Babylon (2022)
dir. Damien Chazelle
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Paramount Pictures
Damien Chazelle had a dream to fuse Singin’ in the Rain and Eyes Wide Shut, and, for our sins, that’s what he’s given us.
In preparation for this review, I came across a description of Babylon as drawing on “just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire.” I couldn’t have put it any better myself.
Chazelle’s epic three-hour+ ode to the birth of Hollywood as a cultural phenomenon – holding sway now for a century – is by turns brilliant, exuberant, self-indulgent, exhausting, and ultimately flattens out the history of the artform Chazelle clearly cherishes. The writer/director is also so focused on giving us the spectacle and bacchanal of the last days of silent film that he forgot to write characters or a story.
Taking place between 1926 and 1932, with an epilogue set in 1952, Babylon focuses on four disparate characters trying to make their mark on Hollywood – or, in one case, trying to keep his mark from fading.
Nellie LaRoy – she added the “La” to her name to make it sound French – was born for the spotlight. She’s got “it,” a quality shared by real life silent film star Clara Bow, the original “It Girl” on whom Nellie is loosely based. Manny Torres is also eager to break into show biz, but he craves recognition and clout behind the camera. Manny is a first-generation Mexican-American who will do anything – including being defecated on by an elephant – to be a part of movie magic.
Elsewhere in the newly-forming Dream Factory, Sidney Palmer is a Black jazz trumpet player who knows that putting his talent on screen – as well as the talent of the other Black musicians with whom he works – would be more exciting for audiences than what he’s currently providing accompaniment for. The racism of the time promises to make Sidney’s dreams of stardom all but impossible.
Jack Conrad is our insider. He’s an established, bona fide silent film star. Jack is excited by the possibilities of talkies, but his enthusiasm begins to wane when the technological changes of his industry threaten to make him a relic of a bygone era.
The nearly 30-minute-long bravura opening sequence of Babylon – shot to look like one continuous take – is a microcosm of the dizzying highs and crushing lows on offer this time out from the La La Land and Whiplash director. The prologue consists of the wildest Hollywood party you could imagine. A live jazz band (led by the aforementioned Sidney) plays raucously as hundreds of party goers writhe and gyrate against one another in various states of undress and inebriation. The sequence creates a sense of a community devoted to pleasure and enjoying it for as long as it lasts, because it surely won’t.
Chazelle’s lithe camera then moves from the action on the main floor to a private bedroom. Here we see a couple engaged in drug- and booze-fueled sex, complete with a golden shower. The man is clearly meant to be silent comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who was accused in 1921 of raping and accidentally killing aspiring young actress Virginia Rappe while hosting a similarly hedonistic party at a San Francisco hotel.
Chazelle is intent on creating the liveliest, most debauched atmosphere possible for his picture so that we can get a sense of the rollicking, anything goes – especially in nascent Hollywood – roaring ‘20s. His strategy seems to have been to highlight the most salacious tidbits from the era, accuracy be damned. (You can read here about the liberties that Chazelle took with the Arbuckle incident. Chazelle makes his version of Arbuckle a child-like imbecile and ignores every fact of the actual case.)
The outrageousness of both Babylon’s ethos and its characters are a function of two different concerns. The first is impressing on a 2022 audience how wild young Hollywood was, especially when compared to the mores of the time. That last clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The illegal, prohibition-era booze might have been flowing, and there’s no doubt that people know how to party hard, no matter the era, but Babylon is in overdrive. Chazelle wants to scandalize his audience, so we can get a sense of what it must have felt like to be there.
By contrast, Clara Bow infamously hosted the entire USC Trojan football team for Saturday night parties at her Beverly Hills residence, and in one scene, as an homage to this fact, Nellie shows up to a party with an entire college football team in tow. A biographer of Bow interviewed players and concluded that “even the wildest party, which ended in a 4 a.m. game of touch football on Clara’s front lawn, was tame.” Chazelle might have found a four A.M. game of touch football not quite sufficient to raise eyebrows.
