Imagine Singin' in the Rain sans musical numbers, mashed together with The Artist and Nickelodeon, then re-imagined by Quentin Tarantino. Well, Babylon is slightly more batshit bonkers than that.
While writer/director Damien Chapel continues to mine his unabashed love for the spectacle and grandeur of the great Hollywood musicals, especially the aforementioned Gene Kelly classic, here he seriously flips the script and instead of an upbeat love story he chooses instead to expose the soft white underbelly of Tinsel Town.
The opening pre-title sequence bursts out the gate with such over-the-top bravado as to surpass the gooey gross-out moments of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Stand By Me, The Exorcist, and Triangle of Sadness all combined; the sheer gag inducing reflex here is damn near unparalleled. The rest of the film is liberally peppered with sex, drugs, and big band revelry; Chazelle's longtime musical cohort, Justin Hurwitz, delivers a deliriously whiz-bang of a score.
On the surface, the film is both a sprawling love story and an examination of the decline of a matinee idol. These two main storylines are intermingled with a bit of behind-the-scenes Hollywood excess and a pointed commentary on the racism of the time, specifically how actors and musicians of color had to endure being admired as exotic curios rather than talented human beings. The rest of the film peeps back the allure of the Silver Screen to reveal debaucherous bacchanalia with such unabashed glee and hubris that you often don't know whether to laugh, cry, scream or squirm (I did all four regularly).
Sadly, the film seriously stumbles in the final 10-minutes with a terribly misguided ode to 2001: A Space Odyssey, almost as if Chazelle fell into a refractory coma after prolonging his orgasmic insanity for the previous 2 hours and 59-minutes. That said, what a joyously demented top is lavished upon us up until those closing moments.
