… that I somehow managed to forget was in MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM.
Time that film had another release with the two-strip Technicolor restored to its red-and-green weirdness. The current version substitutes blue at times to provide a more varied palette. While I appreciate the concern, what I want is not a more varied palette, but the original palette the filmmakers gave it back in 1933.
Funny how two-strip was mainly used for musicals and horror movies. To musicals, it lent pink and healthy faces; to horror movies, green and murky shadows.
Back to Scorsese — the digital recreation of two-strip in THE AVIATOR might have more in common with the retouched MYSTERY’s look, since a green sky would hardly suit the movie’s purpose — bluish grass is easier to get away with.
I was determined to see KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON the very day it opened — we ended up being a day later and indeed the screening went past midnight so we finished watching it two days late. But Friday was a fairly big day at work so it was unavoidable.
Some modest spoilers ahead. Depends how much you like to know in advance.
The film seems to me a masterpiece. Fiona and I exchanged many glances in the darkness of the Vue Ocean Terminal’s Screen 2. Moments so strong they had to be acknowledged. And one shocking image made Fiona gasp aloud.
Also — there are intertitles! But as I don’t have a copy of the film I can’t reproduce them for you. They are unique to the film, mostly, although those in a newsreel of the Tulsa race massacre may be of the period. Of course the movie’s intertitles are in an authentic Academy ratio.
The film’s sense of period is near-flawless and pervasive. The late Robbie Robertson’s score — the film may be the most heavily-scored Scorsese film ever — nimbly keeps one foot in the 1920s and one in the here and now. I think the frequent use of the word “pregnant” was the only thing I even questioned. At the dinner table, it seems likely that people in the ‘twenties would prefer to say “expecting.” In the talkies, the word “pregnant” would be verboten, so I suspect it would have seemed slightly clinical, slightly rude.
The script is by Eric Roth & Scorsese, from David Grann’s book. I was thinking I hadn’t seen a Scorsese writing credit for a long time, but in fact his name was on SILENCE. Before that, though, you have to go back to CASINO. His name is on lots of documentaries, but I give Kent Jones credit for most of those. I do think the films on which Scorsese is a credited writer tend to be those he’s most fully engaged with… one might have to make an exception for TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL… but in his memoir Final Cut United Artists exec Stephen Bach credits the final draft of the script to Scorsese and DeNiro.
Roth wrote FORREST GUMP, a film I loathed, and a bunch of other things like the new DUNE and THE INSIDER and MUNICH and BENJAMIN BUTTON that I don’t like either. But based on this film, I have to give Roth his due. Excellent work, elevated by the handling.
In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON there remain traces of that tendency to look for opportunities to soften a very dark character — DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, an objectively bad fellow. Everything he does is bad, or can be interpreted as bad. The movie attempts to suggest that some of his bad acts might be open to more favourable readings, that sometimes he was not fully aware of what was going on, etc. In this case, it works for the movie. If Burkhart is totally unredeemed, you have a GASLIGHT/SUSPICION (if we assume Cary Grant’s guilty) type of movie which could only be told with Molly (the magnificent Lily Gladstone) as the absolute reigning main character, therefore a film not about white guilt and one that ought to have an Indigenous American director. As a film about white guilt, white corruption, toxic masculinity, it’s a highly suitable subject for Scorsese.
The curious result is one of the most complex lead characters in any Scorsese film, embodied in a somewhat limited performance — Scorsese’s cinema thrives on psychological contradictions, and Burkhart is fully compartmentalized — his left hand doesn’t know what his right is doing, but it also doesn’t know what IT is doing — he’s “a dumb boy” as Brendan Fraser’s showboating lawyer says, and also in deep denial, and we have to accept that he loves his wife even as he’s killing her relatives AND killing her.
