Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, ambitious but deeply flawed epic

Damien Chazelle’s attempts to out-Fellini Fellini in this star-studded film are regrettable.

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon

Babylon (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★½
For more than three decades I’ve been teaching a course in film history as part of the Continuing Education program at the University of Sydney. One of the most fascinating periods in the colourful history of cinema is 1927-1930 when silent films gave way to “talkies”. Fans of the sublime 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, which unfolds during this period, will perhaps have thought that this was a cheerful, nostalgic time in Hollywood history, but it was far from that. As the young director of La La Land (2016), Damien Chazelle, demonstrates in his hugely ambitious but deeply flawed epic Babylon, the demise of that very specific art form, the silent film, led to the end of many careers, not only the actors who were deemed unable to talk for the new medium but also all the musicians who had accompanied the silent films in cinemas around the world.

Given my fascination for this period I went to see Babylon with the highest expectations, which were dashed almost from the start. Chazelle does explore the way the abrupt and fundamental changes to the art of the silent film impacted on those involved, but in a wildly over-the-top and grotesque fashion. The film is too long (three hours and nine minutes) by at least an hour, too intent on shocking – there’s at least one orgy too many – too loud, too unsubtle. Attempts at humour are grimly unamusing: an elephant defecates over a hapless truck driver and it’s supposed to be funny. A starlet pees on the face of a corpulent comedian (presumably based on Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle) during a wild party – hilarious. Margot Robbie’s character does battle with a rattlesnake and a muscular thug chomps on a live rat: not my idea of a comedy scene. Some of these excesses are inspired by Kenneth Anger’s notorious, once banned, book Hollywood Babylon (1965) and they may very well have occurred, but seeing them depicted on the big cinema screen makes for a very disagreeable viewing experience.

Babylon features four major characters. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), apparently based on popular silent star John Gilbert, is a much-married heartthrob whose career goes into a catastrophic decline when audiences laugh at a love scene in his first talkie. Gilbert, who had starred with Greta Garbo in the superb Flesh and the Devil (1927) did indeed appear in some atrocious early talkies, but he fell from grace not because he couldn’t “talk” but because the dodgy sound recording, the woeful scripts and the incompetent direction did him in.

Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is an ambitious, abrasive young beauty who practically bulldozes her way onto a silent film set and impresses her (female) director (Olivia Hamilton) because she’s able to shed a tear on demand.

Manny Torres (newcomer Diego Calva) is a Mexican who finds work as a gofer and proves his mettle when he’s able to secure a replacement for a broken camera just in time to shoot a romantic desert scene before sunset. Manny becomes a studio executive over time and is sent to New York in 1927 to check out audience reactions to Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (ecstatic).

Then there’s Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), an African-American trumpeter, first seen playing with a jazz band during the lengthy orgy scene that introduces most of the main characters early in the film; Palmer is later hired to star in some all-black musical talkies, but still has to suffer some indignities as a result of the stereotyping of the period.

So much of Babylon is excessive that it comes as a great relief when, occasionally, the film ceases to bombard the viewer and offers some true insights into Hollywood at the time. In one such scene, English gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) gives a troubled Jack Conrad some good advice. His time is over, she tells him, but she predicts that, in the future, his best (silent) films will endure: “A child born in 50 years will discover you and you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” Anyone who has seen late, great silent films – films like Wings, The Crowd, The Wind and Sunrise among many others – will surely nod in agreement.

Another excellent scene comes as this uneven epic nears its conclusion; this takes place in 1952 with Manny back in Hollywood after a long absence. A final montage serves as a reminder of the magnificent legacy cinema has given us over the years, though many viewers may not recognise the brief clips from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Luis Bunuel’s Un chien andalou among others. Much of Babylon seems accurate if over-exaggerated. It’s true that several silent films were shot simultaneously on adjacent outdoor sets, but this sort of thing occurred several years before 1926, when the film’s opening scenes are set. Some real names are mentioned (Gloria Swanson most prominent among them) but the only “real” character seen is that of Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), MGM’s powerful head of production.

Among the peripheral characters are a frenetic German director at work – there were several of those in Hollywood at the time – as well as a dangerous gangster (Tobey Maguire) and a gallery of wealthy financial backers of the industry.

One sequence that stays in the mind is similar to a scene in Singin’ in the Rain: on the set of the studio’s first talkie Nellie is playing a college student – the film is presumably supposed to be Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party, made in 1929 with Clara Bow. The camera and camera operator are shut up in an airless box so that the sound of the camera won’t be picked up by the microphone. Up above the set, the sound recordist has the last word on every aspect of the scene.

There are endless takes, all of them useless for one reason or another – Nellie fails to hit her mark, she speaks too loudly, she speaks too quietly, someone’s shoes are squeaking, the studio head bursts in at just the wrong moment. No wonder the first talkies are crude and almost unwatchable.

In scenes like this one Chazelle is on firm ground, but his attempts to out-Fellini Fellini are regrettable and for much of its length Babylon is an unsubtle and indigestible mess so that despite all the talent involved and the fascinating subject matter, it must be seen as something of a disaster.

-

You Can Go Now! (M)
In cinemas
★★★½

Richard Bell is an award-winning Aboriginal artist and activist or, as he says, “an activist masquerading as an ­artist”. Abrasive, confrontational, witty and angry, he is the focus of this very good documentary that also serves as a reminder of the Indigenous protest movement of the past – notably the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the 1967 referendum and its aftermath.

Underlying it all is the understandable anger and frustration of Indigenous Australians when faced with the disinterest and even opposition of former prime ministers such as John Gorton and Billy McMahon.

Bell’s artworks often feature original photographs that he re-colours in vivid hues, and he’s influenced by Roy Lichtenstein among others.

You Can Go Now! uses archive footage very effectively to show the links between Indigenous Australians and the Black Power movement in the US.

Bell formed a friendship with US activist and artist Emory Douglas that was clearly fruitful for both of them.

Interviewees include Gary Foley and the current Minister for Aboriginal ­Affairs, Linda Burney. As we approach the referendum on the voice, this film is essential viewing.