Babylon, which I’ve just seen, is a horror movie. If there is any question about that, it is totally dispelled about two hours and 15 minutes into the more than three-hour film, when Tobey Maguire shows up. Maguire could be any mad doctor in a horror film, taking unsuspecting guests to view his menagerie (e.g. The Black Sleep).
But the whole movie is about a menagerie. There is little magic and few “normal” people in Babylon: just a hodgepodge of early Hollywood freaks, struggling to get along as the silent era morphs into the age of sound. The three leads — Brad Pitt (Jack), Margot Robbie (Nellie), and Diego Calva (Manny) — play their roles well, but Robbie is too OTT. The character is supposed to be OTT, but it goes too far. The scene where they try to pass her off as cultured is like something out of My Fair Lady or Bells Are Ringing ("Drop that Name.") And she doesn’t look like a woman of the late 1920s. in fact, I didn’t really get the feel of time and place, the way I did in a far better film about early Hollywood: The Day of the Locust (1975). The language is of the 2020s.
Yet, although I have to think more about this, I liked Babylon, sort of. It's a movie of excess and set pieces, some excellent, some less so. The orgy at the beginning went on too long and therefore fell flat. It reminded me of that endless vampire fight in the Tarantino-written From Dusk to Dawn (1996), a scene that might have worked had it not been so endless. But I must confess, it is interesting to see a film that tries to show every conceivable fluid and solid that can come out of the human (and animal) body, leaving the audience to decide which they prefer: the elephant excrement? Blood? The pus and snake venom that’s sucked out of Nellie’s neck? The projectile vomit scene? All the urine, which shows up in so many ways? Tears? I’m sure the fluids that I haven’t mentioned must have shown up as well; certainly the acts that produce them were there in full force.
It is believed in certain parts of the world that elephant excrement can cure a headache. Despite that, Diego Calva’s Manny, who gets covered in it at the top of Babylon, is probably the man with the most headaches in the film. His character is also the best thing about the film, although I think he would have given up on Nellie much earlier. But the final shot — Manny in a movie theater in 1952, tears streaming down his face — is actually quite moving, though other aspects of the ending are reminiscent of the end of How the West Was Won, which seems to show the L.A. Freeway as the apex of American ingenuity.
I agree with Manolha Dargis' review in The New York Times, which ends:
"There are moments in Babylon, say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece Greed. A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in Babylon, and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art".
I think I'll watch Babylon again.
