Review: “Babylon” is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood’s heyday
That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, ultimately ambiguous portrait of American cinema before the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts on a once-glorious tribe of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imagination made movies on the fly, not to send a message but to see how far they could push a medium still in its infancy.
Cinema nerds will find plenty of similar parlor-game diversions in “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. But for those not keeping score at home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a narrative cracking along at a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young man she befriends at Wallach’s party, gets his own chance to leave elephant detail.
Such are the romantic touches that give “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists in a revisionist dream space in which anarchy and art go hand in hand, even as the body count piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie as a creature of insatiable appetites — for fame but most especially cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed energy fuels the entire cockeyed caravan.
Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists in “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz musician Sidney Palmer , whose travails as an African American in a mostly White medium come to an offensively absurdist head when he’s asked to perform in blackface.
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