Babylon (2022)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
I mean, if you like go-for-broke, unbridled chaos for three-plus hours, Babylon has entered the conversation.
If you can withstand the first half hour of depravity and abhorrent behavior, there’s only 150 more minutes to go!
Good performances from Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva exist here and below-the-line, the film is technically strong.
NO
This is the same guy who made Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man?
If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Damien Chazelle has grown to hate making movies and hates Hollywood even more.
The film’s failure is not because it is basically 188 minutes of boundary-pushing madness. Rather, It emanates from the film’s toxic, unrelenting defiance of anything positive or good to say. Even when it tries to find positives, it feels inauthentic when lining up against everything we have endured before those moments and what we endure afterward.
OUR REVIEW
If I didn’t know any better, I would think Damien Chazelle hates making movies. The absolute rage and indignation he places on screen for his latest film, Babylon, is something to behold. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, when Hollywood began making the switch from silent films to “talkies,” Babylon is a 3-plus hour romp that reduces the entire industry to that of sycophants, drug-addicts, sexual deviants, and reprobates who only exist to exploit, abuse, and denigrate people to further their own personal gain.
Chazelle has always explored voraciousness and ferocity since he brilliantly showed us the imbalance between teacher and mentor in 2014’s Whiplash. He tempered down some of that intensity in the beautiful and bittersweet 2016 musical, La La Land, which told a love story between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone trying to stay together as each pursued their dreams of being entertainers. Gosling and Chazelle teamed together again, digging deep to explore the drive and desire of Neil Armstrong’s quest to walk on the moon in 2018’s First Man.
A skilled and gifted filmmaker, Chazelle has simply cut loose all the ties that potentially bind him with Babylon. This is a far-ranging, go-for-broke, unrelenting film of excess. Powered by three main performances by Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva, with a myriad of cameos, guest spots, and a vast ensemble at his disposal, Chazelle feels angry, repulsed, and defiantly anti-Hollywood here. Here and there, it makes for an interesting movie. Quickly, the entire experience is overwhelming, exhausting, and unrelentingly antagonistic to the viewer.
Within the first half hour, an elephant has emptied his bowels on a ranch hand. A woman performs a shower most golden upon a slovenly dude gyrating below her. We linger at a Caligula-style orgy for an uncomfortably long time, and see two characters discover a secret room with enough cocaine to give Scarface pause.
We also first meet Manny (Calva), an animal wrangler tasked with delivering that elephant to the decadent house party of producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin). Matinee movie star Jack Gordon (Pitt) is in a fight with his latest wife (Olivia Wilde), and they essentially split before Jack enters the gathering. Manny crosses paths with Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a hopeful drug-addicted starlet who is looking for any opportunity to find her way into the movie business.
Though these three get lost in the chaos of the first half hour, which also finds Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea playing a studio fixer who forces Manny to get rid of a dead body, the title card “BABYLON” first appears on screen at about the 30-minute mark. Eventually Chazelle uses his main characters as linchpins for the far-ranging story he sets out to tell. Full of debauchery, back-stabbing, and instant gratification at all costs, any kindness is often asterisked with cruel or bad behavior that follows.
At times, it becomes easier to ignore Chazelle’s haphazard, rambunctious screenplay and listen to Justin Hurwitz’s powerhouse jazz-infused score. A subplot involving trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is a story both interesting and woefully underwritten. There’s dazzling cinematography by Chazelle’s go-to lenser, Linus Sandgren, and some stellar production design by Florencia Martin. While the costumes are not necessarily tied to the time period on screen, Mary Zophres’ work does articulate the elegance, veneer, and shabbily thrown together looks that get some of these characters from one moment to the next. Technically speaking, much of Babylon is craftsmanship at its finest.
What suffocates any good is the constant drumbeat of toxicity and awfulness Chazelle cannot avoid dwelling in. Stellar tracking shots are broken up by some cringy dialogue and scenes which feel like they exist only to get to the next abhorrent act or behavior. The film’s last hour is a doozy, bringing in Tobey Maguire for an antagonistic turn that not only does not work because Maguire’s not believable in a maniacal role like this, but also because the storyline he is involved in feels derivative of both “Pulp Fiction” and “Boogie Nights.”
Ironically, those two films - groundbreaking and critical of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in their own way - finds people selling their souls for the pursuit of fame and finding themselves in impossible situations driven by drugs, crime, gangsters, and an industry built on the exploitation of weaker hopefuls who came before it. Somehow, even with the violence and chaos those movies put before us, there seemed to be hope and promise coloring in the gaps, the margins, the corners. Babylon just smears color all over everything, a cinematic scribble-out of hope and dreams and any good that Chazelle’s own industry has created for over a century.
Robbie is strong in a thankless role. Pitt is rather aptly cast as a 1920s cinematic star struggling to find his place in this new era of Hollywood set to arrive. Calva is a surrogate for the viewer, but a final sequence, set some 26 years after the film begins, where Manny sobs watching Gene Kelly perform in Singin’ in the Rain, seems such a hollow and empty out for everything that has come before it.
At once, Chazelle seems to have realized he’s dismissed the work of those who crafted the transition to sound and finds one example of a film he can point to as being influential and groundbreaking. However tender that moment may be, the inauthenticity of the moment is striking.
I can only guess as to the pain and disappointment Chazelle still feels when he recalls the moment his 6-time Oscar winner, La La Land, ended up on the losing side of Oscar’s greatest controversy, when it was revealed, as his producers were accepting their Best Picture Oscars, that Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight had actually won the prize. Then, First Man, long believed to be a player in the 2018 Oscar race, scored four nominations, all below-the-line technical nods, and missing out on an anticipated Best Picture nod, along with no nominations for writing, acting, or directing.
Perhaps Chazelle is still upset about these things, maybe it’s foolish to even think so. Talented in so many ways, Chazelle has moved audiences to tears, stirred emotions, and made unforgettable sequences people still talk about to this day.
Babylon, however, is an angry and hostile film. Whatever drove this journey, I hope, for all of our sakes, it has brought Chazelle the peace of mind he so desperately needs to find.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Flea, Li Jun Li, Tobey Maguire, Lukas Haas, Max Minghella, Samara Weaving, Katherine Waterston, Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze, Jeff Garlin, Olivia Hamilton, P.J. Byrne, Rory Scovel, Eric Roberts, Chloe Fineman, Jennifer Grant, Patrick Fugit, Kaia Gerber, Phoebe Tonkin, Telvin Griffin, Pat Skipper, Ethan Suplee
Director: Damien Chazelle
Written by: Damien Chazelle
Release Date: December 23, 2022
Paramount Pictures