The second issue is Chazelle’s seeming desire to make the polar opposite of his chaste, immaculate 2016 Oscar Best Picture nominee La La Land. The director was taken to task for creating a pollyannaish, idealized world in that musical, and I can feel his eagerness to prove he could produce something a little more down and dirty.
The debauchery throughout Babylon is evocative of the libertinism on display in the early scenes of something like Cabaret. In that 1972 film, the hedonism and queer-inclusive atmosphere of metropolitan Berlin in Weimar Germany serves to contrast with the coming reactionary intolerance of fascism. In Babylon, the unending pursuit of pleasure curdles into something rather distasteful and out of place within the larger context of Chazelle’s ultimately hopeful vision of early Hollywood. The nadir comes in a lengthy sequence near the end of the film in which Manny must pay off a gambling debt that Nellie has run up with a local gangster.
The methamphetamine-addicted mob boss – played to creepy perfection by Tobey Maguire – takes Manny on a hellish tour of a sick social club in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. The tour, which features BDSM orgies that may or may not include non-consenting participants, ends with a Master Blaster-esque (minus the brains) hulk of a man whose act involves eating live rats for money.
My opening Singin’ in the Rain mention is particularly significant, because large portions of Babylon are essentially a retelling of that classic 1952 MGM musical – you’ll note that Babylon’s epilogue is set in the same year – in which the talkies completely upend both Hollywood and the careers of the film’s characters. As the silent film star, Jack Conrad’s story arc is basically a mashup of Lina Lamont and Don Lockwood from Singin’.
Chazelle tries to insulate himself from that critique by explicitly referencing the Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen directed musical. Jack, like Don Lockwood, is even embarrassed when audiences guffaw at his first talkie performance when he repeats “I love you” over and over again, like he would have done in his silent film days. The audience also mocks the way that Jack’s clothes rub the microphone as he passionately kisses his costar, as happens in Singin’ in the Rain, to illustrate the technical challenges of adding the first synchronized soundtracks to movies.
Outside of being the vehicles driving Chazelle’s recreation of the earliest days of Hollywood, the characters in Babylon are little more than delivery devices for dialog. I didn’t know them – with the exception of Manny, and then only barely – any better at the end of the movie than I did at the beginning. Manny falls in love instantly with Nellie the moment he sees her. We are expected to accept this with no explanation or interiority from Manny’s character. It’s likely Chazelle’s way of impressing upon us the magnetism that “it girls” had over the public, but it ultimately feels like lazy screenwriting.
The cast that Chazelle assembled for his film all do remarkable work, considering the unfocused, bloated screenplay they’re working with. Margot Robbie as Nellie is every bit as magnetic as Clara Bow or any other “it girl” of the late silent movie era. The sequence in which Nellie gets her first big break – involving being able to cry on command for take after take after take – is breathtaking. Chazelle and Robbie, in this moment, are able to recreate the discovery, in Nellie, of that mysterious, ineffable quality of the performer loving the camera and, perhaps more importantly, the camera loving the performer.
Diego Calva is convincing as both the fresh-faced Hollywood hopeful version of Manny and as the older and wiser Manny who has witnessed the birth of the modern movie industry and was forever changed by his experiences. Manny compromises his own values and identity – insisting that people call him Manny, instead of Manuel, and falsely claiming to be from Spain instead of Mexico – in order to rise in the (almost) exclusively white Hollywood power structure. Calva lets us see how damaging those compromises have been for Manny, even if Chazelle’s screenplay doesn’t offer up much in the way of insight into the character.
