#2: BABYLON

 

Starring Margot Robbie, brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo Li Jun LI. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Budget $80 million. Running timer 189 minutes, or three hours and nine minutes.

Imagine if Singin' in the Rain remade in the 21st Century with added drugs, sex and violence and you have Babylon. Set in 1926, Babylon follows the fortunes of four characters, Brad Pitt's silent movie star Jack Conrad, Margot Robbie's wannabe sex siren Nellie McRoy, Diego Clava's fledgling Mexican movie producer Manny Torres, and Jovan Adepo's African American jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer as they navigate the silent days of Hollywood and the introduction of sound to the movie industry. It's the classic rise, and fall story for our four lead characters as their lives intertwine and collide and in some cases spectacularly implode. 

The first hour of this three hour plus visual onslaught is an extraordinary visual and audio delight of such energy and frenzied relentless kinetic fury that left me happily dazed, confused and breathless. It's an arms-flung-wide celebration of the golden age of cinema and I found myself utter in love with it. I was desperate for it to retain that sheer bravado of that opening hour for entire length of its running time, but sadly, it couldn't and oddly it's when Manny Torres travels to NY to see Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer that the film starts to loose momentum. Indeed you could say it's the introduction of sound that not only changes the shape of cinema forever but also this film.

Apart from the staggering opening Hollywood party of such wanton drunken debauchery as to beggar belief, There's an extraordinary sequence that takes place in a dusty field outside Los Angeles where a dozen different movies are being made at the same time, that makes this film so astonishing, it's pure unadulterated chaos. The frenzied action and pure energy of the films being filmed leaves you bludgeoned with delight. It shows us simultaneously the making of a Middle-Ages war epic and Nellie's first movie and it's glorious. Indeed the scene where she cries on demand take-after-take is superb. 

But as sound comes in and the studios change, the gonzo rawness becomes replaced with a machine-like quality that sees our four heroes fortunes change and not all for the good, or worse.

Brad Pitt's Jack is the funniest of the four, his Conrad the most at ease in this world and he stumbles from one disastrous marriage to the next, and from one debauched party to another. Margot's Nellie gives both the most powerful performance and the most divisive, while Manny our touchstone ultimately becomes the most ridiculous particularly during the coda moment of the film. Sadly Jovan's Sidney Palmer, perhaps one of the most interesting characters, becomes just a side note.

And giving the proceedings its furious heart beat is the music, a glorious frenzied jazz funk soundtrack by Justin Hurwitz which matches proceedings perfectly. 

Sorry, way too many superlatives. 

And yet despite all this positive shtick, this doesn't really nail the landing. Sure, it's a visual tour-de-force that left me dazed and breathless, but it left the group of chums I saw this not only unmoved, and divided but openly hostile about it.

That it apes Baz Luhrmann style too much (true), that Margot Robbie's character is horribly anachronistic, that Sidney Palmer, the only black actor feels badly short changed and that the ending set in a cinema with Manny (now a late middle aged man) watching Singin' in the Rain is badly fumbled and ludicrous and yet despite all that I was still profoundly moved and delighted by the sheer power and energy of its opening hour.

8/10