Trying to Decipher "Babylon"

 Surely Damien Chazelle can be called one of the best filmmakers of the 2010s, I don't think that's a controversial claim. His newest film, "Babylon", is kind of awful and was a monstrous flop for the studio, but it's awful in a very auteur-chic sort of way. Every issue the film has (and it has plenty!) is the result of doing too much, of committing to a bad idea, which in its own way is much better than watching a bad film that has no ideas.

 The main hold-up I have here is that Chazelle never quite figures out the balance between "making movies is fun" and "making movies will destroy you". From the outset, nothing about the film feels fun. We are introduced to the world of silent-era Hollywood with a massive cocaine party, where people die and/or get shat on by elephants. The film is happy to show you bodily fluids of all sorts, but none of this feels appealing. I often found myself thinking of two very well known cocaine movies: Scorsese's "Goodfellas" (clearly an inspiration on the photography, with there being multiple long tracking shots showing off interiors as the most blatant lift), and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights" (clearly an inspiration on whatever Tobey Maguire's character is doing). These films are not endorsing the mob or the porn industry per se, but, they both make those career paths look fun for a while. Anyone can watch those films and understand why people might get sucked into it. Chazelle seems mostly incapable of doing this. He does pull it off for about half an hour with a long montage of multiple movie shoots. That section is easily the high point of the film. Seeing the cameras rolling and the actors grinding through a tough day on set, I understand what's so intoxicating about this world. And in a movie that is hazardously filled with cameos and stunt castings in supporting roles, my favorite performance by far was Spike Jonze as the German director obsessed with the artistry of his war picture. But on the whole, everyone spends most of "Babylon" absolutely miserable, and that has a ripple effect that sinks the whole film.

 Take the ending montage. Chazelle's ending sequences have always been exemplary, usually in such a way that they work as a short film all on their own. Here, we get a montage of cinema. It's kind of simplistic for someone like him, knowing how ambitious the "La La Land" ending sequence was. But on a deeper level, I have no idea what ending the movie with a montage of other movies accomplishes. It feels like the capstone for a fun and uncritical film about the magic of Hollywood, which is extremely not the film we've been watching for the past 3 hours. The past Chazelle endings tend to challenge their protagonist, again best exemplified by "La La Land", which offers an alt-history of how Mia and Sebastian's lives could have gone if they chose to prioritize their relationships over their careers. On paper, "Babylon" is a perfect setup for a similar ending. Manny, the only character with a fully fleshed out character arc, has returned to Hollywood after disappearing from it for two decades. We have watched his downfall, where he rose from a low level assistant to an executive who gets corrupted by opulence and sells out his friends. I would have expected Chazelle to pose a tough question of whether chasing Hollywood dreams was worth it for Manny. By showing off the whole history of great cinema, the answer seems to be an uncritical "yes". I cannot imagine a duller way to conclude a movie about movies. 

 "Babylon" was sold as a Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie show, which is both odd in the sense that Quentin Tarantino made a movie about Hollywood starring those two very recently and odd in the sense that they're blatantly boring figures. Brad Pitt gets saddled with a plot about an aging actor coming to terms with his loss of popularity. It's an overdone bit, Pitt himself isn't terribly compelling in the role, and worst of all it lacks anything that makes it specifically about the silent to sound transition that the film portends to be about. Pitt fails to survive that transition, but the film (as long as it is) never connivingly answers why. We know that the audience doesn't take him seriously, but exactly zero moments are spent dissecting any differences in acting styles between silence and sound. Every struggle that Pitt goes through could be transplanted to any time, including the 1960s setting of Tarantino's film. Margot Robbie, as legally not Clara Bow, fares even worse. She's a talented actress. Very few directors seem to know how to get that talent to show up on screen. Most often they default to having her play a chaotic neutral fireball with an aggressive Brooklyn/Jersey accent. That's exactly what she is here, and she never changes. After 3 hours of running time and 10+ years of story time, Margot's Nelly LaRoy ends exactly the way she started, a loud and messy woman who takes pride in those traits. Margot Robbie can play that role fine, but she badly needs to find projects that give her some other dimension, and "Babylon" fails to do that.