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)

2016 Top Ten List #10 La La Land

LA LA LAND                        A-                   

USA  (128 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Damien Chazelle

A critically acclaimed Hollywood revival that owes its artistic soul to Jacques Demy and his lavishly colorful musicals of the 60’s, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), as Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM Hollywood musicals, where his films were basically a love letter to the Hollywood movies of the 40’s and 50’s, incorporating the dreamy music of Michel Legrand and bleak elements of poetic realism into his bursting kaleidoscope of colors that vibrantly come alive onscreen through movement and dance.  A key to understanding Demy’s films was the effortless naturalism on display, where he didn’t hire the best choreographer or music instructor, as the singing and dancing were not legendary, but simply incorporated into the rhythm of the picture, part of the DNA of the product, so characters didn’t walk so much as skip and twirl down the street, where this visualized fantasy world included the bit players who simply exited gracefully offscreen, so that the totality onscreen was always greater than the sum of the parts.  With that in mind, this film takes a while for the full effect to kick in, as at least initially it feels forced, opening without an introduction to any of the characters, so there’s no emotional connection established, yet it breaks into a show-stopping opening number that only reluctantly generates interest.  Set in a typical Los Angeles freeway traffic jam where the traffic isn’t moving at all, where one’s patience is at the boiling point, one by one people start coming out of their cars, singing and dancing, climbing on the roofs of cars, creating this fantasized, color-coordinated alternate reality that makes the wasted time feel a little more bearable.  What works is that the misery caused by this kind of freeway logjam is real, something we can all relate to, where our minds tend to wander anyway, so why not allow an outpouring of an over-sized imagination in response?  So while it’s bit contrived, reality quickly kicks back in gear once the cars start moving again, where an unlikely road rage encounter between strangers (the two protagonists) results in typical hostility and disdain.  

Only afterwards are the characters introduced, where Mia (Emma Stone) works as a barista in a corner coffee shop on the grounds of a Warner Brothers movie studio, where important people come in and out, people used to being ogled and pampered, often complaining of the service, where the employees are star struck by being so close to movie stars.  When a customer accidentally spills coffee on her white blouse just before an audition, it does not bode well for her getting the job, probably more embarrassed than anything else, yet the rudeness of the people she is trying to impress stands out, cutting her off in mid-sentence, with some not even looking up from their phones.  Meanwhile, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) lives in a near-empty apartment where none of the boxes are even opened as he wonders how he’ll pay next month’s rent, visited by an over-controlling, financially secure sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) who seems used to bossing him around trying to get his life in order, where she gets under his last nerve before he heads off to work as a jazz pianist forced to play Christmas tunes in an upscale restaurant, the epitome of artistic humiliation, which he endures for as long as he can before breaking into one of his own compositions, defying his boss’s strict instructions, none other than J. K. Simmons from Whiplash (2014).  When Mia returns home, she has a giant Ingrid Bergman poster on the wall next to her bed, with a bedroom filled with Hollywood tributes. Her roommates, all in different colored attire, break out into song trying to cheer her up by inviting her to a posh party that evening.  After initially blowing it off, she decides to join them at the last minute, but feels completely out of place in such an artificially contrived upscale environment.  Making things worse, she’s forced to walk home, as her car has been towed. Hearing a lilting melody as she passes the restaurant, a lovely jazz riff with a beautifully melancholic theme, she is drawn inside at the exact moment Sebastian is getting fired for disobedience, recognizing him from the earlier road incident, but ignoring her complimentary remarks as he steams past her out the door, soon to become a distant memory. 

