Babylon (2022)

I became a fan of Damien Chazelle almost overnight. I rented Whiplash, one of the only films ever to leave me physically shaking, shortly before seeing La La Land in theaters (twice) and breaking down in full sobs. First Man was an odd follow-up, a spaceman biopic after a big Hollywood musical, but Babylon feels a bit more a return to form. Again (and still), Chazelle is looking at what makes successful people tick, what pushes them to succeed beyond their comfort zones, and what price fame exacts on their souls. 

Babylon is bigger and it is more boisterous, a three-hour version of Hail, Caesar! by way of Quentin Tarantino, which begins with a pachyderm’s diarrhea and concludes with a long montage that serves as – unsurprisingly, given his past work – Chazelle’s big love letter to the movies. For my money, it’s a grand success until that finale, which overinflates the point made by La La Land in a movie that is already perilously extravagant.

 

Babylon is a sprawling film epic in the tradition of, say, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, featuring a bevy of characters bumping into each other on the way up the showbiz ladder: aspirant and ingenue Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), whose dreams of stardom occlude the perils along her way; silent star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who speaks bad Italian while proposing marriage to a different woman every other scene; accidental stagehand Manny Torres (Diego Calva); jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo); and gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who sees all and writes even more.

 

I knew just from the runtime that the decadence of Babylon was going to be the point, that its sheer exorbitance would likely be a comment in itself. La La Land was a tight two hours, but it seems that three-hour runtimes are becoming the way of the future; James Cameron needed the full three to give us the next Avatar film, while Wakanda Forever landed only twenty minutes shy. After the aforementioned elephant sequence, Chazelle stages an exorbitant party sequence that would make Baz Luhrmann blush with envy. It’s The Great Gatsby times a million, and how our protagonists react to and inhabit it will set the course for the next two hours and change.

 

Chazelle is a confident filmmaker, and the vast majority of the film is leisurely world-building, episodic sequences that explore the consequences of Hollywood’s meteoric rise. In some such episodes, our protagonists are asked to make moral sacrifices in exchange for fortune and glory; in others, they voluntarily sacrifice their dignity or their physical well-being for a shot at the big time. To sustain this episodic structure, a storyteller must be supremely confident and adept in ferrying the audience along, and Chazelle is certainly that, but he’s helped ably by a terrific cast.

 

As Nellie LaRoy, Robbie is electrifying. I’m not sure if her performance is sufficiently different from, say, her Harley Quinn to land her an Oscar, though the idea is being bandied about; she’s certainly manic and magnetic, like a dark Judy Holliday. Her chemistry with Diego Calva’s Manny is supposed to be star-crossed, but I sense that only Manny feels that way, and that’s precisely the point. This is a far cry from Mia and Sebastian of La La Land, perhaps because Babylon is largely more cynical. Meanwhile, Pitt’s terrific, as he always is, though one may be wondering why Jean Smart was given a role as toothless as Elinor until the third act, when Smart – in her role as scribe, prophet, and gatekeeper – gets an incisive monologue that could very well crop up in an awards season sizzle reel. Indeed, Elinor’s big speech makes a better summation of the film than Chazelle’s ending proper, which leads me to my conflicted feelings about the film’s ending.

 

I was deliberately not looking at my watch throughout the film but felt it must surely be on its way toward denouement when Chazelle began to stage his final episode before the film’s coda. Nothing I had seen so far prepared me for a terrifying performance from Tobey Maguire as mobster James McKay. In the film’s final act, Chazelle ratchets up the tension until the film descends into its own version of Dante’s Inferno – itself a perfect inversion of Babylon’s opener – with the ghastly Maguire as Virgil, our sunken-eyed guide into the underbelly of Los Angeles. From there, the film wraps up by telling us who will and won’t change, just in time for an epilogue that puts a button on the story. 

 

It’s almost as though Chazelle is in a rush to conclude the movie in time for his final sequence, which feels less like a satisfying and integrated climax and more like the final moments of Walt Disney World’s The Great Movie Ride. Without spoiling, Chazelle’s grand point had always been clear, and the extended conclusion feels like a less successful version of La La Land’s ending – which worked precisely because it was rooted in the characters. Here, though, Chazelle is making a broader point about the filmmaking industry, and when he acknowledges, for example, Singin’ in the Rain, he tips his hand, gilding the lily and unfortunately suggesting that Babylon has just been an R-rated remake of the 1952 classic.

 

Babylon isn’t Singin’ in the Rain, but nor is it La La Land, which I maintain is still Chazelle’s best. If there’s an issue with Babylon, it isn’t that it lacks restraint or focus – its madcap meandering is precisely the point – but if it’s a shaggy dog story, the punchline needs to be a little more substantive and personal than where Chazelle leaves it. I still don’t know if La La Land ends on a happy, sad, or wistful note, but Babylon closes with one foot firmly in treacle, which is a sentiment the movie never fully earns. If the film had ended ten minutes earlier, this might have been a different review, but Babylon trips over its own feet right at the finish line – but what a race up until that point.

 

Babylon is rated R for “strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.” Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Eric Roberts, Jeff Garlin, and Tobey Maguire.

