'Babylon' is a tale of Hollywood excess, told far too indulgently

Hollywood, the Roaring Twenties. A group of actors and players in the burgeoning movie industry - a Mexican immigrant (Diego Calva), a free-wheeling starlet on the rise (Margot Robbie), a world-famous actor at the top of his game (Brad Pitt), a jazz trumpet player (Jovan Adepo) - go on a wild ride, charting the end of the silent era, the birth of the talkies, and the excess and debaucheries that happened in between.

It's not remotely surprising that Damien Chazelle, director of 'La La Land' and 'Whiplash', would choose to make a movie about the birth of the Hollywood industry and the era of the silents and the talkies. His work has always been preoccupied with an idea around the Hollywood of old vanishing into the mist, of an era that was glorious and wild, but ultimately doomed by its own excesses. Some day, somehow, someone would turn this thing into a business and then all the freaks and weirdos that made it up would be forced to leave or go straight. Yet, there's a scene in 'Babylon' that almost neutralises this idea entirely. The ever-reliable Jean Smart, playing an all-seeing glamour journalist, sits Brad Pitt's chiselled jawline down and calmly explains that Hollywood isn't a place, it's a cycle. What dies, comes back, and what's out of fashion, comes back into fashion. If you stick around long enough, everything gets burned away and comes back in another fashion. The only thing that remains is the cycle. People, style, tastes, whatever - it's all fleeting.

At three-plus hours, 'Babylon' is an exhausting proposition for any cinemagoer. For one, this is a story that's been told over and over again - and told better. 'Singin' In The Rain', 'Sunset Boulevard', 'The Artist', Martin Scorsese's 'The Aviator' touched on it, you also had Peter Bogdanovich's 'The Cat's Meow', even 'Three Amigos!' was about a comedy about three failing silent comedy actors. Yet, where 'Babylon' tries to outshine them all is by focusing on the excess. The opening scene involves an elephant - a real-life elephant - firing a torrent of excrement down on two migrant workers trying to get up a hill. Later in the opening scene - which goes for about 30 minutes, by the way - the elephant is walked through an orgy. In this orgy, we see a man having a wine bottle shoved up his anus, a young woman urinating on an older obese man, and dozens of people performing sexual acts while taking cocaine bumps off each other.

Everything about 'Babylon' is geared towards excess. All of the cuts, the performances, the details, all of it - it's all indulgent, all over-the-top, none of it done with subtlety or with any kind of wit. It's just blasting forth, firing shit at the walls and expecting audiences to be enthralled by the shape that it takes. Margot Robbie is playing something close to Harley Quinn here, all wild-eyed chaos and gangster moll voicework. Brad Pitt, meanwhile, seems to be playing some twenties version of himself - established, world-famous actor, been through a couple of high-profile marriages, now facing irrelevancy as the Age of Movie Stars comes to an end. Diego Calva and Jovan Adepo both are underutilised. Calva's character goes from wide-eyed hustler to hardened insider over the course of the movie, but there's a level of insincerity to it that just doesn't land. Jovan Adepo's character simply walks away by the end of it all, his contributions in the story really amounting to nought.

This kind of excess ultimately leads to exhaustion and eventual boredom. That 'Babylon' ends on an ultimately bum note shouldn't surprise anyone. Hedonism always gives way to conservatism, where the darkest excesses eventually lead to complete transformation. 'Babylon' tries to make light of all this, but like so many points in this movie, it just holds the note far too long, to a point where it becomes an ear-piercing wail, or worse still, just pure noise. You can tell that there's a lot of skill involved by the actors here, trying to keep up the rhythm and tempo, but you come away from 'Babylon' realising that it's all ultimately being wasted. There's no great appeal in 'Babylon' because it's all been done before in a leaner, economical fashion.

The excesses might be the point here. Yet, as we live through a time of upheaval and collapse of old institutions and ideas, 'Babylon' reminds us why they collapse. Bullshit, or in this case, elephant shit, weighs a lot.