BEFORE: Jean Smart carries over from "Senior Moment", but this film has such a large cast that it's one of those "Time Bandits" time-hole movies, from here I could link to just about anything, so I've got that weird sinking feeling, why watch this film NOW when I could be saving it to get me out of a linking jam, somewhere down the road? I almost feel like I'm wasting it, but it's been on the DVR for a while, taking up too much space, so I also desperately want to get it off the list.
I remember there was some Oscar buzz for this film when it was released in December 2022, like they held a lot of guild screenings for it, but with a running time over 3 hours, that was maybe a bit of a tough sell. It didn't make the studio much money, the worldwide gross was half the budget, so somebody LOST a bundle on this one. It did get three nominations, but in the minor categories like costuming and production design, notably NONE for the cast. Umm, that's not really a good sign, but still, I'm intensely curious about what this film's got going on.
THE PLOT: A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
AFTER: SPOILER ALERT for the plot of "Babylon", but you've had over a year to see this one - still, don't say I didn't warn you.
I just saw something the other day on one of the entertainment clip shows that discussed how "Babylon" is the story of a trumpet player who becomes famous as he rises through the ranks of Hollywood productions. Umm, no it's not. I mean it is, but that's just one of the five main intersecting storylines here, so it really sells the movie short, and it means whoever wrote that did NOT watch the movie, and I'm guessing many other people also avoided this one, partially because of the long running time. This might have worked better as, say, a series on Netflix or Hulu, and I'm shocked that it didn't end up as one, instead it demands over three hours of your time, and today's audiences just don't have that kind of attention span. Sure, they'll watch an 8-hour Hulu series that's broken up into 1-hour episodes, but not a 3-hour movie, even though that's shorter in the long run.
There are five main characters who are followed through the "Golden Age" of Hollywood (and it turns out it was called the "Golden Age" because people back then liked to have other people piss on them at kinky parties, allegedly) and they are: Jack Conrad, an A-level actor who goes through a succession of four or five marriages; Nellie LaRoy, an ingenue actress who will do anything to get into movies, and then anything after that; Manny Torres, a resourceful delivery guy anxious to work on movie sets; Lady Fay Zhu, a hyphenate dancer-singer-sex worker-editor-director of Asian descent; and Sidney Palmer, that trumpet player who eventually starts appearing a series of musical films. But it's a long road for all of them, lots of twists and turns and setbacks on their journeys. And all this takes place during the Age of Excess, there are drugs and alcohol and sexual encounters and lavish parties where all three come together.
Right from the start, Manny is tasked with delivering an elephant to a party at producer Don Wallach's house, because nothing says extravagance like an elephant, right? The problem is that his mansion is up on top of a mountain, so how to get the pachyderm up there? The truck sent to carry the beast is not up to the job, so Manny and another man find themselves behind the truck, trying to somehow push it up the mountain road, which proves to be impossible. But while they're back there, the elephant, whether out of fear or necessity, starts crapping out the back of the truck, and the other worker gets literally covered in elephant crap. Yeah, that kinds of sets the tone for the whole movie, there will be more vulgar humor and disturbing bodily functions to come. If you thought this was going to be a classy film about Old Hollywood, as I did, well, you've kind of come to the wrong place.
Nellie tries to crash the same party (instead she literally crashes her car into a statue outside, and then blames the statue) and Manny lies to the bouncers to get her in. Their friendship is formed, and they'll encounter each other several more times before we get to the end. Sidney is playing trumpet at this very same party, of course, and Jack's there, too, breaking up with his wife because he refuses to speak in English, only Italian for some reason, and she's had enough of that. Surely there must be another reason for her to divorce him, but no, this is what we get. Manny shows Nellie the room where the drugs are stored, and this is a bit like giving a flamethrower to an arsonist - but an actress overdosed upstairs, so thank God there's an elephant coming to the party, because Manny realizes they can use that as a distraction to get the body out of there. Meanwhile, Nellie is cast from among all the partygoers to replace her, so she's got to be on the set bright and early the next morning, which of course does not stop her from partying, not in the least. Manny gets lucky, too, he's assigned to drive the very drunk Jack Conrad home, and Jack taps him to be his new personal assistant-slash-fixer.
