Babylon (2022)

I admire writer-director Damian Chazelle's work, so it pains me to say that Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

 

Angels and Ghosts of Toxic Nostalgia

or

Make Hollywood a Cesspool Again 

 

Yeah, well, nostalgia isn't what it used to be. 

 

Damien Chazelle's Babylon tries to be many things in its break-neck, inarticulate way: a love-sonnet to "Cinema", an hysterical screed about ambition (the uphill) and the Fickle Finger of Fate—and Fashion (the downside), an impotent rage about the inevitability of Change, and an excremental wallow in excess "just because we can."

 

It's also a bit of a litmus test on how you feel about Hollywood: starry-eyed dreamy or worm-at-the-bottom-of-a-tequila-bottle cynical. You can love the taste of sausage, but you don't want to see how it's made. 

 

Movies about movie-making rarely make a lot of coin at the box-office, but the industry does love to bestow them with Oscars. Babylon has failed at the former, and, because it's not properly rose-Technicolored besotted with The Art, it won't win any bling, either.

It's 1926, and Kinoscope studio head Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) is throwing a wild party—security is loose, morals are looser, and everybody is either tight or flaccid—at his palatial Bel Air estate high atop a graded mountain with nothing around it but steppe and orange groves. The house looks like it fell out of the sky to the most desolate place on Earth. Thus, it's quite a task to transport anything to the place. We meet Manuel Torres (Diego Calva)—"Manny" to just about everybody who can give him a job—who has convinced one of Wallach's assistants (Flea) that he can deliver an elephant to the party. An elephant. This proves problematic and particularly perilous as the pachyderm's poundage prevents purchase. The solution? Roughage. The subsequent eruption of elephant diarrhea—which Chazelle stages like a famous silent film clip (thanks, Damien! This won't influence my review at all!)—blows enough ballast to allow everyone to get all the way up the hill.

That serves as a warning shot for the next 30 minutes as Chazelle presents his version of the "Godfather wedding", where he introduces all of the principal characters attending this orgiastic party of excess. But, where Coppola stages his sequence with snapshots of telling detail, Chazelle glides his camera in, up and around the frontal and backal nudity bumping and grinding to obfuscate the- something-to-offend-everyone anything goes-ery of his bacchanal.

We meet: Manny (of course), Mexican immigrant, who is the ultimate volunteer ("I'll do it!") to get ahead; the gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who's seen a lot ("I knew Proust, you know..."), but only divulges the choice bits when it's to her highest advantage; star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a reigning light at M-G-M, slumming it at the party which he attends on his wife (Olivia Wilde) just announcing that she's divorcing him as the capper to their latest spat, Lady Faye Zhu (Li Jun Li), the most capable one of the bunch—she does a rich Dietrich routine to a song that's hard to believe was of the period—but is a minor player at Kinoscope because 1) she is bi-sexual (which she can hide) and 2) she is Asian (which she can't). 

There's bandleader Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who is professional amidst all the madness, but still keeps the energy of the party lively through his work. Late to the party (and not invited) is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a New Jersey native who just knows she's going to make it in Hollywood ("Ya either a stah or ya ain't! And I'm a stah!"), and whom Manny instantly crushes on.

After a cocaine-binge with Manny, Nellie's go-for-broke dancing at the party attracts the attention of Kinoscope brass, who are in need of an actress on-set the next day—it seems the one they hired has just died upstairs after a drug-fueled micturating display for star Orville Pickwick. By the morning, Nellie's on her way to the Kinoscope set out in the desert, and a drunken Conrad has been driven home by Manny, whom the star immediately makes his assistant ("He can do anything!").

Conrad tells Mannie the movie set is "the most wonderful place in the world," but when Nellie gets there it's anything but. The "studio" is a large field, fenced off to keep the "Hire me" crowd at bay, and there are 10 sets running simultaneously (there's no sound to interfere with silent movies), orchestras playing to provide "mood music" and a sense of chaos going on everywhere. Nellie is shuffled off to make-up, brought back, made up again and then thrown into the shoot, where she acts and dances with abandon, overshadowing the film's star (Samara Weaving). Meanwhile, a hung-over Jack takes Manny to the space where they're making his costume epic with 10 cameras filming a battle scene where the knights are played by skid-row bums off the street. One of them gets killed by running into his own spear.

It's anarchy, but, despite that, sometimes magic happens. When Nellie is asked to cry for a scene, the director (Olivia Hamilton) is amazed that she can produce them on cue. "You think you can cry a little less?" "How many drops and which eye?" Nellie asks, and, as promised, delivers that many drops from that eye. "How do you DO that?" her director asks. "I just think of home." Nellie says matter-of-factly.

