Oh God, please forgive us! You sent us this beautiful light and we're squandering it!
First Screening. Cinemark. I have to say the first 90 minutes of this film is so perfect, I knew, I just fucking knew, that it had to swing the other way. And when it did, and it swung hard the other way, I then saw... wow. This is effectively a remake of Boogie Nights. Now I hate Boogie Nights, and I'll never watch it again primarily because I don't even like the first half. But this film, I love the first half. I love it HARD. And it's not that i didn't see the swing coming, or could not foresee what was going to happen to the characters. I totally saw that coming. It was the way in which that was executed was so exceptionally badly done as to defy reality. Why would you create something so perfect only to mishandle the second half? That is the true mystery of this film.
The opening forty minute sequence has an amazing amount of everything in it. There was an amazing amount of queues from LaLa Land, there was a Scarface amount of cocaine at a time when as an over the counter drug, it was not piled high like 1983 on tables. There was an amazing amount of elephant shit. And there were an amazing amount of tits. In fact, the only thing shocking about any of the nudity in the opening was that she didn't take part in any of it. I'm not saying I wanted to see it, or being a pig about it, it just seemed that as the character she was portraying, it was odd that she was not partaking. I mean, she was all about the jazz and the coke and the dancing and the gambling - which we never see. So for that to be excluded was something noticed.
After that, you basically have the pool scene from Boogie Nights, which is a movie set out in the middle of the California desert where several films are being shot at the same time to take advantage of the always present sun. This roundabout, non stop camera opening followed by the nuts and bolts of what it takes to actually film a movie was shockingly good. There is a female director, whom to the best of my research on IMDB seems to be Ruth Adler, which seems to be a fictional construction to convey the fact that early Hollywood employed tons of women in 'above the line' roles like directing, screenwriting, producing, etc. Olivia Hamilton plays this role, and if I have Wikipedia right, she is the current wife of Damien Chazelle. I only convey this because I was trying to find out if Ruth Adler was a real person because the portrayal was so profound. This character pops up again in another sequence I'll get to. To round out this sequence and the absolute chaos these people must have operated in, you have an ad hoc factory churning our scenes by numbers with no studios to speak of because they are simply not needed. In the midst of this is a menagerie of interesting characters including a Chinese director of photography whom I can only assume is the grand master James Wong Howe, who if you looked at his IMDB page, would floor you as the Vilmos of the Golden Age. This type of attention to detail brings me to a point.
This is (obviously) a film about Hollywood, and like a lot of film geeks, I dig films about films. I LOVE F for FAKE to the point that... I really do think it's better than Kane. I love 8 1/2. I love LaLa Land. These introspective films about the business and how it's great and horrible are insanely interesting. There are some that see them as non-productive becaus the majority of the audience has no relationship with Hollywood other than going to the movie theatre and why would they be interested in a single town on the edge of the earth that lives in this out of reach and decadent fashion. I just don't understand this point of view. Why go to the movies at all? Most films are about people and subjects that are unknown. It is the exploration of those stories that create a drive for audience. Why pick up a book? Etc. If in fact people's relationship with the movie theatre should limit their interest in the film industry, then I can't wait to see a riveting docudrama about the success and trials of the distribution industry. Let me check. Oh, there isn't one.
The most impressive section of the film is the deftly written, better executed, brilliantly edited transition to sound in which Margo Robbie's character Nellie LeRoy must perform her first sound scene under Olivia Hamilton's direction. This scene was fucking gold. It had everything. Pacing, ego, attitude, on set pushers, film closets, red lights and not just a little antisemitism. Every actor in this scene, even the ones you come to hate, are doing something special. And when it concludes you realize that this is just as special as the oepning 40 minutes. This is what Chazelle does. he gets a group of actors, and in the opening sequence you're talking a hundred or so actors, to trust each other to the point where they move as one in a tightly co-ordinated group, to ignore everything else around them, even nudity, to perform a long, sweeping, crane or dolly shot and get the one take needed to convey the atmosphere or given objective. The Sound scene is just a microcosm of that opening shot, different in objective but no different in execution. Like the opening scene had reminiscent themes of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, this scene was reminiscent of hundreds of sets all over the San Fernando Valley, but of a certain scene in Singin' in the Rain in particular.