And we're off, to the set where about five silent movies are being filmed at the same time (hmm, not sure that's how movie sets work...) and one of them is a giant gladiator action movie, where nobody is a professional stuntman, so a few of the soldier extras end up getting stabbed for reals. Umm, OK, we'll assume that there was a bit of trial and error in the old days, but this might be taking things a bit too far. Also there's a full orchestra on the set, providing the music as an inspiration for the battle scene, but I don't think this was part of the making of any silent movie, I mean, it's SILENT, why did they need an orchestra? They could have just used a gramophone, right? Sure, it sets up the non-sensical image of gladiators and horses trampling the woodwinds section, but come on, that never really happened. This is about when I realized that nothing in this film could possibly be taken seriously - yet this wanted very badly to be a serious film, and you can't have these Mel Brooks-style sight gags in a film and still be a legit drama.
On another part of the set, Nellie goes through make-up and costuming, several times, and then is tasked with appearing in a Western (?) movie, where she has to flirt with several guys in a saloon and then dance seductively on top of the bar. Then when the woman who rescued her from poverty comes in, she needs to cry on cue. Nellie's got this one down, the dancing and the crying and she even takes her top off, which she wasn't even asked to do - really, she goes above and beyond, has sex with everyone on the set even though it isn't that kind of movie. But hey, she's a giver and she's trying to get ahead in a tough business.
The gladiator picture gets stalled when the horses trample the last of their ten cameras, though you'd think that after breaking say, five cameras the crew might learn to take better care of the equipment, but that's just not the case. So Manny is sent to drive back into L.A. from the desert in order to get another camera, before the sun goes down, and before the director completely loses his mind. Hundreds of extras are standing around in gladiator armor, with nothing to do - it's not like you can just cancel the shoot for the day and get everyone back tomorrow, no, of course not. The only person really working is Jack, who's in his tent trying to write and produce his next film, but also getting very drunk at the same time. Manny finally makes it to the camera rental house, waits for their only available camera to get checked back in, and then races back to the set so they can finish the scene, using the last few rays of sunlight. Give me a break - but this does cement Manny's reputation as a problem-solver.
Manny is then sent to New York City to catch a screening of "The Jazz Singer", starring Al Jolson, which was the first film to synch sound with its images - because back then there were only a few million people in NYC, and therefore nobody else who could tell Jack Conrad what that was like. This makes no sense, either, because didn't they also screen that film in L.A.? Nah, I guess it's not a big movie-watching town... Suddenly everyone's world is rocked because they have to all learn to make movies a new way. Yeah, this doesn't make sense either, because it's not like a switch suddenly got flipped, the change-over was no doubt more gradual than this, but whatever. Hollywood movies regard the invention of synched sound as something akin to the moon landing mixed with the cure for polio, and it couldn't possibly have been that big of a deal.
But these are the jokes - the first film that Nellie's in with sound being recorded is a huge disaster, first she says her lines too loudly, then she's too quiet. There are too many noises on set, and anytime a P.A. sneezes then everyone goes into a panic. The microphones are put in certain places and the actors are given stage directions based on that, then the actors miss their marks and the directors learn that the mikes can't be moved without taking a half-hour break. Why is everyone on set suddenly so bad at their jobs? Why does this cause everything short of three nervous breakdowns and a full-on fist-fight? Is this supposed to be funny, it's every crew person's nightmare! I didn't find it funny at all, there's simply no way that introducing microphones to a movie set would cause this much chaos. The acclaimed producer Don Wallach shows up on set, witnesses all the chaos and doesn't fire anyone? That's the most unbelievable part of this whole scene, he should have fired EVERYONE and brought in a new director, cast and crew who could, you know, actually perform their jobs.
