I Just Saw

I just saw Babylon and it was solid. You could weight your papers with it. It wasn’t much more than that, though. The film that it reminded me the most of was Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which also starred Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie as movie people whose lives intersect, but where that film keeps you engaged and gives you a sense of depth in spite of being light on plot and heavy on movie arcana, this one… not so much. It may just be that that film had the looming threat of the Manson family murders and the relevant suspense-building scenes sprinkled in throughout, where Babylon only introduces any kind of antagonist or substantial threat towards the end of the third act.

Another problem, though, is the relative lack of depth or colour to the personalities. This is very much a film where the story is just a vehicle for the theme, where the substance is only there to serve the style, which to a degree is fine, a lot of great movies have been more about world-building than complex characterisation. But the people of Babylon don’t really progress beyond types, and the film asks us to invest in the story at certain points, unspooling it over more than three hours. At the centre of it is a tragic love story about a wild girl and a more sensible man lured by her charm, but when the dramatic beats of this were playing it never felt like more than a caricature of a love story, like the script never got past a certain point.

The queen of chick-lit Jacqueline Susann used to write her first draft on cheap white paper before working out things like characterisation on different coloured paper. Babylon feels like it never got past the cheap stuff. What possibly doesn’t help is a rather inconsistent tone, vacillating between jokes about fetishes and bodily fluids and even outright nihilism at times, like a funny but powerfully bad taste gag about a girl committing suicide over Valentino’s death and Brad Pitt’s character’s marriage, and treacly tragedy near the end.

The story just doesn’t sell the characters enough for you to care about their fate, and doesn’t commit to the seedier aspects of its world to a degree that would make it work as a black comedy or expose. It alludes to elements of 1920s Hollywood like racism and labour laws so lax that people die on set, but it’s too content with its surface-level approach to really say anything other than “yeah, LA’s a crazy place, but aren’t movies cool?”

The blasé approach is an odd watch in the post-Me Too era, as well. What are we supposed to feel when a Jewish man is racially abused on set, for example? Is it meant to be funny (the scene as a whole is played for laughs)? Does the film have any opinion about it? Maybe I’m way off here, but it almost seemed to be saying that racism is a price worth paying for cinema.

The acting’s all good and there are lots of fun comedic set pieces, though. The detail on what a pain in the arse it was to shoot movies with 1920s equipment was great. And Tobey Maguire as the third-act villain was legitimately the best part of the movie from a story perspective. He plays his character as a camp, giggling, hedonistic, de Sadean dope-pusher and gangster, like a mincing Scarface-cum-Caligula with his own dungeon of amusements in the California desert, and at this point in the movie, when it’s 90% done or thereabouts, it feels like there are some stakes. He’s great, and while it’s not often that I demand more Maguire, this movie really needed him.

So, yeah. In the genre of movies about entertainment media, Babylon falls below Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood for characterisation, Hail Caesar! by the Cohen brothers for comedic consistency, and Radio Days by Woody Allen for warmth and charm. It needed to be half the length and more substantial. But it is a fitfully funny, visually arresting, lumbering folly of a film that’s worth a watch.