Babylon film review: Brad Pitt can’t save this mess
★★☆☆☆
In the first ten minutes of Babylon, an elephant excretes faeces explosively down the camera, a woman pees on her sexual partner and partygoers are seen shovelling cocaine up their noses from a pile almost as high as the elephant.
The party kicks on for another half an hour, when naked people start having sex on the dancefloor and one hedonistic partygoer takes it too far and dies, the biggest concern being how to carry him out so as to not disturb the party. They decide hauling the elephant through the main hall is a good distraction.
Everything is a wild, chaotic close up. It’s Gatby-esque and so it should be, this is the 1920s and we’re at a party frequented by the Hollywood set during the Golden Age of cinema. It is the age before The Talkies were invented when films were pushed out at pace, regardless of quality, because by the looks of it, everyone was focussing hard on partying instead.
Soon we’re on a film set where Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy character has blagged herself a leading role. (Coked up at the party, she always said she’d be a star.) Also on set, hundreds of male actors are shooting a fight scene in a period drama using actual bows and arrows and getting actually killed in the process. Tens of died bodies lay around as the director celebrates how successful the shoot’s been.
Like it’s party loving leads, Babylon is a hot mess
There is often a cut from one scene to another after a few seconds. Babylon is hectic and frenzied and by golly it’s fun. But it’s all way too much. Especially when we pass the two hour mark and the film is still the same, and there’s more hedonism, more hedonism, more hedonism, and soon we’re approaching the three hour mark and losing the will to live.
Babylon’s saving grace is Brad Pitt, who gives a career-best performance as Jack Conrad, an ageing star of the silent era who fails to convert to The Talkies. The plot revolves around the idea that he becomes washed up and depressed because he’s out of date and Nellie relates; she’s a silent star too who has had it bad since sound became a thing.
We watch most of the fall from the perspective of Diego Calva’s industry upstart Manny, who blags his way into the industry only to find out how insipid it is. They all end up broke and in trouble with some gangsters and their pampered perspectives peter out as they face peril.
Babylon is just too long. Miles too long. It is a bloated expression of a familiar story: a movie about making movies, only this tale has been told so much better before, like in director Damien Chazelle’s other film about making movies, La La Land.
There are some very nice nice bits – the first half an hour, for instance, before you realise that the whole film is going to flog the same dead horse for three hours, and Brad Pitt, who is brilliantly funny and immensely watchable. One scene where gossip columnist character Jean Smart wisely tells Johnny to accept that his career is over – but immortalised in history – is rich with truth, and is one of a few scenes with feeling. A few of the bits on set offer fascinating insight into movie making in the 1920s and there are good performances throughout. It’s funny throughout too.
But my God, Babylon needs some direction and some serious cuts. It’s so chaotic that by the end, when they try to feign sentimentality about Hollywood and try to make a real point, it feels contrived and utterly unemotional. Like it’s party loving leads, Babylon is a hot mess.
Babylon is in cinemas now
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