Nellie keeps working, although it's determined she doesn't have the proper voice for acting in movies with sound - (Je-SUS, why do directors keep re-making "Singin' in the Rain"?) but she deals with her situation by gambling, taking a lot of drugs, and going to these lavish parties, and same goes for Jack Conrad, who's got another new wife and spies an audience laughing at his latest movie performance. Nellie also visits her mother in an asylum in New York, and hires her father as her business manager, but he just wants to open a restaurant with her earnings, and fight a rattlesnake during the next drunken party. When he falls down drunk, Nellie takes his place, wrangles the snake, but also gets bitten by it. She's saved by Fay Zhu, who cuts the snake's head off with a knife, then sucks out the poison from Nellie's neck - and this makes Nellie fall in love with her, and I don't think that's how lesbians work either, but I could be wrong. I mean, whatever floats your boat, great, but we couldn't just have two women love each other naturally because that's the way they are, we had to create this whole weird scenario with a rattlesnake to make this happen?
More time passes, and Sidney the trumpeter is seen again, he's been working with Manny to star in music-based films for the black audiences, but during one production it's determined that there's some kind of lighting issue, and the other musicians hired for the film have darker skin than he does, so the director asks him to use cork to darken his skin so he won't look lighter than the other cast members. At first he refuses, because asking a black man to wear blackface make-up is incredibly racist, however if he doesn't do it, then the other cast members will be fired and he'll be responsible for other African-Americans losing their job. So he relents and performs in the make-up, but then quits soon after that. Again, I'd like to know if this is anything close to a real-life situation, because it kind of feels like the film is bending itself over backwards to depict something that probably never happened, because it feels like the most vulgar, insulting thing that someone could possibly imagine happening, and what's the point of that?
Same goes for the next party that Nellie attends, which is not the type of drunken sex-party where she feels at home, it's a real classy party at the mansion of William Randolph Hearst, and when she feels nervous and out of place, she tells a very raunchy dirty joke, then screams at everyone in attendance, goes to the buffet and hand-feeds herself some of the food, and then leaves the party and feels sick, though whether it's from the food or her actions, we're not sure. Oh, she could just lean over the balcony outside and throw up, but instead for some reason she goes back into the party and vomits all over the host. There's simply no reason for this to happen this way, it just means some screenwriter REALLY HATED William Randolph Hearst - it's also not funny in any way, but just disgusting, like many of the key moments in this movie.
Meanwhile, Jack meets with Elinor, the gossip columnist, and she informs him that his career is essentially over. She wrote in her column that his popularity has declined, his star has faded, but the good news is that even fifty or a hundred years later, he'll still be alive (sort of) on film. People will still watch his movies and like him and want him to be their friend, even though he's very dead. Jack does not deal with this well, and after saying goodbye to Fay Zhu, who's leaving for Europe, he excuses himself from a hotel party, kisses his fifth wife, then goes back to his room and shoots himself. Sure, the clear message here is that once Hollywood is done with you, life is worthless and has no meaning. It's not like you can take the money you earned over the years, or sell your mansion and go live out your days in some small town in Colorado or Idaho and NOT be famous, that would be ridiculous. Nope, better to just end it all, how stupid.
The end-game of the story starts with gangsters threatening Nellie's life because of her massive gambling debts - she turns to Manny, who wants to just put her in the car and drive to Mexico, where they can get married and start over, but as you may have guessed, that would be just as ridiculous and impossible as Jack walking away from movies, it's not going to happen. So Manny comes up with a scheme to raise the $85K she owes and enlists the help of the on-set drug pusher, The Count, to raise the money. But dropping off the money means going to one more underground party, and this one has a live crocodile and a giant wrestler who eats rats, so really, you can't say this movie didn't aim low, it did that at every opportunity. I won't give away the other details of the payoff here, but things go South and Manny is forced to flee L.A.