You see where this is going: Chazelle the director is in love with "the timeless" image and Chazelle the writer is showing the work, patience, pain, suffering, and craziness employed to achieve it. Even if it kills you. Throughout the time-frame of the movie—1926 through (significantly) 1952—the stars will have their ups and downs, the first become last, the insignificant achieve power, and they all can lose it with a bad headline or a stupid choice...in a land and profession rife with the possibilities of both. Lives and relationships are fragile and are erased and forgotten in the quest for the indelible image made by artifice. 

The advent of talking pictures will be a life and game-changer for the industry. Technicians will be under more pressure, and the performers will have to be all-around actors, not emoters, not just-pretty-faces...and if their voices destroy the illusion the audience has of them, it's a career crusher. We've seen the story before. What Price Hollywood? (or its progeny, the various versions of A Star is Born) The Artist. Truffaut's Day for Night. Bogdanovich's Nickolodeon. Directors get nostalgic for the simpler times of film-making and return to it once they have success. It's as if they have to re-torch the pilot light to remember why they loved making movies in the first place. As the bandleader Sidney Powell says of making movies "I think they got the cameras pointed in the wrong, direction. That's what I think." Directors can't resist the urge of turning the camera.

And there's one more most appropriate example:

 

Singin' in the Rain.

Made in 1952. About the struggles of performers to adjust to "The Talkies." It is no coincidence that Chazelle references it twice in Babylon, and does so directly when Manny goes to see the movie and breaks down in tears. It's a story he lived. But, instead of death and ruin, it's in Technicolor with music and songs and laughs, even in the face of humiliation and tragedy. No one thinks of Clara Bow or John Gilbert or Anna May Wong or "Fatty" Arbuckle while they watch Singin' in the Rain. The film-makers are too good at their jobs. They're having too good a time. If you laugh, the world laughs with you...

Chazelle shopped Babylon around town after Whiplash caused a stir and he was advised it was too big a project too soon. Someone suggested a musical and so he made La La Land, instead—the modern era's version of Singin' in the Rain with music and dancing and aspirations and baked-in nostalgia. But, it's the antithesis of Babylon, just as one could say that, with Babylon, Chazelle made the "anti-Singin' in the Rain," telling the same story, but without the Technicolor-tinted filters, the practiced and fluid choreography, the charm or the illusion. Oh, it's got production value and good performances and period detail and moves like a bat outta hell. It just doesn't leave you with any feelings other than wanting to take a shower.

Babylon tells the story of what happens when you lose success, but, in an unintentionally meta-way, it also tells the story of what can happen if you have too much. You make a bad movie that you think is wonderful and important.

In the pre-showing "vamp", Margot Robbie says she's grateful that Babylon can be seen "as it should be...with an enthused audience." Well, keep wishing, sister.

 

Ready or Not (2019)

Wedding Night Blues (The Family That Plays Together...)
or
"Goddamnit, Emily, Aim for the Center of Gravity!"

There's an old-time comedian's joke as old as Joe Miller's Joke Book that goes "Marriage is a great institution...but who wants to live in an institution?"

For Grace (Samara Weaving, niece of Hugo—and probably the last time any one needs to mention it), marriage is an institution she's been looking forward to for a long time. She's fallen in love with Alex Le Domas (Mark O'Brien) and endured some relationship stipulations from his family, the Le Domas' of the Le Domas games manufacturing fame, who are "big on traditions." But, now, the big day has arrived and she has the usual wedding-day jitters, and as problematic as the family can be ("They just want to make sure you're not a gold-digging whore" says her intended), she's sure about Alex, who has become something of a black sheep of the family. Doesn't mean he won't one day inherit the Le Domas fortune, though, despite the fact that father Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny) doesn't like her, that his wife (Andie McDowell) is oddly creepy, while Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni) isn't just oddly creepy, she's downright horrifying. Then, there's brother Daniel (Adam Brody), "the alcoholic brother who keeps hitting on (her)." For her, the only thing that matters is what Alex thinks, and for that, she's "proud to join your relatively fucked-up family."

Famous last words...

The wedding comes off without a hitch, and it's a dream come true for Grace. An orphan, she's never been part of a family, even one such as this. Well, then again, there IS a hitch: to be truly accepted into the family, she must play a game on her wedding night, which Grace thinks is odd, but she's willing. "If it means your family will accept me, I will play the shit out of checkers."

Led into the substantial mansion's secret gaming room, the extended family is sat around a table, while patriarch Tony tells the story of great-grandfather Victor Le Domas, who made a wager with one Justin Le Bail, who promised him a great fortune, but on the stipulation that any person marrying into the family had to play a game to be chosen by a mysterious box—if they won the game, they would be welcomed to the family and they would all enjoy continued prosperity. That's what they tell Grace, anyway.

