It may or may not have been but Damien Chazelle envisages Hollywood in the 1920's as a modern day "Babylon" with parties that might have been engineered by Hieronymus Bosch. In the first few minutes of his film an elephant defecates on his handler and a starlet urinates on a naked fat man. This Hollywood isn't a place for prudes or, you might say, 'decent' people. If Cecil B. De Mille had directed this picture the entire cast would be thrust down to Hell by Chuck Heston.
They say nothing succeeds like excess and this is one excessive movie, (I mean why open with an elephant and not a horse?), and it's BIG in a way that almost puts Baz Lurhmann to shame. Of course, it's also derivative. There might be more of everything in Chazelle's vision of Hollywood as Hell but we've been here countless times before. Ultimately, then, it depends on just how well Chazelle handles overly familiar material and the answer to that is very well indeed. This may come to be regarded as one of the great movies about old Hollywood but it doesn't come close to a few standards I could mention.
Of course, as befits a movie of this size Chazelle has assembled quite a cast. A near-perfect Brad Pitt is the alcoholic silent movie star, Margot Robbie, the talentless starlet who becomes a talentless star, Jean Smart is the Hedda Hopperish gossip columnist and then there's Jovan Adepo as the black jazz player who breaks into the mainstream, former child star Lukas Hass, Eric Roberts, Olivia Hamilton as a female director, a terrific P.J. Byrne, Max Mingella as Irving Thalberg, Katherine Waterston, a very creepy Tobey Maguire and perhaps best of all, Diego Calva as the gofer who rises to the top.
Like the movie itself they all go over the top. At times I felt that Chazelle imagined himself as a kind of 21st century D.W. Griffith and as pure cinema this is the real deal, maybe too much so. This is a film that draws attention to itself from shot to shot though what it lacks is something resembling a decent script serving up instead one set piece after another. That said, it is hugely entertaining, a kind of malodorous love letter to cinema. Personally, give me "Singin' in the Rain" anyday, (and the countless references to that masterpiece are a major misstep).
