What do you do when you see a movie that just reminds you of other, better movies? “Babylon”

I won’t keep you. It’s New Year’s Eve and you (and I ) have better things to do. However, my last theatrical film experience may serve as a warning to not fall for all that glitters or that given a filmmaker whose work you don’t really like a second chance is not always the brightest thing to do or just to recognize that I will never get those three-plus hours back.

“Babylon” is baloney. It’s beautifully shot, edited, and the performances are all strong; but so what, when the core of the film is so hollow? So what, when the performances are doing the heavy lifting of filling out something like characters but are written so blasé that it grows increasingly difficult to care whether they live and in a film that grows more and more tiresome to the point where you actively start wishing for a body count.

Almost every scene is Damian Chazelle’s film echoes dimly something from a better film. His opening orgy scene conjures up similar images from Pasolini to Kubrick and even paintings by Moreau, Klimt, or Dore. It’s beautiful and shot breathlessly and that in itself called to mind - as did other scenes, many other scenes - “The Wolf of Wall Street” in its more lurid aspects. 

Not a single character reads as a real human being; not Margot Robbie’s Nellie, a starlet on the rise modeled on Clara Bow. Not Many, played by a solid and sometimes remarkable Diego Calva. Maybe Brad Pitt’s Gilbert Rolandesque Jack Conrad comes close to something like a sentient being; but everyone winds up being more of a type or worse, a placeholder where there should be someone breathing. 

But it doesn’t matter. This is even a more vacuous exercise in “homage” cinema than “La La Land”. A major difference is that, at least here, Chazelle doesn’t bleed the natural charisma out of is actors. Robbie shines luminously, as she has to pretty much carry the film through the rise and fall of a career that mirrors the fall of the silent era. 

Hers is the free spirit that cannot be contained blah blah blah. Of course, she’s hampered by her appetites; gambling, sex, drugs. And yes, with the onset of sound, the movie industry becomes less fun as the moral scolds begin to express their displeasure. 

There is no point going on about historical inaccuracy except to say that if Chazelle did his homework as so many insist, he it poorly. Anachronisms abound and normally, I can overlook them, but here they’re at Zack Snyder “300” levels of fantasy and exaggeration. The dialog is rife with modern turns of phrase, “motherfucker” flies melodically from any and all mouths, but most of all, it’s in the utter disservice to not understanding how people just don’t talk to each other; it’s at each other and that’s not an anachronism; it is the way Chazelle crafts dialog.

Additionally, his weird treatment of race continues to hold over from his Oscar winning opus in its treatment of Sidney who comes up among the ranks with Nellie and Calva’s Manny as the trumpeter in an ensemble and eventually on screen. Sure, there’s the patronizing attitudes of the monied class (we endure an overlong sequence - hell, they all are overlong - with the Hearsts and the Rothchilds and other of the early 30s glitterati); but no recognition or acknowledgment that it is unlikely that Sidney would be allowed into certain spaces at the time, at all. The party scene mentioned in parentheses pales compared to the sequence where Manny, as producer of a film that is to reignite/save Nellie’s career and bring Sidney notice, asks Sidney to darken his face with shoe polish because the lighting is making him look white and the film will be have to be shelved, owing to laws against mixed race orchestras. 

Moreover, his treatment of Li Jun Li’s Faye Zhu, apparently modeled on Anna May Wong, is crap. She maintains some dignity throughout the film and while I know she is only modeled on Anna May, it’s still a reductive rendering of an Asian American woman who is also a lesbian being further marginalized because the times are changing not because of her ethnicity but because of her sexuality which rings so false, you could hear the bells peal from the screen. There are two problems with that thesis; one, is that lesbianism was hardly ever an issue in the Hollywood of the twenties or thirties. The other is how Faye’s firing from the studio (also wouldn’t happen to a strong commodity and didn’t, for example, to Anna May Wong) shows how little agency she has and, indeed, how little anyone in the film has.

Granted, this is part of Chazelle’s point; the studios don’t care who you are. Actors are merely commodities and fame is fleeting, legends fade, time goes on and there will be hundreds more like you, etc., etc. There is not a single original take on these wheezy themes; but god, is it a good looking fraud.

The film descends into greater depths of vulgarity - which I’m fine with, really, but Chazelle’s vulgarity is less of a John Waters than a teenage boy who thinks talking about porn in public is edgy - as Nellie runs afoul of some mobsters she owes eighty-five thousand dollars to and pleads for Manny to bail her out. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that the kingpin is played by Tobey Maguire in one of the most genuinely funny performance of his career. It’s creepy funny and by this point in Chazelle’s film, oh so very welcome.

In fact, with Maguire’s arrival on scene, it appears that it was time for Chazelle to pull an homage to David Lynch out of his ass, this time “Lost Highway” and “Blue Velvet”, since Maguire portrays a character not so different from Robert Blake’s in the former (and maybe a little Dean Stockwell from “Blue Velvet” and a cut to, yes, lines on the highway on our way to a deeper den of iniquity.

In any case, it’s more sound and fury that is by turns more goofy than suspenseful because, again, you don’t care about the characters. By the time we get to the scene where the enforcer catches up to Manny to tell him to leave L.A. and never come back, all I can hear is Ving Rhames telling Bruce Willis that his L.A. privileges have been revoked.

I know it sounds so unfair to not address other themes of how everything changed with sound and how life and art moves on without us and how we are all subject to the grand continuum of history. On the other, hand, it’s less annoying to do that; it saves you from being annoyed by watching a film that overplays its empty hand over and over again. 

The idiotic attempts at trying to bolster emotional beats falls flat repeatedly and the ending of the film with its “see? The movies! They’re art, I tell you! All the suffering the players in their tiny worlds go through to make a flick is worth it! SEE???” is all so vapid and so very trying.

After all this time, no, it was not worth it. Wait. There was one kind of “2001: A Space Odyssey” moment when Manny slips into a movie theater in 1952, coming to L.A. with his family where Chazelle decides it’s a good time to insert a kind of Ken Anger montage of snippets of other films from Muybridge to Cameron’s “Avatar”, as well as inserting scenes from “Babylon” into the mix to show how the whole wonderful and terrifying enterprise we know as cinema continues on. And on. And on. (It’s actually a really good sequence, but again, divorced of any salience with the rest of this tiresome escapade.)

Okay, it’s New Year’s Eve and I’ve wasted too much of our time on this tragic piece of film. Go out and have a swell time (or stay in and have one.) I’ll catch you in the New Year!