‘Babylon’: a lurid look at movies in the 1920s

  Director Damien Chazelle takes three hours and nine minutes to bring Babylon to its predictably ironic conclusion. As I watched the film, I wondered exactly what Chazelle had in mind with this indulgent, lurid look at the early days of the movie business.

   Chazelle takes a sensationalized bold-faced approach to his material. Not only are the characters and events Chazelle depicts notably lewd but the movie serves them up so breathlessly we're probably meant to take them as revelations about the way things really were.

   Chazelle immerses his story in the nothing-succeeds-like-excess school of filmmaking, which, at least for me, meant that watching Babylon was like being elbowed in the ribs by someone who winks as he says, "Can you believe this?"

     Babylon begins with a party that brims with over-the-top debauchery. Silent film stars and wannabes gather for a bacchanal at which anything goes. The movie's major characters are introduced as they step around throbbing piles of partygoers.

     How lascivious is Chazelle's portrayal of early Hollywood? At the opening party, an immense actor -- presumably suggestive of Fatty Arbuckle -- enjoys a golden shower. A drug overdose death? Yes, that, too.

     About those major characters: 

     Margot Robbie plays an aspiring star who crashes the party in hopes of meeting the folks that will launch the big-screen career she believes she's destined to have. 

    Brad Pitt portrays a matinee idol with a devil-may-care approach to work, a hard-drinking life and his many marriages. 

    Newcomer Diego Calva appears as a worker at the party who slides into movies, a sideways entrance. He quickly falls for Robbie's Nellie LaRoy, a love that persists throughout the film but adds little to the proceedings.

     Chazelle plunges into the wild atmosphere generated by an industry that was only beginning to find its cultural footing. The doors swung open for hollow ambition to mingle with genuine talent and the two sometimes became indistinguishable. 

     Fueled by energy, sexiness, and bravado, Robbie's performance proves a stand-out, although not always in a good way. She's working so hard, you wonder whether OSHA should have looked into it.

     Pitt can play this kind of role without much apparent effort. His Conrad is a star for whom everything comes easily. He's conquered the world of silent movies. 

     Jean Smart plays Elinor St. John, a powerful gossip columnist who chronicles the Hollywood scene. She's a star builder and a star destroyer.

     Li Jun Li evokes images of Anna May Wong as a mysterious cabaret singer.

     Perhaps because of his encompassing approach, Chazelle also makes room for racial issues. Jovan Adepo plays a Black trumpet player who finds a niche in the movies but eventually must confront his conscience about Hollywood's blatant racism.

    And, alas, poor Tobey Maguire. He turns up as a leering gangster who travels through a degraded underground, happily enjoying the sleaze. 

   It might be said that Babylon has it all: death, sex, tragedy, shiny dreams that curdle into dashed hopes, and a large cast that's been tossed into Chazelle's sometimes frenzied narrative.

    Of course, Babylon does have it all — but in quantities that amount to wanton overload. Elephant defecation and rattlesnake wrestling appear as if plucked from a crazy highlight reel, sideshows to the main event.

    Of course, all that rises must fall. The arrival of the talkies brings a need for nuanced vocal talent many of the movie's silent stars don't possess. When the wheel of time turns, the hands of the clock point to sad endings for many of these characters.

    In Babylon,  Chazelle (La La Land) seems to be striving for something big, bold, and culturally meaningful. He's not holding back. But what he gets is something less than epic, a movie that's weird, long and, finally, tiresome.

      For a movie with so much uninhibited energy, Babylon proves a drag.

     

    

Theatrical power drives 'Fences'

Denzel Washington directs August Wilson's powerful family drama.

Anger and irony always have informed Denzel Washington's best work, and in his adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, Washington finds a character that's equal to his taunting, incisive intelligence and his unwavering commitment to finding the dramatic truth of every character he plays.

Washington played the role of illiterate garbage man Troy Maxson in a 2010 Broadway revival of Wilson's 1983 play that also teamed him with Viola Davis, who again joins Washington to play Troy's long-suffering and sometimes indulgent wife. Davis's Rose has lived with Troy long enough be wise to his wiles: A former baseball player, ex-convict and a deeply opinionated man, Troy's a definite handful.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, the movie provides a context for understanding Troy. He was a good baseball player whose career peaked before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League color line. He says he played with men so good, Robinson couldn't even have made the same team as them. He's an embittered man who can serve up a sharp, piercing grin -- the kind of smile that cuts as much as it warms.

Fair to say that Fences, which Washington also directed and which takes place mostly in the backyard of the Maxson family home, survives as a play on film, but that doesn't mean that its great theatrical moments are in any way muted.

Both Washington and Davis scale their performances somewhere between stage and screen, and in his role a director, Washington clearly keeps allegiance with the rapid-fire exchanges in Wilson's text.

The movie's economical opening shows Troy riding the back of a garbage truck with his co-worker and pal Bono (Stephen Henderson). Troy and Bono empty garbage cans along the route. We get a quick glimpse of the white man who's driving the truck. That's pretty much all we need to know about the racial hierarchy of the Pittsburgh sanitation department in the 1950s, although the subject does come up later.

Visual flourishes aside, Washington allows the power of the performances to carry the day, obtaining fine work from a supporting cast that includes Russell Hornsby as Troy's musician son from a previous marriage, and Mykeleti Williamson as a World War II veteran who suffered brain damage as a result of his war wounds. Williamson's Gabriel wanders the neighborhood, a trumpet tied around his neck with a frayed piece of rope. He's the movie's holy fool.

But the film's key male relationship involves 53-year-old Troy and his younger son Cory (Jovan Adepo). Cory is a high school football star with college potential. Troy holds the young man back, insisting that he step into a dutiful but limited role as a worker. Learn a trade, Tory insists.

Put another way, Troy wants his son to become him, a desire that's partly selfish but also fueled by Troy's certainty, honed by experience, that sooner or later, the white world will betray an ambitious black man.

Fences fits into the best tradition of American family drama, a story about characters who carry the burden of their personalities as well as of their times and who sometimes suffer from a potent merger of the two.

For all of Troy's cruelty, the movie gives him the integrity of his convictions, and what I carried from the theater was a sense of the indelible rage that Washington breathed into Troy and the ability of his beleaguered wife to match it and go beyond it to a place of acceptance.

Despite some cinematic stiffness, Fences emerges as a movie with a love of the characters who populate it and a deep understanding of what they all must do to survive. Both in front of the camera and behind it, Washington has made a powerful piece of work.