SILENT FILM ERA ROARS
DAMIEN CHAZELLE’S FEVERISH ‘BABYLON,’ ABOUT HOLLYWOOD BEFORE AND AFTER THE ARRIVAL OF SOUND, IS BIG, MESSY, AMBITIOUS AND OFTEN WAY TOO MUCH
‘Perhaps the ballyhoo meant nothing,” Kevin Brownlow wrote in his defining history of the silent film era, “The Parade’s Gone By.” It’s probably true that even avid moviegoers have increasingly drifted away from the films of what Brownlow called, with good reason, “the richest in cinema’s history.” In 1952, the Sight and Sound poll of critics had seven silents in the top 10 films of all time. The recent, much-debated Sight and Sound list had just one.
In “Babylon,” Damien Chazelle’s feverish and sprawling celebration of those halcyon Hollywood days and their abrupt termination, the director of “La La Land” has, with orgiastic zeal, sought to bring back the ballyhoo.
Yet Chazelle’s three-plus-hour extravaganza isn’t the dutiful, nostalgic ode you might expect of such a Tinseltown period piece. It’s much messier and more interesting than that. In resurrecting the silent era and the onset of the talkies, “Babylon” has trained its focus on a transitional moment in moving images, painting a picture of how technological progress doesn’t always equal improvement.
Here, in unrelenting excess and hedonism, is the manic, madcap energy of the movies and the crushing maw of the medium’s perpetual evolution. That early freewheeling frenzy is snuffed out by the advent of sound and other forces that seek to domesticate the movies. In that way, “Babylon” may be most addressed to our current movie era.
Today’s film industry is similarly wracked by forces of change that may be sapping its big-screen verve. “Babylon” is about how the movies are always reborn, but brutally so. Though it may be a chaotic shamble, Chazelle’s film makes this one point brilliantly clear: Cinema will be tamed for only so long; the parade will go on.
This is, to be sure, not a strictly accurate history. Chazelle has taken a “print the legend” approach to 1920s Hollywood, drawing partly from the pre-code scandals and myths of Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon.” His film, a romp and tragedy at once, is sometimes enthrallingly, often exhaustingly played at a manic pitch, careening from set piece to set piece. Striving to impress the wildness of the time, “Babylon” overdoes it, striking a cartoonish over-the-top note from the start, and then, for three hours, trying vainly to sustain its drug-fueled fever dream of bygone Hollywood. That makes for an overstuffed and — especially by the third act — meandering film.
But it’s also an insistently alive one that’s hard to look away from, with flashes of brilliance. For a director known for more tasteful and sentimental excursions, “Babylon” is a lurid descent into debauchery. Sometimes it’s an unnatural fit. It’s too showy and too long. But Chazelle’s film is something to reckon with, and the kind of ambitious swing that a young director of talent deserves credit for daring.
In its ecstatic early scenes, “Babylon” throbs with their almost primal showbiz aspirations. Aspiring actor Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie) is cast as a last-minute fill-in while Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent star in the Douglas Fairbanks mold, brings the fixer Manny (Diego Calva) along with him to set. Each will make their nimble way up, with a widespread cast of characters swirling around.
Nothing is quite as vivid in “Babylon” as its teeming studio of outdoor sets where Nellie and Manny each find themselves the day after an extravagant party. There is so much more to come after these scenes: the epochal arrival of “The Jazz Singer”; Nellie’s farcical first try on a soundstage; a nighttime dance with a poisonous snake; Jack’s painful slide out of the limelight; a late misjudged plunge into a dark Los Angeles underworld with a mob boss played creepily by Tobey Maguire. Some of these scenes are terrific. Much is overcooked. “Babylon” is never quite rooted in either Nellie or Manny, whose arcs feel increasingly dictated by the film’s real narrative engine, Hollywood history.
But the best of “Babylon” is there, a couple of hours earlier, at the carnivalesque Kinoscope lot in the desert. It’s a mad moviemaking nirvana, with films being shot all over and many of the participants women or people of color — a reminder that the early days of film were in some ways more open and inclusive than the Hollywood eras that came later.