What they don't tell Grace is that if she chooses one particular game—"Hide and Seek"—she will be forced to play the game to the death—hers. If she is caught, she will be killed in a ritualistic sacrifice to Le Bail. If she wins, the entire family will suffer a painful and merciless death. Needless to say, the family is very interested in what the outcome of the drawing will be.

Guess what game Grace will be forced to play?

While Grace goes off to find a suitable hiding place where the family can't find her—she is, of course, at a disadvantage as she's the only one who doesn't know the layout of the house or the many secret doorways and passages in the vast mansion—the family arm themselves with ancient weapons to dispatch her, or at least subdue her, so that she can be sacrificed. New husband Alex is forced to stay in a room under guard, so that he can not lend assistance to his newly-wed wife.

Talk about a lousy wedding night. Grace thinks the whole thing is a dumb family tradition, but then, she's not clued in to the fact that the marriage could be viciously annulled at any moment whether by cross-bow, battle-axe, dueling pistol, musket, or bow and arrow. It is only when she comes across one of the servants (who all look like extras from a Robert Palmer video), dead in a case of mistaken identity that she begins to realize that the stakes are very high and that she might not survive it. She is given limited help by Alex, who is under tight family scrutiny, but she's in a white flowing wedding dress with heels in unfamiliar surroundings. The odds are never in her favor.

But, she is adaptable. Plus, she's plucky, and she has a fierce survival instinct. It also helps that the Le Domas family have handicaps—they're not the brightest of bulbs, they are victims of their own sense of doom, and they're rather privileged so the old weapons aren't exactly user-friendly. "The rich really are different." says a depressed Daniel. But, not different in a good way. It also doesn't help that daughter Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) is a coked-out bone-head who tries just a bit too hard and seems to have her best aim when it's directed to one of the servants. Good help is hard to find these days.

If you haven't guessed by now, the film, Ready or Not, is a comedy, but a horrific one. It's laughs are gruesome and grimacing, and only a couple steps less giddy than what you'd find in "The Addams Family." It's gimmicky, but not in the monstrous tradition, more in a comedy version of "The Most Dangerous Game" if the privileged hunters were just as full of themselves, but weren't so competent. Yes, the rich are different, and, these days, they're treated differently, not so much with respect, but with contempt. The Le Domas' (it just occurred to me that the name sounds like "dumb-asses") earned their money the old-fashioned way—they inherited it—and now, their main business is protecting themselves and their dumb-assets from dilution. So, add another hyphenate, this is a satire, as well.

It's something else, as well, but, any other hyphenate would contain spoilers, so we'll leave that one off. Suffice it to say that Weaving's Grace, after some initial whimpering, has an action hero's grit and ability to recover from some pretty scarring injuries, and she has no hesitation about tearing up her pristine wedding dress to make handy tourniquets or garroting material; she's too practical for a trousseau. She is a Bride-zilla with a registry at Cabela's, and as her dress gets more sullied and bloodied, she seems to get more determined to show she's not playing games. 

The directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, seem to take a wicked delight in keeping the thing paced quickly and keeping the tone somewhat bombastic. In fact, this feels like one of those giddy low-budget movies whose social message is buried six feet under a cackling sensibility, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the film-makers can't believe they're getting away with it. One is also reminded of the style of Tim Burton without the wobbly art-student design sense or eagerness to please with source pedigree.

Speaking of Burton, it's only a matter of time before he casts Weaving in one of his movies. She has the requisite out-sized porcelain doll's eyes—not unlike Barbara Steele's—that Burton favors as well as the determined stride that his female leads always seem to adapt. But, the Australian actor also has great comic timing, a loose, natural way with dialogue, which, combined with an unguarded buck-toothed smile (that reminds one of John Huston at his most malevolent) that is funny and endearing—you'd root for her even if her opponents weren't so comically incompetent and loathsome. 

Of course, that deck is stacked, she being the underdog, but Weaving's trooperish attitude in an unself-consciously de-glamming performance where she goes from pristine bridehood to looking like a BPA study is a giddy marvel, whatever side of the female empowerment argument you're on. She's great, and one hopes for better parts for her, rather than being perpetually type-cast as Margot Robbie's younger sister.

As gruesome as Ready or Not is, at least it has the good sense to not be too serious about it, taking the tack of that comedy staple, the "in-law" joke. You didn't know you'd be marrying them, too, despite all the warnings signs one sees in the preparation of nuptials. The film might be cathartic for brides made neurotic by "his" (or "her") family, given the universality of the problem. And the film is a fine example of that genre-blending rarity, the comedy-horror film, without skimping on either aspect.