Damien Chazelle's epic Babylon starts extreme and somehow contrives to get even extremier which is an achievement of some kind, I suppose, but I'm still trying to work out what the point was of it all.
I don't mind being bludgeoned with bold imagery and jump cuts, loud noises and explicit content, envelope pushing offensiveness - that's fine, normally I'd say bring it on.
But I have little patience when sound and fury signify nothing and I'm afraid that Babylon, despite all the fireworks, struggles for coherence.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
We open on a Californian dirt road in 1926. An elephant is being transported to be a showpiece at a rich man's bacchanal. The party is in what will eventually become the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air, and one of the things that Chazelle does get right is the almost complete emptiness of Southern California and Los Angeles County at this time. The mansion is palatial but there's not another soul around for miles.
The movies have only been in the state for a few years and the landscape is mostly arid dustbowl and orange groves. The infrastructure that came to be known as Hollywood hasn't arrived yet.
And Babylon is a story of Hollywood - specifically how the industry went from silent pictures and a cottage industry that could make superstars overnight to talking pictures and, as all that money started coagulating at the feet of a smaller group of people, the arrival of big business.
At the party we meet all of our recurring characters - ambitious fixer Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), ambitious "it" girl Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), gifted trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and fading matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) among others.
In a bravura opening sequence - which would surely be a test for even the finest intimacy co-ordinators - the themes of our picture are unveiled. But not before Nelly and Manual have a moment ….
The movie business came to California for the light. It was abundant and cheap which meant they could shoot longer, make more pictures and - because audiences were basically eating up everything they were given - that meant more money.
But Southern California in the teens and twenties was its own version of the Wild West. There was very little in the way of legal oversight - of the work or the play.
Imagine if the carnies from last year's Nightmare Alley had gone into the motion picture business and made tens of millions of dollars, that's kind of how Chazelle would like us to picture it.
But that's not the only truth about the period. Some of the most extraordinary works of art of the early twentieth century were being made at this time, by people who actually gave a stuff.
Yes, DW Griffith disregarded the safety of his skid row extras on Intolerance but that was 1916. In 1926, Buster Keaton was making The General and Charlie Chaplin had just made The Gold Rush. Murnau made Sunrise in 1927 and, despite Pitt's character's constant chirping about how the movies can be "high art", nobody in the film is able to acknowledge that it was already happening. Too many drugs on the KineScope set, no doubt.
All of the characters in Babylon - played to the hilt I might add, no complaints there - have some form of inspiration in Hollywood history.
Robbie's LaRoy is based very loosely on Clara Bow, for example. But, none of them get to be fully realised.
Apart from Calva's Manny Torres and Adepo's trumpeter Sidney Palmer, there's just nothing to anyone.
Robbie is obviously up for anything and brave as a lion, but I really want to see if she has any range. There's none on display here.
Chazelle knows that we've already got one perfectly good film about the transition from silent to sound, a little thing called Singin' in the Rain. So, to be fair, he leans in. Doubles down on all the parallels to the extent that it sometimes feels like a remake - Singin' in the Rain for PornHub generation and it's often as ugly as that sounds.
And, by the end I'm not even sure what his manifesto is. Was the wild and crazy OSH-nightmare of the early days of Hollywood a source of artistic freedom and creativity that would be stifled by the arrival of money men and test audiences?
Or was it a cruel and ruthless machine that didn't care who got hurt on the way to riches and fame?
One more thing, screenwriters - if you don't know how to end a character's story, please don't just default to suicide. It's cheap and ugly and unnecessary most of the time.
Babylon is rated R18 for sex scenes, violence, drug use, offensive language and suicide. It's playing in cinemas across New Zealand now - but because of the length, sessions will be limited.
