Review | 'Babylon' is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood's heyday - The Washington Post

That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, yet ambiguous representation of American cinema earlier the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts connected a once-glorious people of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imaginativeness made movies connected the fly, not to nonstop a connection but to spot however acold they could propulsion a mean inactive successful its infancy. Raffish, ungovernable and not a small unhinged, the aboriginal settlers of 1920s Hollywoodland were, by Chazelle’s reckoning, a motley unit of wackos and visionaries, prone to self-destruction but besides to soaring flights of inspiration and ecstasy.

At least, I think that’s “Babylon’s” point? Quite honestly, by the clip this muddled, overcrowded, tiresomely digressive travel yet crashes similar truthful galore post-binge hangovers, Chazelle’s constituent has gotten mislaid successful a self-indulgent, manically erratic shuffle. Once the elephant is delivered, it becomes the centerpiece of a raging enactment of unfettered drinking, drugging, enactment and a near-death. A fetish-y country of an overweight antheral and his young day recalls the scandalous beingness and vocation of Fatty Arbuckle; the pencil-mustached Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, successful a silky, endearingly delicate turn) is intelligibly meant to evoke John Garfield; and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the cocaine-addled ingenue who’s plucked from obscurity to go a star, seems to beryllium based connected Mabel Normand.

Cinema nerds volition find plentifulness of akin parlor-game diversions successful “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. (Is the manager Nellie works with based connected Dorothy Arzner? Anita Loos? Alice Guy-Blaché? Discuss!) But for those not keeping people astatine home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a communicative cracking on astatine a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young antheral she befriends astatine Wallach’s party, gets his ain accidental to permission elephant detail. Played by newcomer Diego Calva successful a show reminiscent of a youthful Javier Bardem, Manny is the ethical halfway of a movie that whirls, gyre-like, into the outré reaches of depravity and dissolution.

Part burlesque, portion grotesque, “Babylon” takes its pacey cues and daze effects from earlier, overmuch amended films: Chazelle doesn’t archer a communicative truthful overmuch arsenic drawstring unneurotic sequences that alternately punctuation “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights,” without being astir arsenic horrifyingly elegant oregon cringe-inducingly pleasurable arsenic either. Like “Singin’ successful the Rain,” which the filmmaker volition punctuation virtually successful a climax that’s meant to beryllium a moving testament to film’s endurance arsenic an creation form, “Babylon” takes spot astatine the cusp of the dependable era, erstwhile the licence and licentiousness of the silents gave mode to the rationalized — and fatally sanitized — accumulation practices of the talkies. Manny’s large interruption comes erstwhile helium rushes from a distant movie determination to Los Angeles to regenerate a camera; helium gets backmost conscionable earlier the manager is astir to suffer the light, thereby inadvertently discovering magic hour. In a invited quiescent moment, a Louella-or-is-it-Hedda-like newsman played by Jean Smart schools Jack successful the ways of graceful aging successful a touching code astir obsolescence and eternity.

Such are the romanticist touches that springiness “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists successful a revisionist imagination abstraction successful which anarchy and creation spell manus successful hand, adjacent arsenic the assemblage number piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie arsenic a carnal of insatiable appetites — for fame but astir particularly cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed vigor fuels the full cockeyed caravan. Lewd, lascivious, libidinous, Nellie is the heroine of a representation that begins to consciousness hectoring successful its admiration for her astir outrageous antics (the quality betwixt madcap and mayhem lies lone successful a fewer random letters, aft all). Let’s enactment it this way: If you indispensable spot 1 movie this twelvemonth featuring projectile vomiting arsenic an indictment of the precocious classes, marque it “Triangle of Sadness.” Conversely, if you indispensable spot 1 movie this twelvemonth featuring a pointless and seemingly endless snake-fight scene, “Babylon” is your champion bet.

Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists successful “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz instrumentalist Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose travails arsenic an African American successful a mostly White mean travel to an offensively absurdist caput erstwhile he’s asked to execute successful blackface. Although he’s a invited summation to the proceedings, Sidney’s storyline gets mislaid successful Chazelle’s frantic intercutting, which becomes a lawsuit of diminishing returns arsenic “Babylon” reaches its panicky denouement: a country featuring a ghoulish Tobey Maguire, successful which helium seems to beryllium channeling “Boogie Nights”-era Alfred Molina by mode of “Nightmare Alley.”

By this point, the pleasance seekers decadently partying their mode done “Babylon” person looked to symptom for their biggest turn-on. The breathless vigor begins to consciousness exponentially much forced (and, frankly, unpleasant) the harder Chazelle works to prolong it. Robbie delivers a fearless portrayal of a pistillate trying to outrun the forces seeking to domesticate her, but she’s abandoned by a communicative that amounts to small much than a mash-up of moments that, for each their precocious aesthetic and accumulation value, consciousness shallow and not terribly original. Even “Babylon’s” last moments — intended to beryllium Chazelle’s crowning paean to cinema astatine its astir expressive and transporting — can’t bring the hazy stuff-for-stuff’s-sake into focus.

Like truthful galore caller films — “Once Upon a Time successful Hollywood,” “Belfast,” “The Fabelmans,” “Empire of Light” — “Babylon” wants to wage tribute to the mean that brings america each unneurotic successful the dark. But it besides doesn’t miss an accidental to alienate the assemblage astatine each turn. Which, successful a backhanded way, mightiness marque it an accidentally honorable portrayal of a mean that has ever wanted to person its coke and snort it, too.

R. At country theaters. Contains beardown and crude intersexual material, graphic nudity, bloody violence, cause usage and pervasive coarse language. 188 minutes.