Babylon review – Brad Pitt suaves through a grand hymn to golden age Hollywood | Film

Damien Chazelle returns to that la la land in which he made his big breakthrough, with a turbocharged but heavy-handed epic about the secret chaos and excess of 1920s silent-era Hollywood on the verge of talkie extinction, inspired by some well-known anecdotes and further embellishing the apocryphal rumours and tales. It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably, though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings. There are preemptive references to Singin’ in the Rain and it climaxes with a swoony-solemn Oscar-telecast-type montage including clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Funny though Babylon often is, in all its frantic melodrama it is weirdly without the gentle romantic sweetness and believable human frailty in his Oscar-winning film La La Land (although there are musical echoes of that earlier picture and the same message that jazz is where integrity is to be found in showbusiness).

Chazelle is also concerned to restore some of the minorities who have been erased in Hollywood’s history, as well as be more candid about the sordid realities, but he fudges the new #MeToo conversation about the Hollywood golden age: all the raunchy sex here is very much consensual. Pundits have cited silent movie historian and evangelist Kevin Brownlow in relation to this film, but the debt is obviously more to Kenneth Anger, author of Hollywood Babylon – and frankly even more to Baz Luhrmann than either. The outrageous party scenes, with the mandatory overhead shots showing the ecstatically unclothed women crowd-surfing face-up are so much like Luhrmann he should be getting a royalty cheque.

Various stock characters swirl around in the movie madness. Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a handsome much-married leading man of a certain age in the John Gilbert mould, whose career is on the slide, concealing his boozy ennui with a veneer of genial suavity. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: with his opaque humorous drawl and rangy physique, Pitt is Hollywood’s great lost cowboy actor, though there are no oaters here.) Li Jun Li is stylish and charismatic in the role of Lady Fay Zhu, a gay club singer perhaps inspired by Anna May Wong. Jovan Adepo is Sidney Palmer, a brilliant African American jazz trumpeter who is finally given some on-screen time in the talkies, at the expense of racist “blackface” humiliation in the wake of Al Jolson’s success with The Jazz Singer. Max Minghella plays studio head Irving Thalberg, a rare real-life character.

But most importantly is Margot Robbie playing Nellie LaRoy, an obsessive wannabe star with a gambling addiction. She impresses everyone with her ability to cry on cue, but needs some elocution lessons from Hedda-and-Louella-ish gossip hack Elinor St John (Jean Smart), a haughty Briton working a Henry Higgins side-hustle. Relative newcomer Diego Calva plays Manny Torres, a moviestruck Mexican kid who gets a job on Jack’s location shoot, rises up the studio food chain, pretends to be from Spain to avoid anti-Mexican bigotry, and is secretly in love with Nellie.

There are plenty of great scenes here: particularly an outrageous setpiece in which Nellie, always up for a dare, fights a rattlesnake in the desert after one of many orgiastic parties; this is a contest that leads to a very erotic encounter with Lady Fay Zhu. She is also great when Nellie has to do a speaking role in a perky college-gal comedy; she does take after take with the director of photography melting in his soundproofed ”sweat box” enclosure. Most staggeringly, there is Manny’s first real job in the movies: wrangling an elephant to be delivered to a colossally decadent party where there is to be a Roscoe Arbuckle-style crisis. One very indulgent plutocrat, doing drugs and pervy activity with a young woman in a private room, panics when she loses consciousness. The question of rape (which fuelled the actual Arbuckle case, of which he was eventually exonerated), does not feature, although the movie slightly swerves the question of whether this fictional woman recovers or not. This situation plays out differently to the real-life case of dancer Patricia Douglas, subject to a career-ruining smear campaign in 1937 after accusing a studio executive of rape at a party given by MGM chief Louis B Mayer. Audiences are entitled to wonder if the traumatised secret suffered by the Nellie LeRoys from real-life Hollywood was not that they had a quaintly imagined “gambling habit”, but that they were being systematically abused by their employers.

