The most astounding thing about Babylon is that it's a film entirely composed of false notes. From the uber-indulgent near-thirty-minute opening orgy to the closing Singing In The Rain-inspired phantasmagoria there's not a single believable moment. The characters are cliches writ large, the comedy is forced to breaking point, every sequence sails past melodrama into overkill, then circles back for another assault on your battered sensibilities. If you know anything at all about Hollywood from the silent to the early sound era, then you know it was absolutely nothing like Damian Chazelle's perverse reversal of Singing In The Rain. Sure, there was debauchery. There was excess. Careers crashed and burned. But Babylon aims Sick And Twisted in biblical proportions, and it quickly becomes ludicrously outlandish. If Chazelle is trying to say something worthwhile here, he's making a giant hash of it. There's a would-be momentous scene toward the end in which gossip columnist Elinor St John tells movie star Jack Conrad that his career is over simply because his time is up, but he will be remembered in a hundred years time. Only we know that there were usually very specific reasons why silent stars failed in the transition to sound (Singing In The Rain knew that), and, actually, most of those stars weren't remembered 20 years later, and they're completely forgotten today. Elinor and Chazelle could hardly be more wrong. The only point at which I was emotionally engaged by Babylon was in one of Brad Pitt's later scenes. Was I moved by his character. No. I was moved by Pitt giving a masterful performance in this empty vessel of a film, to sadly little effect. Margot Robbie gives it everything she has too, but with rather more mixed results, given how her character's arc is from annoying to insufferable. By contrast, Diego Calva as an improbable Latino producer is an utterly blank canvas for most of the movie. And then there's Tobey Maguire giving what must surely be the year's most over-the-top performance in possibly the decade's most over-the-top film sequence. But can anything really be over-the-top when a film is an exercise in excess? Chazelle clearly thinks the way to cinema greatness is Go Big Or Go Home. Somebody needs to introduce him to the concept Less Is More.