Months pass before they meet again, this time at another poolside Hollywood party where Sebastian’s hiding behind dark sunglasses playing electronic keyboards in an 80’s pop cover band, the evening’s entertainment, so she plays along and offers a song request, doing a blatantly fake dance in response that is actually kind of cute, showing signs of an all but absent personality.  Walking to their cars afterwards, the only emotion they share is utter sarcasm, reaching an overlook showcasing the glimmering city of lights, where despite their pretend contempt, they break out into an elegant song and dance, swinging on a lamplight in a riff of Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1952), lamenting how such “A Lovely Night” is wasted by being with someone who is so clearly not interested, yet for the first time a spark of magic is in the air, where we’re beginning to get the charm of these two delightful characters.  When Sebastian shows up at the coffee shop, all bets are off, as they walk through a studio lot as if they’re gliding on air, suddenly hanging on every word, confessing their innermost dreams, as she’s been striving to become a successful actress since she was a little girl, while he’s always wanted to be the owner of his own jazz club, where the chemistry between them is electric.  When she blurts out “I hate jazz,” suggesting it reminds her of Kenny G and elevator muzak, the kind of stuff that sends you to sleep, he’s compelled to reach into his soul and reveal what makes it so alive for him, suggesting every jazz musician composes their own spontaneously created symphony that is different every night, challenged by the musicians around him, the changing moods, constantly discovering new territory while playing onstage.  It’s a kind of free form poetry that only exists in this intrinsically American art form that began by blacks playing live music in the brothels and bars of New Orleans, including Louis Armstrong, one of the most influential figures whose career spanned five decades, literally introducing a new style of music to the entire world.  His enthusiasm is so apparent she can’t help but be moved by his passion, where he later brings her to a small jazz club where they are literally smitten.  This conversion, of sorts, has a way of persuading the viewers to give this kind of movie a chance, where jazz and cinema are synonymous with a treasure-trove of history, where all you have to do is kick back and enjoy, allowing the artistry to work its wonders.    

Much of the film does exactly that, borrowing from the past, replicating some of the wondrous moments of movie history, where couples would fall in love and find themselves transformed by imaginary Hollywood backlot sets that couldn’t be more luxuriously decorated, transcending the limitations of theatrical space, where we watch the couple float through the stars of the Griffith Observatory, waltzing into the air as planets and galaxies roll by.  This is thoroughly enchanting stuff, where it’s hard not to be moved by the changing moods of the romantic couple whose lives become a brilliant mind-altering fantasia that comes to represent their unspoken interior worlds, filled with a dazzling elegance that literally fills the screen, shot by cinematographer Linus Sandgren in extra-wide CinemaScope.  Most of this has been seen before, where it’s like a collection from movie history, but the most poignant moments are reserved for just the two of them, as the viewers become invested in their characters once they reveal themselves to us with such brazen authenticity.  The film uses the changing seasons as chapter headings that invoke different periods of their lives, which don’t always mesh as we might expect.  Perhaps the biggest contrast comes when Sebastian is hired to play keyboards in a popular jazz fusion band called The Messengers lead by an old school friend Keith (John Legend), complete with a singer, scantily clad dancers, and other MTV music video looks, where he’s finally making money, but growing farther away from his dream.  Their onstage performance couldn’t be more hostile to the film’s artistic concept, yet it represents what’s more customarily accepted in the modern world, where the format is to make a record, then go on the road for a year or so promoting the music.  This has a disastrous effect on their relationship, while Mia devotes all her time writing and staging a one-woman play that is an instant flop, sending her back home to the safety net of her parents.  With their dreams deferred, a single event changes the status quo of avoidance and disinterest, offering Mia, and perhaps even their relationship another chance.  Her audition is the most personalized and poignant moment of the film, “The Fools Who Dream,” (“Here’s to the hearts that ache, / Here’s to the mess we make”), becoming a mantra for the thousands of people who have flocked to Hollywood having this exact same dream, just hoping they might get their chance, but the exhilaration of most are left dejected and disillusioned.  The film imagines two completely different endings, where one is like the flip side of the other, where you get your fantasy fairy tale ending as well as a more realistic possibility, where both are one in a million chances, but all it takes is that one lucky break.   Mia’s heartfelt audition is easily the most original aspect of the film and is the one scene that far and away distinguishes it from the rest, as overall the film feels more like a recreative montage of cinematic scenes and styles that came before.  Chazelle has stylishly created a melodramatic tearjerker, a musical film fantasia, and a sure audience pleaser.