Note: To honor Vittorio Taviani, who passed away this weekend, I am posting my original review of Good Morning, Babylon — my favorite of the many films he co-directed with his brother, Paolo Taviani — which I first saw at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
There is a kind of immortality one obtains
only through art. And that is what Paolo and Vittorio Taviani lovingly
celebrate in Good Morning, Babylon,
their richly textured, radiantly photographed fable of Old World tradition and
New World innovation.
The film follows two young brothers from their
Tuscan village, where their family works at restoring the splendor of
time-ravaged cathedrals, to the Hollywood of 1916, where D.W. Griffith is
inventing the syntax of the first great 20th-century art form, cinema.
Griffith, played as an avuncular visionary by
Charles Dance, becomes a father figure for Nicola (Vincent Spano) and Andrea
(Joaquim De Almeida), and invites them to bring their artistic legacy to his
most ambitious epic, Intolerance. The
stonemasons eagerly accept, and wind up constructing eight huge elephants as
temple decorations in the silent classic's lavish Babylon sequence. Not coincidentally,
the elephants are large-scale replicas of designs they carved for a cathedral
back in their home village.
The Tavianis, heretofore best known for their
folk tales about Italian peasantry (Padre
Padrone, Night of the Shooting Stars),
doubtless see much of themselves in Nicola and Andrea. Like the young immigrants,
the Tavianis are inseparable collaborators who were raised in a rural Tuscan
village, and who grew up to accept cinema as their means of artistic expression
and spiritual self-preservation.
Perhaps because of these strong
autobiographical links, and most definitely because of the Tavianis' great love
for film, Good Morning, Babylon is
highly romanticized in its rendering of its lead characters, and in its
depiction of early Hollywood as a golden-lit wonderland. The actors,
technicians and directors are seen as exuberant pioneers, intoxicated with the
knowledge they are doing and making things no one ever has before. For them,
filmmaking is at once a daunting adventure, a raucous ritual, and a means of
joining total strangers as lovers and comrades on and off the set.
After decades of movies that have taken a far
less generous attitude toward the Hollywood dream factory, Good Morning, Babylon comes as a refreshing, reinvigorating change.
It reminds us of a time marked by innocence and idealism, and of the reasons
why many of us fell in love with movies in the first place. Throughout the
film, a mood of ingenuous optimism is beautifully sustained — musical, almost,
in its intensity.
The performances are perfectly attuned to the
unaffected sincerity of the Tavianis’ celebration. A good thing, too. With
a misplaced touch of irony, or a self-conscious emphasis on the wrong line, the
whole illusion would be shattered. Dance risks audience ridicule when, as
Griffith, he joyfully exclaims, “I love moviemaking!” But even if you smile at
the character’s unabashed enthusiasm, you won't laugh.
Vincent Spano and Joaquim De Almeida offer
virile, vibrant performances as Nicola and Andrea. They are defiantly proud
men, particularly when their worth is challenged by snide studio executives. (“We
are the sons of the sons of the sons of Michelangelo and Leonardo! Whose sons
are you?”) But they can be comically endearing in their exasperation at bad
fortune. At one low point on the road to Hollywood, Andrea snaps at Nicola. “I'd
die of pity if I saw somebody like you and me!”
Greta Scacchi and Desiree Becker are utterly
charming as bit players who fall in love with the Tuscan immigrants, despite
their initial resolve to date only directors or producers. In one of the
movie's sweetest scenes, each brother offers his sweetheart a firefly he has
captured. Then, as a comic counterpoint, the brothers, not quite fully fluent
in English, try their hand at love letters — using flowery phrases such as “You
are as beautiful as a snowy mountain!” — that become a running gag all over the
studio backlot.
Occasionally, the Tavianis reveal their own
awkwardness at working in another language. Some of the English dialogue sounds
affected and overly precise, like a too-literal translation. (English subtitles
are provided for Italian-language scenes.) At other times, the measured pacing
and the gorgeous landscapes, familiar from the Tavianis’ Italian films, seem
distractingly inappropriate for this particular story.
In the end, though, the relatively minor flaws
of Good Morning, Babylon are easily
overlooked. The final scene, where Nicola and Andrea make a valiant attempt to
literally immortalize themselves through their new art, achieves a deeply
affecting, bittersweet poignancy. It is an altogether fitting conclusion for a
movie that pays such eloquent tribute to the magic of moviemaking.
