12/28/22 - Babylon (2022) - 4+/10

A monstrous coke line of cacophonous cinema. Perhaps just an embellishment on factual events instead of pure fiction, it is still decadence greasily oozing out of every alcohol drenched orifice while vacuous charm merchants parade through the overlit madness. Feels as if Chazelle wanted to make his own amphetamine crazed version of the Coen’s Hail, Cesar!, but without the intrigue, humor or driving narrative. 

It isn’t funny enough to carry the excesses in questionable taste and the thin threads of bedraggled dramatic heft. Less a magical tale of old Hollywood, swept up in a whirlwind of pomp and flashing bulbs treating us to a tale of love and loss, but more of a gaudily painted timeline mapping the rise and fall of analogous historic figures in cinema as it evolved from the silent era into the talkies & today. It is a concussive bomb blast of self-reflexive adoration that wantonly veers into the unnecessarily vulgar for shocking effect because the audaciousness & spectacle were more important than the small humanities. Nostalgic artsy masturbatory history lesson, to an odious degree at its end.

I will give it its due in that Chazelle sells out to his vision and goes all in. If you find its beginnings charming or riveting, I think this will be a wild ride of salacious behind the scenes and blimey-eyed veneration for the artform through its turbulent history. If you didn’t like the epic bacchanalia of a pre-credits 30 minutes, then you are doomed for seemingly unending disappointment.

Robbie is magnetic, but I don’t know if it is enough for an award. Deigo Calva, whom I haven’t seen before but the praise of this role preceded him, is solid but unspectacular with what he is given. Li Jun Li delivers raw charisma, Pitt is merry, and the rest of the cast does a good job. My issues with the film are its excesses and insufficiencies. It is much too much and much too long. It emphasizes the bawdy and the boisterous too eventually boring effect (especially in the Hurwitz score where the whiffs of La La Land were too robust not to notice) while leaving me grasping for tighter narrative filaments and a connection to the characters & story that I just did not find. It is a passion project made entirely on “I am in love with this” but none of “I have this to say”. He swung for what he wanted but it was a wild miss for me.

• PS - What’s up with the “Pussy Posse” representation in this one? Was something trying to be said or is it just friends helping each other out?