From giddy highs to tragic lows, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is an exhilarating ensemble piece that covers everyone in the motion picture industry from movie stars and studio heads to extras recruited from skid row and animal handlers dealing with elephant dung, and shows how quickly someone can go from one to the other and back again.
It’s a film about what Hollywood does to the people who work there — what it gives them, and what it takes away.Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, the circumstances of the film’s creation occasionally mirrored the story it was telling, Perhaps the most obvious example of life imitating art was the casting of unknown Diego Calva in the pivotal role of Manny Torres, a character who works his way up from the bottom rungs of the industry to become a pioneering executive.
Just as some of the characters in “Babylon
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