Jazz trumpeter Sidney gets the least amount of attention and screentime, but Jovan Adepo – who I first saw in Denzel Washington’s Fences – relays Sidney’s frustration with the white power structure splendidly. Chazelle cribs a moment from Spike Lee’s divisive 2000 film Bamboozled for Sidney’s most heartbreaking moment. The musician has finally made it in front of the camera, but the studio executives consider Sidney’s complexion too light when compared to the other performers. They fear censors in the deep south will think Sidney is white, which would lead to the film being banned because of racist miscegenation laws. The white executives saddle Manny with the despicable task of convincing Sidney to use shoe polish to make his face darker. The tortured look on Adepo’s face as he stares into the cannister of polish is pulverizing.
As Jack Conrad, Brad Pitt is, in some ways, reprising his role as stuntman Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That character, like Jack, can see that things are changing in the industry. Booth experiences the end of his career as it relates to the fading star of the man who he performed stunts for in better days – by the time we meet Cliff, he’s been reduced to performing menial odd jobs for his diminished employer. The sense of melancholy is similar, but both the script for Once Upon a Time and Pitt’s performance in that movie sell it with more poignancy than is achieved in Babylon.
Jack is reminded by an industry gossip columnist acquaintance – true friends are hard to come by in Hollywood – that he, like she, is a dime a dozen. (The great Jean Smart turns up as the journalist using a less-than-convincing British accent.) As soon as they are used up, she tells Jack, there will be innumerable hopefuls ready to take their place whom the real power players will be more than happy to usher into the spotlight. For a time, at least.
Chazelle’s movie hits the screens as Hollywood’s own power as an arbiter of taste and creator of culture feels like it’s starting to fade. I wrote at the top of the review how the magic of the movies as a cultural phenomenon has been holding sway now for a century. The rise of the internet and our increasingly fragmented sense of shared cultural experience is making the future of Hollywood’s dominance an increasingly open question. Babylon might be a bit of a mess due to its creator’s overzealous attempts at making HOLLYWOOD: THE MOVIE, but the melancholy he taps into from our collective knowledge that all good things must come to an end ultimately resonates.
Why it got 3 stars:
- Babylon is a bit of a mess, but the key performances are wonderful. There are also a few fleeting moments when Chazelle captures the exuberance of youth and how exciting it must have been to help invent Hollywood.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I loved Chazelle’s use of the oooooold school Paramount Pictures logo at the open.
- I didn’t mention her in the review, but Li Jun Li is exceptional as Lady Fay Zhu, the stand-in for Chinese-American silent film star Anna May Wong. (Wong was honored last year by the US Mint as one of the first women, and the first Asian-American, to appear on American coinage. Look for her as part of the American Women Quarters series.) Li is breathtaking in every scene in which she appears.
- In an example of unintentional comedy, Chazelle cuts from the dead woman in the opening sequence to a studio executive who barks orders to ensure no one knows about the foul play. The person playing that executive is Flea of California funk rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s a competent actor (I mean, see the Back to the Future trilogy if you doubt me) but he has a personal history as a bit of a goofball as part of RHCP, so seeing him pop up so suddenly gave me a start. That effect was multiplied because the shot immediately preceding his entrance is of a dead body.
- There is also some awkward/disturbing humor when we get the scene of a studio’s first attempt at making a sound picture in a newly built soundstage. We’re meant to think it’s funny, but the producer begins spewing disgusting, antisemitic slurs at everyone around him because the shoot is going so terribly. It’s frankly the worst writing of the entire movie.
- I loved seeing Lukas Haas in this. The scene where he gets a toilet seat wrapped around his shoulder and head is priceless.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this on a Friday night with Rae at the Texas Theatre. There were ten or so of us in attendance. There was an older gentleman in the row directly in front of us who enjoyed quietly(ish) speaking to one of his companions throughout the movie. I could never quite get a handle on how bonkers he thought Babylon was. Rae told me after the screening that the woman in this group (sitting directly in front of me) was on her phone for virtually the entire screening, checking in on Instagram, email, etc. You know, pressing matters when you pay to see a movie. Luckily (for me), I was positioned so that I didn’t even realize she had a phone in her hand.