BABYLON
**** In Babylon, there’s a scene where one woman woos another by sucking rattlesnake venom out of her neck. That’s the movie in a nutshell—sweet, slightly insane and irrevocably romantic. It’s true to form for director Damien Chazelle (La La Land), who is enamored with the romance of things lost. This time, the subject of his jubilant-mournful gaze is pre-talkies Hollywood, as embodied by a swaggering, fading star (Brad Pitt), an exuberantly vulgar it girl (Margot Robbie), and a naïve striver (Diego Calva), whose evolution—from eager chauffeur to cynical executive to rueful family man—brashly illustrates how Tinseltown makes and unmakes its denizens. Even at 188 minutes, the film can’t fully illuminate the inner lives of everyone in its vast ensemble (which includes Jovan Adepo as a trumpet player caught in a maelstrom of success and bigotry). Still, to drink in Chazelle’s mad brew of screwball vignettes and nostalgic yearning is to experience a transcendent high. Babylon’s Hollywood is callous and cruel—two behind-the-scenes deaths are greeted with nonchalance by the film’s “heroes”—but it can also be frantically glorious, as Calva’s character learns when he steals an ambulance to get a camera to a set before the sun goes down. He makes it in time for the director to get a shot of Pitt, in medieval garb, smooching his co-star as the light fades from the sky. What a town this was then, Chazelle seems to sigh, though not without defiance. Despite being about a cinematic age long dead, Babylon is blazingly alive. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Studio One, Tigard.
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
**** The second chapter of James Cameron’s Avatar saga ends the same way as the first: with Marine-turned-revolutionary Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) opening his eyes. Yet this time, the story is about more than one man’s awakening. It’s about a family and a community—along with the wondrous and unknowable world they must defend from the monstrous, capitalistic menace known as humanity. Onscreen (as in life) more than a decade has passed since the original film. Jake, having shed his human form to inhabit a towering, azure alien body, has started a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), a formidable warrior on the distant moon of Pandora. Invading humans are once again ravaging Pandora’s lands, but Cameron seems most fascinated by what happens off the battlefield. When the Sully family takes refuge among an ocean tribe, his imagination is free to roam Pandora’s depths, the home of whalelike beasts called tulkun, whose minds are as vast as the cosmos. Though a swashbuckling showdown between Jake and vicious colonizer Quaritch (Stephen Lang) reaffirms Cameron’s mastery of brutal and graceful mayhem, the luminous and tactile CGI that breathes life into the film’s flora and fauna proves that Pandora, not Jake, is the hero of Avatar. Every blade of grass, every drop of water, is a gift not to be wasted. “This is where we make our stand,” Jake declares. The real question, unspoken but implicit, is where we will make ours. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Tigard, Wunderland Milwaukie.
WHITE NOISE
**** A bright orange tanker barrels down a country road. On the truck, in bold black letters, are two warnings: “Toxic Chemicals” and “Flammable.” So, of course, the driver reaches for a bottle of Jack Daniels. What could go wrong? In story terms, everything; artistically, nothing. White Noise, an unexpectedly buoyant tale from hyper-cynical auteur Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), may be his best film—an astonishment, given that it’s based on Don DeLillo’s allegedly “unfilmable” 1985 novel. A perky, puffed-up Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies (thankfully, a field of research, not a how-to course) fleeing an “airborne toxic event” with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their four children. Amid the pandemonium, Baumbach unleashes a banquet of themes—consumerism, infidelity and climate crisis are all on the menu—yet never leaves you feeling intellectually overfed. Merrily and persuasively, White Noise insists that life is wondrous in its meaninglessness, even when Jack and Babette seek spiritual guidance from a ferociously grouchy nun (Barbara Sukowa) who declares that anyone hoping to hear her talk of angels is an idiot. Turns out, she’s not a fan of the next world; she’s just doing her best to help people live in this one. In its poignant, peculiar way, so is White Noise. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Fox Tower.
THE WHALE
** Billed as a long-awaited comeback for Brendan Fraser, The Whale stars the aging heartthrob as Charlie, an obese online English instructor. It’s a performance that sustains a nimble spark of hope within successive fatsuited degradations, but can’t quite lift this turgid chamber drama up from the depths of director Darren Aronofsky’s bloated pretensions. From the opening scene, as a creepily enthralled young evangelist distracts our hero from gay porn, until a long-suffering off-duty nurse makes her regular visit, Charlie’s imminent fate seems assured, and subsequent exchanges with his self-appointed spiritual and physical caregivers exist solely to tease out the none too revelatory backstory: genial schlub carb-overloads to numb the oceans of remorse after abandoning his family for a male student who then took his own life. Boyish as ever, Fraser simply hasn’t much to do but absorb the verbal assaults of Charlie’s embittered ex (Samantha Morton) and his teenage daughter (Sadie Sink) or twinkle uselessly amid lingering passages that offer equal parts body shaming and body horror. Ultimately, the ghoulish pointlessness of Aronofsky’s boutique creepshow becomes the actual whale in the room. Stunt casting can distract only so long from a congenital cynic’s ever more hollow oeuvre trumpeting insight-free discoveries most folks have the good taste to ignore. Thar, he blows again. R. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Hollywood, Lloyd Center, Vancouver Mall.