I have also read a lot of people dumping shit on the LeRoy character and about how she seemingly can't stay in her lane and do this or that or the other and how it would be SO EASY to just do what everyone expects her to do and she'd have everything blah blah blah and I think those people do not understand what it was like to work with Lindsay Lohan. Marilyn Monroe, as evidenced by everyone who worked with her, was an astounding actor... when she chose to be. If she wasn't 'there' at that particular moment, well, then you weren't shooting. So what the fuck is Billy Wilder supposed to do with a hundred people on set that he has to pay and feed and put up in hotels etc.? Wait for her to get into the mood to do her job? Of course, you fire people like that. Lohan was the same, with the same addiction issue and the same attitude towards her art. Wrap that into a bad family, a reality show, legal proceedings and a few stints in rehab... yeah. That happens. That totally happens in Hollywood. A LOT. So no, the character never seemed unreal or unapproachable to me. She never pissed me off or made me angry. It made total sense.
I recommend anyone interested in this subject to read Scott Eyman's unparalleled masterpiece "The Speed of Sound" which chronicled the years 1927-1932 and the revolution that happened in Hollywood. Sound destroyed as many lives as it made. Lives like Jack Conrad, Nellie LeRoy, and hundreds of other people who thought they had found the life they belonged in. But like everything that seems too good to be true, this wound up being the same. Eyeman documents the impact of the change on the industry as a whole. How the independents were swallowed up and how from the hip shooters like D. W. Griffith were replaced by cold, ruthless professionals like Irving Thalberg. Like everything it could have gone better but these people were dealing with something that had never BEEN before. All their passions and prejudices were a part of the rise, the transformation, and the success of the Golden Age.
The second half of the film slows way, way down and though I was willing to go quite far, I wasn't willing to go three levels down in an abandoned sewer tunnel with Toby Maguire (obviously miscast) and to casually toss aside characters that we had grown accustomed to. The person I empathized the most with was Jack Conrad. Having two suicides in the film was a mistake. Conrad could have lived the rest of his life like Cary Grant. The script chose to go the other way and it was unnecessary for it to be that dark. Diego Calva has a great performance as Manny Torres, and this character's backstory is important. When people challenge me, and they will, that a story like this is impossible, I will point out that Raoul Walsh was an electrician fixing lights on a camera set in the 1890's and he died with more than two Oscars on his mantle in the 1960's. Most film directors and producers and even screenwriters were not professionals in the business because there was no business. By the time Babylon takes place, the film industry in California is only fifteen years old. All kinds of people were wrapped up in what was a new industry that made no sense to anyone. For a Spanish speaking truck driver to suddenly make a living producing and promoting 'race' films to blacks and latinos... yeah. That's possible. Because it happened. Early Hollywood made films marketed to Chinese immigrants. They wanted everyone's money - even people they hated. Though it seems fitting that Nellie LeRoy just wanders off in the dark, just showing an article of her untimely demise (like a hundred other starlets for sure) seemed to me to be a cop out because you'd rather show some built dude eat rats. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Dante's Inferno should have never left the page, and the entire mob connection could have been more... real. There was a real mob with real threats to Hollywood types and that should have been more realistically conveyed as the threat instead of alligators, people with deformities, and dwarfs. Horrible descent of ideas.
The ending montage is basically a huge failure due to someone's inability to accurately convey what was really important in cinema from 1922 to 2022. There were shockingly good ideas. Tron's light cycles, Gene Kelly, the satellite from 2001. All of these were great ideas, but were absolutely poorly executed. This was not a sensitive assignment. In fact, I'm sure if you thought hard enough, you could probably find a promotional film from the AFI or BFI or one of the studios that did the exact same thing and pulled it off. This film was made by Paramount, and it did not even include a clip of The Godfather, which was their most profitably film in their history. They also had a clip of Avatar, which people did bash, but I will not. Four billion people have seen Avatar. If you hate it, that's your problem.
In the end, Manny doesn't leave the theatre to go walk in the sun. He stays in the theatre and cries. Well, sorry. I disagree with this. But there's a lot I don't like. Again, it's not where they end up necessarily. It would have been moor apropos if Jack Conrad died in a car crash for instance. But the journey to take everyone to the cliff was not exciting, enjoyable or (and here is the key point) re-watchable... at all. And that for me is the kicker. Set your iphone for 90 minutes, then flee. Or in this case.. Flea.