Scorsese and Roth have decided the love story is genuine, which presents difficulties since everything Burkhart does seems to contradict this. So they have him simply ASSERT his love for her, multiple times, which usually inclines one more to doubt a character than believe them. But in odd moments DiCaprio manages to suggest that Burkhart has, somewhere inside him, a love that is true. In his reaction to the bombing aftermath, DiCaprio is brilliant — he seems astonished by something he absolutely knew was going to happen, and properly puzzled by his own surprise. Does not compute. Elsewhere, his baffled scowl is a bit overdone. A berk at heart, it’s surprising Burkhart holds out under questioning for even an hour.
A central problem in Scorsese’s films is Why do these smart women go for these toxic men? In fairness to him, it’s a central problem of the world, too. LaMotta, Henry Hill, and Jimmy Doyle in NEW YORK, NEW YORK are so obviously problematic we are forced to wonder. Is it credible that Travis Bickle should even get so far as to have one incredibly bad date with Betsy? But one answer is available — in the world of these films, choices of male companionship are very limited.
The setting here is more rustic than we associate with this director, who likes westerns but doesn’t much care for horses. The production designer is Jack Fisk, who did DAYS OF HEAVEN (and who is the Man in the Planet in ERASERHEAD) — the Masonic Lodge spanking scene is the best room we’re likely to see in a movie this year. And this is a countryside that’s had the city scattered over it, Pierce Arrows instead of horse-and-buggies. It’s just a very big city with greater distances between everything, and those distances are occupied by photogenic scenery.
This is a very very very good film. Like THE IRISHMAN it’s long and engrossing. It’s also fancier — THE IRISHMAN is some kind of strange epic chamber piece. The stylistic flourishes we associate with this director are back in force — the God’s-eye-view overhead shots; moments of swirling Steadicam; aggressive zip pans (but sparingly used); drone shots that approach and then stop dead, unnaturally.
Then there’s the welcome return of the redundancy joke from WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? “My friends always say to me XYZ.” Cut to a friend, labelled “a friend” by a helpful subtitle, who then says “XYZ.” He does it again here. “I always admired his ambition. I told him so, and the thanked me.” FLASHBACK: “You know, I’ve always admired your ambition.” “Thanks.”
Those aerial views first showed up in TAXI DRIVER — hard to find the spiritual dimension in that film, but the ceiling track post-bloodbath does feel like an out-of-body experience. They recur intermittently in Scorsese films, leaping whole decades — LAST TEMPTATION has lots. They attach to images which have a kind of ceremonial quality, though sometimes it’s merely the ceremony of paperwork. (“All this,” gestures Travis, “means nothing.”) But sometimes, as in Hitchcock, it really is the viewpoint of a purely hypothetical deity who remains, in terms of Their attitude, completely opaque.
And the spiritual dimension — the approach of death is vividly rendered in maybe-hallucinatory images — adds a touch of the sublime and numinous to a gritty, troubling narrative of all-too-earthly greed and brutality.
We finally caught up with BABYLON. A very hard artifact to account for.
“I’m not as angry as I thought I’d be,” Fiona began, after the three hours had gushed over us.
“‘I’m not angry, just disappointed,'” I finished for her.
We’d read some highly magnificent takedowns of Damien Chazelle’s film, so we can’t claim to have come to it unprejudiced. Still, I was rooting for it to be better than its reputation, and I was trying to make sense of the filmmaking decisions. But they defy sense. Here’s my best attempt at working out the thought processes and thoughtless processes that resulted in this misshapen specimen of cinematic teratology.
Firstly, I’ll admit that the cinematography is often breathtakingly beautiful, even by the high standards of this age, when digital colour correction has made an almost obnoxious degree of beauty attainable even by hacks. The music and sound design are also pretty great, and maybe Justin Hurwitz’ sort-of-anachronistic but catchy and pleasing score hints at some of the effects the film is aiming at and missing: it’s an invention rather than a recreation, it has little to do with 1920s and 30s music, but it transports us to another time and place — an imagined time and place rather than an actual one. Put it this way, it’s a more effective soundtrack than MANK’s.
It’s tempting to blame Baz Luhrmann, but maybe we should blame Fellini first? Chazelle may well be familiar with the maestro’s work, or he may merely have seen and misunderstood films influenced by it, but the ahistorical approach of SATYRICON, which must have been infuriating for classicists as BABYLON can be for most film buffs or scholars, provides a kind of mind map for BABYLON’s weird choices.
