BABYLON: “wanton excess” is inadequate to describe this movie

Photo caption: Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Babylon is a whole lot of movie. More movie than you’re expecting. And maybe more movie than you want.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) has delivered a kinetic and kaleidoscopic showbiz epic of over three hours, which is visually stunning, ever entertaining and sometimes shocking. Now, is it a good movie?

Set beginning in 1926, Babylon traces Hollywood’s transition from silent film to the talkies by tracing the stories of a mega-movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the ambitious starlet Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the African-American trumpet prodigy Stanley Palmer (Jovan Adebo) and the sultry Chinese entertainer-by-night Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). The audience largely experiences Babylon from the point of view of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican household gofer whose abilities as a fixer propel him up the movie studio ladder. Chazelle’s view of Hollywood is as a human-crunching pool of toxicity, that a person must leave to survive with any decency or happiness.

This is also a Hollywood of unsurpassed debauchery and hedonism, which we taste right away in a movie mogul’s house party with lots of bare-breasted women and naked people engaging in sex, kinky sex, and perverted sex. The scene is clearly inspired by Ceil B. DeMille’s orgy scene in the silent The Ten Commandments, which seems quaint in comparison. This scene could have been imagined by Federico Fellini on speed and Hugh Hefner on acid.

Margot Robbie (center) and a cast of thousands in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

“Wanton excess” is inadequate to describe this party scene and much of Babylon. Like the guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap, Chazelle has set his amp to eleven. There’s so much eye candy here that Babylon will cause Baz Luhrman to feel bad about himself.

This is also the most scatological mainstream movie that I’ve seen. There’s projectile diarrhea (from an elephant), projectile vomit (from a person on a person) and urination (both from a woman onto a titillated man and from a man onto himself).

Back to the story. Chazelle shows us the Silent Era Hollywood studios with wall-to-wall outdoor movie sets, simultaneously grinding out comedies, romances and westerns. We see a cast of thousands in a medieval battle epic, and the transition to sound during the period when the technical challenges were so excruciatingly unforgiving that the sound men briefly usurped the control from the directors. Babylon’s characters are thinly-disguised recreations of John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Fatty Arbuckle, Anna May Wong, Erich von Stroheim and Louella Parsons, with some real life figures like Irving Thalberg.

Brad Pitt and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

If you’re going to cast an actor to play a movie star from the classic era, you’re not going to cast Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. or Bradley Cooper. Just cast Brad Pitt and you’re most of way there in your storytelling – Pitt’s handsome looks are just weathered enough, and he exudes physicality, confidence and insouciance. If you want a Douglas Fairbanks or Clark Gable type – he’s your guy. And, yes, he is perfect in this film.

Likewise, Jean Smart is your gal for a cleareyed, devastating truthteller. Her character’s matter-of-fact Bad News Good News assessment of Jack Conrad’s career may be the distillation of Chazelle’s core message, if there is one. It’s the most compelling speech in Babylon.

I’ve seen actors throw themselves into Wild Child performances, but none with as much abandon as Margot Robbie. It’s a fearless, over-the-top and singular performance. Unfortunately, Chazelle’s Nelly is two-dimensional. There’s not much there except her insatiable grasping for fame and drugs, but Robbie does wring out every ounce of humanity.

This a well-acted film. Other notable pedal-to-the-metal performances:

  • Li Jun Li soars with sexy charisma in an underwritten part. I want to see more of her.
  • Eric Roberts sparkles as Nelly LaRoy’s venal and opportunistic father, who has reappeared once she is a money machine of a movie star.
  • Tobey Maguire’s performance was perfectly described by David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter as seeking to “out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined.”
  • Sydney Palmer’s trumpet work is downright exciting, I assume that someone other than Jovan Adepo is actually playing the instrument, but I couldn’t determine who from the credits. In any case, Adepo gets props for credible fingering, which is no small thing.

The fine cast also includes Lukas Hass, Patrick Fugit, Samara Weaving, Katharine Waterston, Jeff Garlin, Spike Jonze and, very briefly, Olivia Wilde.

Elements of Babylon are indisputably superb and Oscar-worthy, especially the cinematography by Linus Sangren (Oscar winner for La La Land), the production design by Florencia Martin and the costumes by Mary Zophres (Oscar nominated for True Grit, La La Land and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs).

Is this a good movie? There is an unusually wide range of critical assessments, which average into a a middling 59 score on Metacritic. It’s a gorgeous thrill ride, for sure, but we just don’t care about most of the characters. Some viewers will be just too distracted and exhausted by the freneticism. I think it falls short of being a great movie, but it’s so outrageous and fun to watch that it’s a must see.