That's hardly a happy ending, but I guess that's where we find ourselves because over time, the life expectancy of everything is exactly zero, but then what's the appeal? Why go to work in Hollywood at the magic factory where happiness is made if nothing's going to go right and we're all going to die? Manny comes back to L.A. 20 years later, and catches a screening of "Singin' in the Rain", and all the memories come flooding back to him. (Je-SUS, why do we keep coming back to "Singin' in the Rain"? I mean, it's an OK film, it's fine, but it's no "Citizen Kane".)
And umm, why, exactly, didn't the movie START with this, and then have the whole movie told in Manny's flashback instead of having a separate second set of flash-backs at the end, some of which are flash-forwards to modern fimmaking, which Manny wouldn't even have the capability of remembering, because they haven't happened yet? As is, this just looks like another example of Hollywood promoting itself and sucking its own dick, like those cuckoo clocks in Geppetto's workshop that somehow have the more modern Disney characters on them, in an appalling display of self-promotion?
In the time it takes to watch this, you could just watch "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" again, which also has Brad PItt as an aging, disenchanted actor and Margot Robbie as a young, up-and-coming but ultimately doomed starlet. And at least Quentin Tarantino had something to say that wasn't just based on vulgar bodily functions, even though that film got a little off-track at the end, at least it started out well.
Also starring Brad Pitt (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo (last seen in "Overlord"), Li Jun Li (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "Contraband"), Olivia Hamilton (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Max Minghella (last seen in "Horns"), Rory Scovel (last seen in "Dean"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"), Tobey Maguire (last seen in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Flea (last seen in "Count Me In"), Jeff Garlin (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Eric Roberts (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Ethan Suplee (last seen in "Clerks III"), Samara Weaving (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"), Spike Jonze (last heard in "Sing 2"), Telvin Griffin, Chloe Fineman (last seen in "White Noise"), Phoebe Tonkin, Troy Metcalf (last seen in "Shrink"), Jennifer Grant, Patrick Fugit (last seen in Cinema Verite"), Pat Skipper (last seen in "Seabiscuit"), Kaia Gerber, Cyrus Hobbi, Karen Bethzabe, John Kerry, Sarah Ramos (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Alexandre Chen, Taylor Hill, John Mariano, Mather Zickel (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Albert Hammond Jr., Joe Dallesandro (last seen in "Sunset"), Marc Platt, Sophia Magaña, Terry Walters (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), J.C. Currais, Jimmy Ortega (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Shane Powers, Hansford Prince (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Cutty Cuthbert (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), Robert Morgan (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), E.E. Bell (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Sol Landerman, Karina Fontes, Cici Lau (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), David Lau, Zack Newick, Bob Clendenin (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Carlos Nuñez, Laura Steinel, Danny Jolles, James Vincent, Richard Clarke Larsen, Anthony Burkhalter, Karolina Szymczak (last seen in "Hercules"), Sean O'Bryan (also last seen in "Cinema Verite"), David Ury (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Katia Gomez (last seen in "Get Hard"), Vanessa Bednar, Carson Higgins, Frederick Koehler (last seen in "Domino"), Spencer Morgan, Yissendy Trinidad, Anton Hedayat, Hayley Huntley, Christopher Allen, Alex Reznik (last seen in "Hearts Beat Loud"), Ireland Sexton, Andrew Hawtrey, Jonathan Ohye (last seen in "Book Club"), James Crittenden, Robert Beitzel (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Walker Hare, Douglas Fruchey, John Macey, Oscar Balderrama (last seen in "The Guilty"), Tef Baker, Moises Chavez, Anna Chazelle (last seen in "First Man"), Anna Dahl, Lucie Hamanova, Daniel Holm, Natasha Kalimada, Kennedy Porter, Andrea Ramos, Zhan Wang
with archive footage of Jean Hagen (last seen in "Adam's Rib"), Al Jolson, Gene Kelly (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Debbie Reynolds (ditto), Donald O'Connor (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "The Protégé").
RATING: 4 out of 10 members of the USC football team
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