Youth in Revolt (2009)

It's been said that Michael Cera only plays the same character - the gangly, awkward teenager with his unrequited emotions on his sleeve and a mouth full of verbose non sequiturs. In a sense, Youth in Revolt is a response to that theory; here Cera plays a character desperate to reinvent himself as a "dangerous" casanova. This reinvention is fascinating, but much else about Youth in Revolt is otherwise fairly forgettable, marking potential but leaving the audience with little more than in-the-moment laughs.

Cera stars as the unfortunately named Nick Twisp, the standard Cera character, forced to relocate to a trailer park after his mother (Jean Smart) and her lover Jerry (Zach Galifianakis) are involved in selling a dud car to a few sailors. There Nick meets Manic Pixie Dream Girl Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), a girl he recognizes instantly as the love of his life despite the fact that she's already seeing someone. Sheeni's less convinced, encouraging him to "be bad" so that the two can move closer together once Nick is forced to move in with his father (Steve Buscemi). In order to be Sheeni's dream man, Nick crafts a "supplementary persona," Francois Dillinger (also Cera) - a chain-smoking, mustachioed arsonist. Oh yeah, and Fred Willard shows up a few times as Nick's uber-liberal neighbor Mr. Ferguson, who's more often than not eating those kinds of mushrooms.

First, the bad news. Zach Galifianakis isn't even in this movie. Sure, he has screen time, but his trademark stage presence is nowhere to be found; he plays a much more subdued, muted version of himself for the twenty minutes he's in the movie. That's right; it's sort of a spoiler, but the-man-who-would-be-Alan disappears from the film before we've had a chance to get to know his character. It's sort of a letdown, but it's a problem that plagues the rest of the film, too; Buscemi is almost a non-presence in the film, Justin Long peeks his head in for a bit of overplayed stoner humor, and the only thing genuinely funny about Willard's near-cameo is that Fred Willard is on the screen - otherwise, it's a part that could have been played by anyone capable of lying face-down on shag carpet. I haven't even mentioned Ray Liotta, who's also here. Liotta plays another cop, this one a potential paramour for Jean Smart's character, yet my problem here is the same one I had in Observe and Report - namely, that Liotta seems to be slumming. He's obviously talented and does a good job with what he has, but between this and a bit part on Hannah Montana, I'm close to putting Liotta on the "could have been" pile.

The film belongs almost entirely to the two Ceras, who are more than capable of supporting a movie on their own weight (it's just that I hate to see people like Buscemi, Liotta, and Willard reduced to being extras, when they're capable of so much more). Though Cera's definitive role for me will always be Superbad (George Michael on Arrested Development garners a close second), he does a very good job here, mumbling his way through the more awkward parts but doing it all with a sincerity that almost makes you forget this is but a variation on the same character he's been playing his whole career. His turn as Francois Dillinger is the more inspired of the two roles, since Dillinger is cool and confident (inspired, the film implies, by the iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's Breathless), and it demonstrates there's a little room for growth in Cera's resume. Indeed, Dillinger provides the most laughs in the film, both because it's slightly incongruous for Cera to be speaking lines like "Thanks for breakfast" before overturning his cereal bowl and spitting on the carpet and because Dillinger is so cool about it that he himself seems almost a non sequitur in the movie.

So Dillinger is the star, and his role alone is worth the price of admission, but there are serious problems with the film's own identity. I referred to Sheeni as a "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" with my tongue firmly in cheek and a note of disdain because I'm growing tired of this stock character that's overstayed her welcome. Perhaps, then, that is the best thing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did for me - put nails in the coffin of the MPDG by exposing her as a fallacy. Early in Youth in Revolt, Nick tells us that the difference between real life and movies is that "In the movies the good guy gets the girl. In real life it's usually the prick." Fair enough; one might expect the movie to go the route of (500) Days of Summer, deconstructing the conventional plot threads while grounding the film in a sense of realism. And it seems to do that for a while; Nick remains obliviously in love with Sheeni while she seems to be willing to dismiss him as a "summer fling," but somewhere near the halfway mark the film becomes the same old story we've seen a million times before - boy overcomes obstacles to be with girl happily ever after. It's frustratingly inconsistent, both because of what the movie has already told us (these endings don't happen) and because of what the movie has already showed us (Sheeni is unwilling to leave her boyfriend Trent for Nick). I'm not averse to changing gears mid-stream, but here it seems purposeless, forced, and implausible. (See Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist for a way to do this shift correctly).

Youth in Revolt, then, is a little like a chocolate chip cookie. When you look at it on the shelf, it looks like exactly what you've been craving. As you're indulging in it, it's delicious. As you're almost done with it, you start to become disappointed. Once it's gone, it doesn't wash so well because you realize it's insubstantial - almost exactly like all the other cookies you've had. But it tasted good doing down, so perhaps that's all that matters.
Not for the kiddies, Youth in Revolt snagged an R rating "for sexual content, language and drug use." Frank sexual dialogue and implications and F-bombs fly freely, and a few scenes revolve around psychotropic mushrooms and marijuana.