FLICKERS

Review: Babylon

BABYLON

In a movie your coke dealer will love, writer-director Damien Chazelle offers a deep dive into the decadence and depravity of pre-talkies Hollywood. In Babylon, the pantry of the movie star’s mansion contains a range of morphine, opium, heroine and coke org, while orgies are as commonplace as despair. The antithesis of Chazelle’s sweetly melancholy La La Land, Babylon is self-consciously rude and crude–there will be voluminous vomit–and for the first half of its ungainly three hour running time, it creates the best kind of movie high, one generated by the audacity of a filmmaker on a tear.

Chazelle begins with Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a handsome young Mexican-American who’s been tasked with delivering a circus elephant to the hilltop mansion of a silent film star (Troy Metcalf) clearly modeled on the notoriously debauched Fatty Arbuckle. While the elephant awaits an opportune moment to (literally) crash the party, Manny roams, and finds a bacchanal worthy of the Roman Empire in full decline. As the crowd dances and ruts, unashamedly, a kickass band jams, led by Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a brilliant trumpeter, who is Black, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a fearlessly out queer singer. Both characters, and the actors playing them, deserve more story than they get, and linger in the mind much longer than those who get three times as much.

At the party, Manny makes two life-changing friends: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a drug-addicted actress who’s never had a role but considers herself a star. “Honey, you don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t. I am.” Watching Nellie dance and crowd surf with wild abandon, Manny is smitten for life, and all the more doomed for it. Manny gives a ride home to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent screen heartthrob who sees being a movie star as a calling. Manny becomes Jack’s assistant, and sets forth on a path to becoming a Tinseltown power player.

Jack terms a movie set “the most magical place in the world,” and in a long set piece he probably intended to be zanier, Chazelle and a cast of hundreds head to the desert to prove him right. As a German director screams “Faster! Faster!’ and a band pounds out a beat to go to war by, two medieval armies charge as ten silent film cameras roll. Actual blood flies and oops, a guy dies. This picture will provide Nellie her first role (she improvises to dazzling effect) and Manny the chance to save the production while Jack will manage to kiss the girl, on cue against the setting sun. It will be a glorious day for all. Nellie becomes a star while Manny is hooked on movie set magic.

In 1927, Al Jolson stars in a talking picture called The Jazz Singer, which thrills audiences and sends a blast of terror into the hearts of silent stars like Jack, who’s confident he’ll survive this paradigm shift. His efforts to stay in the game will be achingly played by Pitt. Babylon is a frenetic film but its only real feeling can be found in the silent pain in Jack’s eyes as his new reality sets in.

In a scene destined to be classic, Nellie films her first sound scene on a soundstage where even a dropped paperclip can be ruinous. It’s joy free space that is the antithesis of the noisy, freewheeling desert set of the silent epic in which Nellie made her debut. Later, while shooting a two-bit sound film, Jack can’t help but notice that the set is filled with people who aren’t paying attention, who don’t care. The “most magical place” is no more.

Around the time an unhinged Nellie tries to wrestle a rattlesnake, Babylon begins to feel needlessly long, and not even a steady supply of shock scenes can make up for the one-note characterizations of Nellie and Manny. One feels for Robbie and Calva, who make so much of so little and are rewarded with scenes of humiliation for their characters. The film’s final moments, set in a 1950s movie palace, is a daring artistic leap but is wholly dependent on a sweep of feeling that the filmmaker, despite his many gifts, and three hours of razzle dazzle, hasn’t managed to conjure.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Spoiler Alert

SPOILER ALERT

In the new film Spoiler Alert –starring Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge as two real life men whose marriage was cut tragically short by cancer– the main characters talk a lot, but the movie’s most resonate moments come when the couple, exhausted by illness, simply lie together, taking solace in the familiarity of each other’s embrace. Such moments will likely wring tears from movie audiences, and in turn make it easier to forgive a film with an undercooked screenplay and an oddly remote performance by Parsons.

Directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and based on television journalist Michael Ausiello’s moving 2017 memoir, “Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,” the film opens with Michael (Parsons), recalling the night in 2001 when he met Kit Cowan (Aldridge) in a bar. A designer and photographer, Kit is outgoing and confident, two things no one has ever claimed about Michael, a TV obsessive with a collection of Smurf dolls and toys filling his apartment. (Ausiello’s actual Smurf collection is used in the film.) Kit eventually sees the collection in a scene that allows screenwriters David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage to explore Michael’s feelings about the death of his mother from cancer when he was a teen. In turn, it allows Kit to explain why he can’t stop thinking about Michael, even though the two make no sense on paper.

Kit is “premium cable to my network sitcom” Michael declares in one of the many TV references that charm in Ausiello’s book, but land with a self-conscious thud in the film. Parsons, of course, starred in The Big Bang Theory and screenwriter Grant has written for TV shows and acted in many himself, including the culture-shaking “gay” episode of thirtysomething in 1989. So why does so little about Michael’s TV journalist life ring true? Clunkier still are flashbacks to Michael’s childhood, seen as a garish 1990s sitcom, one where he’s a lonely kid with a deceased father and a doting mother who comforts him when kids pick on him for being overweight. These sequences, which ruin the flow of the movie, are just plain bad.

As an adult, Michael is lean, but carries the scars of being, as he tells Kit the first time they make love, a “FFF—Former Fat Kid”. Spoiler Alert is nearly as chaste as a Hallmark movie, which is fine since Parsons and Aldridge have little to no sexual chemistry, but the filmmakers deserve credit for bringing body shame out of the dark and into the light. While love can be healing, the screenwriters seem stuck in the notion of Michael as forever wounded, always tense, and too often joyless, even in Kit and Michael’s best and happiest days.

Parson just repeats the same emotional beats, which is baffling since he did such powerful, nuanced work in the film versions of The Normal Heart and The Boys in the Band. He’s misconceived the character, and Showalter hasn’t helped him find a way back to center. It’s a shame, particularly since Aldridge, who played the “Arsehole Guy” on Fleabag, is such a warm presence.

When Kit gets sick, Parsons and company rise to the occasion, and it’s as if all involved were feeling the real Kit’s presence as they filmed the story’s final scenes. Michael takes his partner and his parents (Sally Field and Bill Irwin) for a beach weekend in New Jersey. A frail Kit is relaxed and happy and Michael shoots video of him blowing bubbles with a child’s toy. Moviegoers who stick around for the closing credits of Spoiler Alert will see a bit of the original video, giving the real man whose life touched so many an authentic gaze that the film itself lacks.

Chuck Wilson