In the Flesh: Babylon

Running a restaurant, as Artie Bucco tells us, is like owning an elephant. It costs a fortune, and sooner or later it shits on your head. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon weighs in firmly on the “sooner” side of things. Within ten minutes we’re watching an elephant take an explosive dump on a team of guys trying to shove it up a steep hillside road in the bed of a truck. This is how dreams are made in Hollywood! That broad, scatalogical tone drives the pounding rhythm of the film, soundtracked with propulsive big-band brio by Justin Hurwitz. Actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) marching back into a blueblood party just to defiantly puke on their carpet instead of outside, staggering drunk Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) coming out of his tent and transforming for an instant into a noble crusading knight, a chicken stealing a studio executive’s bag of cocaine at a debauched house party — Babylon has heard of writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.

It’s remarkable how fun the film is, especially after the director’s similarly set but deeply anodyne La La Land, but there’s none of that preciousness here. This is an ode to garbage. It’s an ode to the dumb, broken maniacs who gave birth to Hollywood’s early masterpieces, totally unromanticized and without a single shred of class. A scene in which executives and set gofers hem and haw over what to do with an actress who’s just overdosed the night before her big break channels Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights with tremendous enthusiasm, and it’s clear the 1997 masterpiece is very much on Chazelle’s mind. Even the film’s structure closely follows Anderson’s, especially the material around Nellie’s descent into drug abuse and gambling addiction, her inability to adapt with the advent of talkies, which landed almost as soon as her career began. Having seen the meteoric impact of her first moments onscreen in a silent film, it’s crushing to watch the whole industry sweep her aside for the sake of delicate microphones and shifting tastes.

But that’s Hollywood. That’s L.A. It’s a city that doesn’t care, that manufactures sentiment like someone else would make bricks or weave baskets, that forgets itself every night when it closes its eyes. What’s the difference between Nellie and the huge, musclebound freak who eats live rats for the sadistic pleasure of club-goers at the underground dungeon loan shark to which James McKay (Tobey Maguire in full Edgar the Bug makeup, completely repulsive) drags Manny (Diego Calva) and the Count (Rory Scovel)? I doubt either could tell you. They’re machines doing something remarkable for the delectation of various kinds of pervert, and that’s as beautiful as it is squalid. There’s no movie magic here. A man has a stroke and dies from sitting too long in the sweltering camera room on one of Nellie’s sets, the punchline to a staggeringly funny scene in which the cast and crew repeatedly fuck up while shooting with sound for the first time. Another man dies during a battle scene in maniacal German director Otto von Strassberger’s (Spike Jonze) crusader film, run through with a spear. It’s all stupid. It’s all ridiculous. It’s all beautiful. Even if none of it is worth the blood and death and suffering and ruined lives, it happened, and it’s beautiful.