“‘Babylon,’ all three hours and nine minutes of it, sings a song that says: Praise the art and pass the degradation,” writes Tribune critic phillipstribune.
Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in"Babylon." Photo: Scott Garfield
His spare and lovely Harvard thesis project, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” led to the outlandishly intense music-school melodrama “Whiplash.” That begot the massive popular success of “La La Land,” a swell variation on themes laid out in “Guy and Madeline.” Then came the intriguing Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man,” which Chazelle directed .
All this is strategic. Chazelle begins with a visual screech and ends with a man alone at the movies in a 1952 epilogue, lost in bittersweet wonderment. “Babylon,” all three hours and nine minutes of it, sings a song that says: Praise the art and pass the degradation. The contrasts of lightness and darkness are stark, blunt and finally wearying.
I’ll try to explain why Chazelle’s ambitious work doesn’t quite work for me. Largely it’s the tonal mood swings. The opening sequence, largely wordless, depicts Manny and some bit players struggling to get up a mountain road with an elephant that’s gonna blow any minute. We see the truck, at a tricky angle in long shot, nicely judged. Then comes the “payoff” and it’s, like,It’s not meant to be “in period,” like a Laurel and Hardy short from 1926; it’s meant to shock.
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