Review: 'Babylon,' Damien Chazelle's massive story of old Hollywood, is an epic of excess with flashes of brilliance

It seems clear while watching “Babylon” that no one — an actor, a producer, a studio executive — gave writer-director Damien Chazelle a note to “pull it back a little.” Or, if they did, he never took their advice.

Everything in “Babylon” is bigger, bolder, brassier, more explicit and more open-hearted than any previous movie about the early days of Hollywood. All the sex, all the drugs, all the sexism, racism, and a few other -isms are here, in glorious Technicolor — even if they weren’t all there yet in the silent black-and-white movies the characters are making in between parties that make Sodom and Gomorrah look like an ice-cream social.

Chazelle’s story starts with Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican-born lackey for studio chief Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), trying to get an elephant up the hill to the boss’s mansion — where a serious bacchanalia is about to start. Chazelle even maneuvers for the elephant to defecate, quite prodigiously, onto a truck driver (and the camera), practically setting up the old joke about the kid shoveling crap in the circus, who responds to the suggestion of quitting with “What? And give up show business?”

Many of the movie’s key players are at this party — if you can pay attention for all the dancing, debauchery, and people having sex in the dim corners of the room. Jazzman Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is leading the band. Gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) is taking notes and taking compliments from up-and-comers wanting to advance their careers with a mention in her articles. Heartthrob star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) arrives fashionably late, arguing with his latest wife (Olivia Wilde, who doesn’t hang around long).

Manny meets a party crasher, who calls herself Nellie LaRoy — and played by Margot Robbie, who commands attention from partygoers and the movie’s audience with her in-your-face sexuality. She and Manny find the party’s drug room, and Nellie soon is dancing with abandon on the party floor. When Manny’s boss, Bob Levine (Flea), is trying to move an overdosed actress out of the mansion unnoticed, he tells Nellie to be on the set in the morning in her place.

Nellie shows up and discovers a world of glorious chaos. Chazelle’s staging of the open-air craziness of a silent-era film production — with half-a-dozen movies shooting simultaneously, using the sun as a floodlight, and the noise not affecting the films at all. Nellie is paired as the bad girl against a virtuous ingenue (Samara Weaving), and the director (Olivia Hamilton, who’s also Mrs. Chazelle) captures Nellie’s irrepressible sex appeal. Suddenly, a star is born.

Meanwhile, Manny is trying to rescue Jack Conrad’s epic, after the horses trampled all 10 cameras and the light is disappearing. Manny’s resourcefulness saves the day, and his rise as a studio executive begins.

More parties, more movies, and more crazy moments with our main characters are in store. Then, at a certain point, a bombshell hits Hollywood that threatens to upend all of their lives: The talkies.

Suddenly, Manny’s Kinescope Pictures (the front gate is the classic Paramount entrance) is having to retool, building massive soundstages, turning fluid action into stilted drama, and finding out which actors have voices that match their faces. (Yes, this was all covered in “Singin’ in the Rain” back in 1952, and Chazelle knows it. In fact, he goes out of his way to show us all that he knows it.)

The question as the three hours of “Babylon” unspools — to use an antiquated reference to film on reels — is whether the manufactured mythology Chazelle constructs with these fictional movie stars is ever enough to supplant the real thing. Chazelle name-drops real stars, like Gloria Swanson, and even plugs in wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), mogul William Randolph Hearst (Pat Skipper) and actress Marion Davies (Chloe Fineman) in smaller roles. But often they’re reminders that the real stories are more compelling than the fake ones.

Some of the moments Chazelle stages feel like strangeness for shock value — such as the bit with Nellie’s manager father (Eric Roberts) and a rattlesnake, or Manny’s descent into the den of a giggling crime boss (Tobey Maguire, seemingly channeling Jim Parsons). Other characters, like the Chinese cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), suggest another, more nuanced, movie happening in the next room.

Chazelle knows star power, and he gets maximum mileage out of Pitt and Robbie as the twin pillars of his sprawling narrative — the aging lothario who recognizes that the jig is up, and the sexpot whose rise is matched by her decline. Both performances are show-stoppers — which, unfortunately, means that Chazelle has to start the show up again.

“Babylon” is a deeply flawed movie, and its excesses often outshine its moments of stunning brilliance. There’s a masterpiece in here somewhere, if one can shovel through all the elephant dung.

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‘Babylon’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, blood violence, drug use, and pervasive language. Running time: 188 minutes.