Babylon – 0 stars

In a year when Andrew Dominik thudded with a Hollywood fable, Blonde, Damian Chazelle, who was on a three picture heater for the ages (Whiplash, La La Land, First Man – yes, people, that’s three 5 star pictures), also crashed and burned, bigly and badly. But where you can see that Dominik’s failure was easier to hide in the making, Chazelle’s epic expanse of shit seems so obviously terrible in its awful construction that you hold everyone involved responsible, for any of them could and should have struck Chazelle hard across his face and said, “What the fuck are you thinking!”

The film, set in Hollywood in the silent to sound era, mistakes bloat as grandeur, Looney Tunes-level excess as glory, and crassness as knowing cynicism. Chazelle’s monstrosity has nothing to say or offer though what the picture does provide is a lot, and loudly. Then, unforgivably, it closes with paeans to the magic of the movies, gaudy testaments as they live in the hearts and hearths of the little people. Chazelle has the audacity to attempt to transform two sybaritic simps (up and coming ingenue from the wrong side of the tracks Margot Robbie and drunken leading wreck Brad Pitt, who fared poorly from the silent to the talkie) into the nostalgic wreckage of TinselTown.  And if that wasn’t enough, a racial parable is tacked on in the story of a jazz trumpeter who crosses over to the screen (Jovan Adepo). He is given just enough of a story to feel both insufficient and patronizing.

The movie is not a takedown of old Hollywood or an homage or even a madcap celebration of the hedonistic heyday. It’s just a boring, overlong freight train that supplants story and motivation for one spectacle after another, mainly in distractingly dizzying and ostentatious tracking shots. Then, after treating the characters as little more than CGI, they are destroyed amidst an ill-considered lecture about the perils of fame, the fakeness of it all, and the fact that Hollywood, as a Hedda Hopper type (Jean Smart) relays to Pitt, “is bigger than you.” But, she promises, you will … live on … forevah, on celluloid, “with angels and ghosts.”

Retch.

The performances are necessarily cartoons. Robbie, in particular, is obscenely over-the-top and nearly abused. As I said, you don’t care about her, you don’t care about anyone. Unless you care about Wile E. Coyote.

So bad you feel a little sick at the end, following a grotesque foray into the truly seamy underbelly of the town (think Freaks-meets-Carnival of Souls).

This was all done better by the Coens in Barton Fink and a heckuva lot better in Hail, Caesar!