And SATYRICON begat GANGS OF NEW YORK, “a western set on Mars” just as Fellini had described his opus as “Flash Gordon set in the past.” If you throw out what normally constrains a period movie — the requirement to produce a commercially acceptable (for the period you’re actually shooting in) version of supposed historical accuracy, then you need some other creative guardrails so it’s not anything-goes masturbatory anarchy. Scorsese, making GANGS, no doubt had some kind of a vision, but he couldn’t achieve it as he was forced to make the film “about” a romantic couple he evidently had zero interest in. A bizarre case of history repeating itself: Scorsese struggled with the squaring the same circle that had defeated Julien Temple on ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS — what interests you is just voyaging plotlessly through a world, but there’s a large and voluble productorial presence squatting on your shoulder barking instructions gleaned from Syd Field or Robert McKee.
MOULIN ROUGE! came out the year before GANGS, couldn’t have influenced it, but probably influenced BABYLON. Anything goes. Chazelle, to give him his due, is a bit better at organizing his mismatched materials than Luhrman, who at every stage of the creative process seems to be merely throwing shit at the wall. In a film called MOULIN ROUGE! our first entry, with our protagonist, into the titular and exclamatory venue, might seem to be a moment of some dramatic import, but Luhrman can’t wait the required three minutes for Ewan McGregor to get there, so he flashforwards to the joint purely in order to ruin the moment. Fiona likened the film’s affect to have glitter shot into your retinae for two hours, which is fair — the Cuisinart approach to montage is a big part of what’s so offensive — but the sheer ineptitude of the story certainly enhances the repulsiveness — are we actually meant to be on the edge of our seats worrying whether Nicole Kidman will be shot or die of consumption? I came to the conclusion that a bullet would be quicker, and would allow the villain to be punished, so it would be preferable all round.
What oddly enough isn’t a problem with MR! is the wild anachronism. Cinema can do that — you can justify pop songs and the fancy dress of two centuries if your big idea is simply to generate excitement, and your big insight is that the Moulin Rouge was an exciting place. You could actually take the costumes further into craziness if you wanted.
And so, in BABYLON, Margot Robbie (in full Harley Quinn mode) attends a movie premiere in a chorus girl costume rather than a gown, a peculiar choice which is likely to work only for audiences who have no idea of the film’s period. Her hair is a tangled mop of wrongness for most of the runtime. The maze of open-air sets is authentic for 1914, not for 1926.
A lot of the weird choices are not just ahistorical but illogical.
Brad Pitt’s character is supposedly a fake Latin lover, but he acts under the name Jack Conrad. A character decides to pay off the mob with Monopoly money. I think a lot of this illogic accounts for the way we felt nothing — the melodrama all fell flat. Because we couldn’t believe any of it. But then, the characters are mostly obnoxious — Robbie’s Frankensteinian assemblage of Clara Bow, Joan Crawford and others, is so obviously a nightmare when she first rocks up to the party that it’s incomprehensible that Diego Calva’s protag, Manny, wouldn’t slam the door in her face. Sure, she’s beautiful, but so is nearly everyone in this film, save the fat guys Chazelle keeps serving up for our mockery. (Fellini’s freakshow aesthetic had both an innocence and a measure of sympathy, at least by comparison.)
I couldn’t LIKE any of these people: it can’t be coincidence that Manny gets the bosses’ attention first by devising a means of smuggling an overdose victim from a party, and then fires the titles writer to avoid a lesbian scandal (the fact that the silent era is over and titles-writers are no longer required would seem reason enough), and persuades the Black jazz musician to black up. Obviously the message is that moral compromise is the way of the business, selling out your principles is the way to get ahead. There’s some sense that we’re being told a story, one which could end with Manny going a step too far and losing his soul, or crossing a line and getting in trouble for it, or finally discovering there’s something he won’t do (like Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, who’s also a louse but a more entertaining one). But the story isn’t paid off in any of those ways, it’s just truncated.