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.

Damien Chazelle returns to that la la land in which he made his big breakthrough, with a turbocharged but heavy-handed epic about the secret chaos and excess of 1920s silent-era Hollywood on the verge of talkie extinction, inspired by some well-known anecdotes and further embellishing the apocryphal rumours and tales. It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably, though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings. There are preemptive references to Singin’ in the Rain and it climaxes with a swoony-solemn Oscar-telecast-type montage including clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Funny though Babylon often is, in all its frantic melodrama it is weirdly without the gentle romantic sweetness and believable human frailty in his Oscar-winning film La La Land (although there are musical echoes of that earlier picture and the same message that jazz is where integrity is to be found in showbusiness).

Chazelle is also concerned to restore some of the minorities who have been erased in Hollywood’s history, as well as be more candid about the sordid realities, but he fudges the new #MeToo conversation about the Hollywood golden age: all the raunchy sex here is very much consensual. Pundits have cited silent movie historian and evangelist Kevin Brownlow in relation to this film, but the debt is obviously more to Kenneth Anger, author of Hollywood Babylon – and frankly even more to Baz Luhrmann than either. The outrageous party scenes, with the mandatory overhead shots showing the ecstatically unclothed women crowd-surfing face-up are so much like Luhrmann he should be getting a royalty cheque.

Various stock characters swirl around in the movie madness. Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a handsome much-married leading man of a certain age in the John Gilbert mould, whose career is on the slide, concealing his boozy ennui with a veneer of genial suavity. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: with his opaque humorous drawl and rangy physique, Pitt is Hollywood’s great lost cowboy actor, though there are no oaters here.) Li Jun Li is stylish and charismatic in the role of Lady Fay Zhu, a gay club singer perhaps inspired by Anna May Wong. Jovan Adepo is Sidney Palmer, a brilliant African American jazz trumpeter who is finally given some on-screen time in the talkies, at the expense of racist “blackface” humiliation in the wake of Al Jolson’s success with The Jazz Singer. Max Minghella plays studio head Irving Thalberg, a rare real-life character.

But most importantly is Margot Robbie playing Nellie LaRoy, an obsessive wannabe star with a gambling addiction. She impresses everyone with her ability to cry on cue, but needs some elocution lessons from Hedda-and-Louella-ish gossip hack Elinor St John (Jean Smart), a haughty Briton working a Henry Higgins side-hustle. Relative newcomer Diego Calva plays Manny Torres, a moviestruck Mexican kid who gets a job on Jack’s location shoot, rises up the studio food chain, pretends to be from Spain to avoid anti-Mexican bigotry, and is secretly in love with Nellie.

There are plenty of great scenes here: particularly an outrageous setpiece in which Nellie, always up for a dare, fights a rattlesnake in the desert after one of many orgiastic parties; this is a contest that leads to a very erotic encounter with Lady Fay Zhu. She is also great when Nellie has to do a speaking role in a perky college-gal comedy; she does take after take with the director of photography melting in his soundproofed ”sweat box” enclosure. Most staggeringly, there is Manny’s first real job in the movies: wrangling an elephant to be delivered to a colossally decadent party where there is to be a Roscoe Arbuckle-style crisis. One very indulgent plutocrat, doing drugs and pervy activity with a young woman in a private room, panics when she loses consciousness. The question of rape (which fuelled the actual Arbuckle case, of which he was eventually exonerated), does not feature, although the movie slightly swerves the question of whether this fictional woman recovers or not. This situation plays out differently to the real-life case of dancer Patricia Douglas, subject to a career-ruining smear campaign in 1937 after accusing a studio executive of rape at a party given by MGM chief Louis B Mayer. Audiences are entitled to wonder if the traumatised secret suffered by the Nellie LeRoys from real-life Hollywood was not that they had a quaintly imagined “gambling habit”, but that they were being systematically abused by their employers.

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.