Vanessa Huang reviews three recent films that celebrate the magic of movies.
Babylon ★★
On paper, Babylon is just the kind of navel-gazing that makes for an awards season darling, clocking in at three hours and chronicling the pivotal transition from silent films to talkies in 1920s Hollywood. A tepid critical response and box office performance seem to defeat the conventional narrative on that front, and it’s a response that feels warranted for a film as trite and uninspiring as this.
Gone are director Damien Chazelle’s classic sensibilities: the film is a frenetic sensory assault, racing through its debauchery and excess with thumping orchestrations from composer Justin Hurwitz, and anchored by Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), two Hollywood hopefuls, alongside fading film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). Babylon, hardened by Hollywood’s seedy underbelly, presents a disillusioned response to La La Land’s starry-eyed romanticism: as Nellie and Manny rise in stardom, so too begins their nightmarish descent into moral corruption.
What detracts from the film isn’t the taking of blatant historical liberties – despite Chazelle’s reverence for this iconic era of cinema – but the profound emptiness that emerges once the whip-pans and bodily fluids begin to feel wearisome. Babylon constantly works in vulgarity simply for the sake of it, as convincingly edgy as a child discovering the word “fuck” for the first time. There are flashes of potential, such as journalist Elinor St John’s (Jean Smart) powerful monologue on fame and mortality. But these moments are too few and far between, and lacking the necessary connective tissue to really contribute anything coherent.
Giving Chazelle carte blanche for Babylon has resulted in a sprawling attempt at the Big Hollywood Epic, an ultimately thankless task that may have fared slightly better in the hands of a different filmmaker. A canvas this mammoth in scale forces Chazelle to work in broad strokes, skirting across the entire surface, only to land in tedious pastiche.
The Fabelmans ★★★★★
If Everything Everywhere All At Once is for people with mummy issues and Aftersun is for people with daddy issues, then The Fabelmans is for people with both. Trust Steven Spielberg, pioneer of the blockbuster, to delve into autofiction for his personal ode to cinema, turning inward and retelling his teenage years in his most intimate film yet.
A film that eschews pretension for earnest sentimentality is easy to dismiss as nostalgic fodder, the kind of crowd-pleaser that’s so simplistic it’s intellectually lightweight. On the surface of The Fabelmans, this may be so. But there are also complex layers that gradually unfurl themselves the longer you sit with it. Rather than dress the film up in grandiose ambition, Spielberg strips the importance of cinema down to its fundamental elements: how we view life and how we tell our stories. It’s a quality matched by equally unshowy cinematography from Janusz Kamiński, who crafts innumerable shots that will be forever seared into my memory. Spielberg doesn’t shy away from self-criticism either – as his younger self (Gabriel LaBelle) begins to use his camera as a shield, protecting him from the pains of coming of age, he becomes so obsessed with trying to frame everything perfectly that he loses sight of reality.
As much as award ceremonies like to pretend otherwise, there’s nothing objective about the experience of watching a film. There’s so much about The Fabelmans that shouldn’t work, from its clichéd portrayal of high school bullying to its lack of real narrative structure, enough that I’m sure many viewers will find it all too bland and self-indulgent. And yet, I left the cinema smiling from ear to ear and filled with a resounding sense of hope from this illuminating peek into the genesis of an all-time great. If there’s something magical about cinema, this is it.
Empire of Light ★★
Paul Thomas Anderson once said of meeting Stanley Kubrick: “He was nice to me when he knew that I directed Boogie Nights, but he was much nicer to me when he knew that I wrote it.” There almost seems to be this creative superiority that we attribute to writer-directors, as if marrying a film’s conception with its realisation means you can really call it your own. Having made a name for himself directing other people’s screenplays, Sam Mendes now takes full control of writing and directing Empire of Light, following his first foray with a co-writing credit for 1917. It centres on a cinema by the seaside in 80s Britain, the people that work there, and how our lives are indelibly touched by films.
A writer-director Mendes sadly is not – the film is less an affecting celebration of cinema and more a vague approximation at it, too detached and impersonal to have any kind of resonance. It feels particularly contrived when characters are outright waxing lyrical about the magic of cinema, to say nothing of the half-baked attempts at addressing racism shoehorned in and a portrayal of mental illness meant as a tribute to Mendes’s mother. The film simply muddles along, never quite clear on what it is trying to be.
Empire of Light’s major redeeming factor comes in the form of esteemed cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose delicate framing of this art-deco cinema is enough to make anyone’s heart soar. It’s also wonderfully acted: Olivia Colman in a career best, while Micheal Ward brings a gentle warmth. It’s a shame none of that is enough to save the film from being a painful watch.