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD: masterpiece

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Quentin Tarantino’s spectacularly successful Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, two fictional characters, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) navigate a changing Hollywood in 1969. The next evolution of Hollywood is filled only with promise for Sharon, but presents an unseen threat to Rick and Cliff.

Rick is an actor, a former star of TV Westerns who has aged into guest appearances on the shows of a new crop of TV stars. Cliff is Rick’s longtime stuntman, who now works as Rick’s driver, gofer and drinking buddy. Cliff lives in a San Fernando Valley trailer; Rick lives on exclusive Cielo Drive, next door to Sharon and her husband Roman Polanski, but he’s slipped too far down the showbiz ladder to know them.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is about a lot of things, expertly braided together. It’s about a specific time and place. It’s about a woman, filled with innocence and zest, who is justifiably hopeful. It’s about two guys – one tortured and the other decidedly not – facing age and irrelevance. It’s about the guys’ relationship, at once interdependent and asymmetric. And it’s a love letter to vintage Hollywood, the Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of.

The story follows the three characters through a series of vignettes, right up to the most startling ending in recent cinema. This is a Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction.

The movie’s title begins with “Once Upon a Time…“, so you are on notice that this isn’t actual history.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is set in the locations most evocative of the 1969 Hollywood: movie studio sets, legendary showbiz hangout Musso & Frank, the Playboy Mansion, the ill-fated Cielo Drive and Spahn Ranch – famous for both its use as a movie set and as the home base of the Manson Family.

There’s a dazzling montage of neon signs being lit up at sunset. Not many contemporary directors still know how to film galloping horse riders, but Tarantino brings us some great shots from Spahn Ranch, where so many Westerns were shot.

Of course, Tarantino’s soundtrack takes us right into 1969 with superbly curated period radio hits like the Deep Purple version of Hush and the Jose Feliciano cover of California Dreamin’. A February scene is perfectly set to Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, with its hot August nights lyrics presaging the Manson murders to come in LA’s stifling August 1969. (Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show got me wondering how Tarantino restrained himself from using it in some – or all – of his previous films; it’s every bit as Tarantinoesque as Misirlou or Stuck in the Middle with You.) A snippet of a full-bearded Robert Goulet singing MacArthur Park even turns up on somebody’s TV.

In 1969, American culture and the nation itself were in turbulence. Hollywood showbiz was also being rocked – major movie studios were slipping both financially and creatively, floundering to react to the primacy of television and the public’s changing taste (and growing disinterest in Westerns). The studios were about to reach out in desperation to auteur directors like Polanski. Rick and Cliff are behind the curve – but they haven’t noticed that their world is dying.

As hedonists, Rick and Cliff have embraced the drugs and free sex of the counterculture. But they still drive gas guzzlers – a luxury sedan for Rick and a muscle car for Cliff – and refer to “dirty hippies”.

How does the Manson Family play into all this? There was a time when people actually believed that drug-infused peace and love would cure all that ailed us as a society. By 1969, the Summer of Love had already turned dark in San Francisco; but the Manson killings made the unmistakable point that the counterculture, for all its promise, didn’t have an answer to murderous psychopaths any more than did the mainstream.

We very briefly glimpse Manson himself (in an encounter that is pretty close to historically accurate). Tarantino knows that the best way to depict Manson’s evil is to reflect it in the cult he created.

DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, drinking way, way too much, is still treated like a star around town, and he’s grown complacent – until the truth about his career staleness finally hits home. DiCaprio shines in the scene where Rick, cast as a one-dimensional villain in a disposable TV Western, shows his acting chops with an explosive performance; Rick, having internalized that his career may be over, lets it all go in the scene. The character of Rick has the movie’s greatest arc, but he’s less interesting overall than Cliff or Sharon.

Margot Robbie in ONCE UPON TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD,

Sharon Tate is the soul of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Robbie is absolutely transcendent,. She doesn’t need a lot of lines to make her character unforgettable. Sharon gets a ticket to watch herself in a Dean Martin movie, and it’s impossible to imagine a moment with more goofy innocence.

Cliff Booth is one of Tarantino’s greatest characters. Cliff is secure in his abilities, without any need for recognition or self-promotion. Unambitious, he is absolutely content to be Rick’s second banana. That being said, he’s not going to take any shit from anyone.

Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Brad Pitt shows us what a movie star is and why he is one. I haven’t been a Pitt enthusiast, although I’ve liked him in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James, Moneyball and Inglorious Basterds. Pitts’ Cliff Booth is off the charts, and it’s tough to imagine any other actor in the role. Other male stars can match the physicality, but not the unique combination of confidence and humility.

Right up there with Pitt and Robbie is Margaret Qualley, who plays a fictional Manson girl named Pussycat. She is kooky in the cute way and kooky in the scary way. Qualley fills her with manic energy, brimming with wit and sensuality.

Julia Butters plays a precocious child actor in the pilot Rick is shooting; she’s the best possible counterpoint to Rick’s flabby professional complacency. Michael Moh is very funny in a send-up of Bruce Lee. Damien Lewis has a priceless moment as Steve McQueen.

For his supporting players, Tarantino pulls out an abundant cornucopia of acting talent and Tarantino sentimental favorites: Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch, Brenda Vaccaro, Clu Gulager, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant, Zoë Bell , Clifton Collins Jr. (Perry Smith in Capote), Lena Durham and Scoot McNairy.

Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together the verisimilitude of time and place, the vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic.

Note: Deep into the closing credits, there’s an Easter egg.

FURY: tanks, brutality and more brutality

Brad Pitt in FURY
Brad Pitt in FURY

In the World War II movie Fury, Brad Pitt plays the commander of an American tank crew that has fought together from Africa through Italy and France; against all odds, they have survived and are now in Germany during the final months of the war.  An unseasoned clerk typist is thrust upon the tight crew as a replacement; he is seeing the horrors of war for the first time, and we relate to the action through his eyes.  His eyes don’t see much except for brutality by both belligerents and a Germany that is physically and emotionally devastated.

Unlike the traditional WW II films of the 20th century, these GIs are not atrocity-free.  Battle-hardened, war-weary and staggering to the finish, these guys are very tough and they behave in some very unattractive ways.

Fury superbly depicts WW II tank and anti-tank tactics that I’ve never seen handled as well in a movie.  There is a tank and infantry assault on dug in infantry supported with light artillery.  And there is a tank-on-tank battle between three American Shermans and a German Tiger tank; the Tiger was far superior to the Sherman and the veteran Sherman crews – who don’t seem to be afraid of anything else –  know to be terrified of it.

This is not a feel good or a date movie.  Fury works as military history and as an action picture – all the way to the final, grim slaughterfest.

Killing Them Softly: almost as good as a Sopranos rerun

In Killing Them Softly, a low-level gangster gets two hapless losers to hold up a poker game that is protected by the mob.  The mob, of course, brings in an enforcer to put things right.   Perhaps Killing Them Softly would have been a great gangster movie in the 60s, before Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Chase raised the bar.  It was a big hit at Cannes, but that crowd may not be used to watching The Sopranos.

We know what is going to happen in the plot.  Fortunately, we have some excellent actors, led by Brad Pitt in a character role as the ruthless and nihilistic mob enforcer.  Pitt’s enforcer brings in a trusted colleague, a hit man from New York (James Gandolfini) to help him out – but the hit man is emotionally damaged from a betrayed romance and can only focus on drinking and whoring.  Richard Jenkins plays an unusually squeamish mid-level manager in the mob.  Scoot McNairy (one of the “house guests” in Argo) and Ben Mendelsohn (the most psychopathic criminal in Animal Kingdom) are especially good as the doomed hold-up men.

As good as the cast is, there’s just not much here.  An attempt to intertwine a thread about the 2008 economic collapse and Presidential election is a misguided device that only serves as a distraction.

The Tree of Life: What a bewildering, pompous mess

Every ten years, Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World).  Here, he has created a bewildering, pompous mess.

The core of The Tree of Life is fine 90-minute family drama about a boy growing up in 1950s Waco (a superb Hunter McCracken) and the friction with his caring but brutishly domineering father (Brad Pitt).  Unfortunately, there is another 60 minutes in the movie.

That additional 60 minutes is a self-important muddle that tries to lift the story to an exploration of life itself – from creation through afterlife.  There are beautiful shots of clouds and waterfalls, with unintelligible whisperings from cast members.  There are Bible verses, the Big Bang and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs).   And, in case you don’t get how seriously the movie takes itself, there is an overbearingly pretentious score.

Plus, there is Sean Penn, silently brooding about his childhood from a skyscraper.  And wandering through a desert in his suit.  And reunited with his dead relatives on a tidal flat.

Malick’s pretense succeeds only in distracting the audience from could have been a good story and a beautifully shot film.  Bottom line:  painfully unwatchable.