SILENT HOLLYWOOD SCREAMS

ROBBIE PERFORMS COMPOSIT SKETCH

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

There are movies and then there are movies about the movies.

Director Damien Chazelle adds to this film genre in a lavish rendition of the time that the silent film era transitioned to the talkies and sound.

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are cast to perform composite sketches of real life actors at the time. Tobey Maguire plays a gangster villain skimming off the top of the film industry and the starlets working therein. 

The director shows how the development of the movie star personality becomes fused with the luxury and excess of the Roaring Twenties in Babylon (2022).

Chazelle gives everything that tone and atmosphere of the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but then he uses parody as a destabilizing undercurrent and presents Hollywood as part travelling carnival and part internalized tragedy.

Pitt mimics silent screen actor and filmmaker John Gilbert at the tail end of his career having witnessed the success of sound on film and the failure of many silent screen actors to make the transition.

Everyone: the actors, directors, set curators and producers seem to be portrayed on film as the caricatures in real life that they would have appeared to be in the silent films they were producing.

But the film is not limited to an existence as a Brad Pitt vehicle. Margot Robbie plays a lead composite of the actors seeking fame and fortune in the picture shows by transitioning from vaudeville to the nickelodeon to full-length feature films.

A silhouette of silent screen actor Clara Bow is created by Robbie in the character Nellie LaRoy by having talent but by also being willing to do just about anything the director asked of her in exchange for stardom.

Jovan Adepo plays musician Sydney Palmer, based on the true to life Black trumpeter, Duke Ellington.

Similarly in First Man (2018) when Chazelle made the focus of the lens more interesting by recreating the rocket ship, Apollo 11, with all the visuals, sounds and rocket fueled vibrations he could muster, the director uses up the entire picture frame with all sorts of details in Babylon.

This intense approach behind the camera makes for a deeply stimulating movie going experience with images triggering auditory and visual impressions.

In Hollywood, the truth of the expression is more important than the truth of the content as Chazelle makes clear by producing a parody of the film industry instead of a biographical history of true events. 

Hollywood producers are more concerned with entertaining the public than educating them. For example, Li Jun Li plays Anna May Wong as Lady Fay Zhu, but her cabaret style performances briefly refer to screen siren Marlene Dietrich. Overall, though, Chazelle is recreating the atmosphere of the era rather than unintentionally making references.

This 3 hour and 9 minute runtime takes a bit to get through. But Diego Calva helps everyone enjoy the show as the set manager Manny Torres sent about by the producers to perform various essential tasks that keep the production going, such as finding a spare camera in town after the mayhem on the set of an epic sword and sandal production destroys all the cameras brought to the production for the day of shooting.

And Flea has a substantial role as the impatient producer Bob Levine.

Pitt becomes involved in intertextual, self-referential ellipses of the mind by playing the aging-out silent screen movie star when Pitt himself is nearing the end of his own acting career and transitioning into producing films rather than providing the lead characters for them.

Chazelle pushes everything quite often toward the grotesque as if dumbfounded as to how anything ever got accomplished in Hollywood during those bygone days.

Director Damien Chazelle’s film First Man (2018) was reviewed on October 12, 2018. Go to the ONTHEGO (OTG) Page and use the search term ‘First Man’. Brad Pitt is a Cinerama Nominee for OTC50 SFF(B) 2023, appearing in Cinerama OTC50 Edition #85. This Cinerama feature has been republished on the SFF(B) Page in the menu bar. And Tobery Maguire appears as Cinerama in the current OTC50 Edition #88. Maguire is a Cinerama Nominee for the 2023 OTC50 SFF(B).