earth, yet the two get down into the muck in a knock-down, drag-out fight that is as emotionally wrenching a scene as anything seen all year, with Troy’s hypocrisy exposed, where Rose finally stands up to him and refuses to budge, setting the stage for even darker misfortunes that lie ahead.  In one of the more hauntingly beautiful moments, expressed with unimaginable tenderness, women dressed all in white lay their hands on Rose in an attempt to heal her damaged spirit.  Despite Troy being the center of attention, almost to the point of distraction, a living Sisyphus forever charged with pushing that ball over the mountain, only to have to do it all over again, and then again on into perpetuity, it’s Rose who is the heart and soul of the film, where Viola Davis is a revelation in the role, offering her greatest performance in what is ultimately a fitting tribute to all black women, becoming the maternal symbol of grace that miraculously holds broken families together during the harshest times, defying unimaginable odds, much like they did during slavery times.