‘Babylon’ Review: Hollywood Decadence at Its Dullest
something, and by the end of the three hours and eight minutes of Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” viewers will have been exposed to any number of bodily secretions, including urine, vomit and tears.The tears come at the film’s climax, no doubt in the hopes that the audience will follow suit, but of all the aforementioned emittances, they feel the least organic to this bloated, hyperbolized and ultimately dreary extravaganza of decadence and nostalgia.Both a valentine and a poison-pen letter to the American film industry in its infancy, “Babylon” aspires to the grandiosity of “The Last Tycoon” and “The Day of the Locust,” though it more often recalls Ryan Murphy’s embarrassing and wildly ahistorical “Hollywood” miniseries.The film opens with a seemingly endless Hollywood party – it’s the 1920s, and Bel Air is still a nondescript, undeveloped hillside – where we will meet most of the major players: Hero and audience surrogate Manuel Torres (Diego Calva, “Narcos: Mexico”), one of the unfortunate handlers of the incontinent pachyderm, has dreams and ambitions in the nascent film industry. Screen king Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) loves women and booze, not necessarily in that order.