To the Fellini-Scorsese-Luhrman vortex, the film adds more than a splash of BOOGIE NIGHTS — network narrative structure, a lot of the same story beats — and then great splatters of Farrelly Bros gross-out comedy, which become an insistent refrain. I didn’t spot any ejaculate but all the other bodily fluids seem to be accounted for, to the point where the absence of emission becomes an odd omission. The purpose of the buckets of shit, gore and vomit seems to be mainly comedic, and the decision to create the comedy in this manner is presumably iconoclastic in intent: Hollywood was not the pantheon of celluloid gods and goddesses, but a Pantagruelian horrorshow of malfunctioning flesh.
Chazelle has Luc Besson’s giftless approach to comedy: force the audience to laugh by applying a comic rhythm to fundamentally unamusing material. He has considerably more varied means of modulating the rhythm, mostly with the skilled sound design, so it’s not just characters looking at the camera with quizzical expressions (a gag Besson lifted from Landis and dots throughout his “comedy” sequences with wearying repetition). But after you’ve been nudged into laughter a couple of times, you do notice that nothing funny is happening.
Enough of the comedy revolves around the deaths of minor characters that this, too, erodes one’s abilities to care about major ones. If a cameraman expiring horrible in a soundproofed booth is meant to be humorous, why should we feel a sentimental pang at Manny’s romantic yearning, which is objectively less important?
If Chazelle is copying PTA, Scorsese, Luhrmann and, at least indirectly, Fellini, without understanding how any of them get their effects (I suppose we have to credit Luhrmann with “effects,” though I consider them all deleterious), we still cannot absolve Kenneth Anger from all blame.
If Hollywood Babylon impressed some part of the world upon publication, it was probably because the world suspected all these stories might be true, and that even if they weren’t, equally vile, tragic or absurd things would be. Nowadays, to me, the book interests mainly for the insight it provides into Anger’s psyche — a great deal of unexamined misogyny and self-hating homophobia seems to be mixed into it.
Chazelle seems to have been thrilled by the gossip, then presumably disillusioned a bit when he read further and discovered most of it wasn’t true. And then confusion set in. In interviews, Chazelle is unable to really explain what relationship he wants his film to have with the truth. He cites Kevin Brownlow as a more reliable source than Anger, but then basically says “But who knows what really happened?” All bets are off.
It’s hard to draw the line once you take that attitude. Once you take the view that Hollywood debauchery exceeded all rumour, and that the rumours weren’t being hyped by the yellow press for their own commercial reasons, you’re into a fantasy. Fantasy is an acceptable genre, though it’s probably good to examine what each particular invention is based on. And you probably had better make the individual characters’ stories meaningful. Romanticising suicide, celebrating alcoholism, leering over orgies with hypocritical disgust, none of that is going to wash.
There is evidence here that Chazelle could make a scary and effective horror film — the descent into the subterranean club is pretty terrifying. There’s a whole lot of skill being blasted like fire extinguisher foam at a cardboard infrastructure that inevitably grows soggy and collapses.
Chazelle’s confusion explodes into the fireworks display of the closing montage, comprised of these-you-have-loved highlights of the preceding three hours, enormous chunks of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, blipvert subliminals of all film history, with special care given to neglecting the silent era. It’s one of the sequences, along with the protracted snakebite farce, where the film’s macro-confusion as to what on earth it’s about spills into the micro-business of an individual scene. What I mean is, usually you can tell why a scene is happening, even if it isn’t working. But sometimes the scenes become simply incoherent. Why does Brad Pitt drop a reference to GONE WITH THE WIND a decade before the source novel was published?
I was really sad when Edinburgh Filmhouse closed, and what made it sadder was that one of the last posters displayed was for Andrew Dominik’s BLONDE, a film I despised. Somebody somehow got in and changed it, I’m glad to say. But it created in my mind a confluence, BLONDE = DEATH OF CINEMA. BABYLON seems, in its closing minutes, to be not just attempting a muddled rip-off of CINEMA PARADISO, but to be mourning the demise of the medium. But the medium deserves a better epitaph.
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