Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Stars: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva
Synopsis: A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a shot of adrenaline to the heart. This is a Hollywood epic of unfathomable proportions. It’s a film that no amount of studio marketing could properly translate to audiences everywhere. Perhaps that’s why many found its trailer to fall disappointingly flat for the past few months. In Chazelle’s previous three masterpieces (yes, they all absolutely rule), he depicts people unwilling to let their dreams fall to the wayside. His characters will do all they can to make it onto that stage, or in the case of First Man, the moon. But what happens when that is no longer an option? Whether it be self sabotage, or more realistically, the results of the system crashing in on itself, Babylon is not the gleaming portrait of Hollywood many might expect. With this film, Chazelle instead depicts what happens to his characters when they have exhausted all possible options. In a landscape like Hollywood, one that is inherently designed to swallow up everything around it, the characters in this film all seem to be strapped into a maddening rollercoaster that has lost all control of the brakes. Unaware of the impending doom, we witness them enjoy the ride of fame and fortune until the tracks disappear beneath them.
Babylon opens up in Los Angeles in the mid 1920s. Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is on his way to the event of the century, or more in line with this film, of the night. Alongside an elephant, Manny stumbles his way through the extravaganza. In a jaw-droppingly impressive one-take. In this take, Chazelle weaves through just about every debaucherous act one could possibly imagine, as he introduces most of the film’s key players. This is one of many moments in the film that feel particularly reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. It may take some time for that comparison to be made internally however, as the opening chunk of this film feels as if it is trying to assault your brain into sensory overload. Yet it doesn’t really stop once the party ends. Instead, the chaos just feels a bit more reigned in as the action, the characters, and subsequently, the audience, get dragged onto a film set. As fictitious screen legend Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and fictitious newcomer Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) make their way to set for an honest day’s work, the audience is treated to pure madness. Fires break out and on-screen injuries occur, contributing to a sense of haphazardness in just about every frame. Anybody who has spent any time on a film set can attest to it being hectic, but few could ever fathom what filmmaking must have been like 100 years ago aside from those who actually went through it. Yet Chazelle, who has previously depicted his passion for the olden days of Hollywood, does his best, and pulls it off pretty damn effectively.
It’s in the above treatment of Hollywood that Babylon excels. If one thing is clear from this film, it’s that Chazelle is deeply torn. The history of Hollywood during this time is inextricably linked to immoral, cruel, and unjust behavior. To sugarcoat any of it would be deeply irresponsible, and frankly, unsettling. There is absolutely still an undercurrent of, “As long as we get the shot” present, but those moments of capturing spectacle are juxtaposed against flat-out horror at times. While much of this film is fictitious and characters within are an amalgamation of real-life personas, one could assume that some of the events within are also stories that have been passed down in Hollywood. It’s in these moments of unsafe working conditions that Babylon could travel down some incredibly interesting, and mostly overlooked, paths of Hollywood history. Yet clocking in at a massive 189 minutes, it almost feels as if Chazelle tried to stuff two films into one: the love letter and the manifesto damning the whole industry. For better or worse, he appears to lean into the former more often than not.
By all accounts, Babylon is an incredibly tough film to process. It’s an absolute marvel in terms of raw filmmaking and sheer scope. It’s unbelievably bold, and it’s the type of massive swing that somebody like myself hopes to see in big budget filmmaking. But it’s in the very spectacle that bolsters the film that Chazelle himself seems to get lost. It almost feels as if he made this film to have the opportunity to walk those very same halls. Because at the end of the day, the more interesting and important stories in Babylon are not the ones being told. Instead, they operate on the outer edges of the superstars at work. There are many principal characters introduced alongside Manny, Nellie, and Jack; yet they barely appear in the film aside from a few moments. I can’t help but wonder how or why so little time in this epic is devoted to jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and singer/writer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). And while Calva very much feels like he should be the narrative lead of Babylon, he, more often than not, gets sidelined. Here we have characters, all well-equipped to have deeply compelling and rarely seen experiences in Hollywood, cast aside narratively. It’s moments like these where Chazelle’s first signs of faltering in his career begin to show. I’m a sucker for spectacle, but I never believe it should operate by sacrificing characters, especially when they’re set up to be pivotal figures. At one point around midway through the film, Sidney’s character has to deal with a clearcut example of Hollywood executives pandering to racist audiences. Directly after this moment, Sidney all but disappears from the film only to show up in an epilogue. It’s clear that an epic of these proportions may be a bit out of reach for Chazelle textually if not stylistically.
This is no slight to Robbie or Pitt, as they deliver astonishing performances full of pain and utter defeat. However, while there’s plenty of full-on movie star work in every party sequence, I wonder what this film would be like if Nellie was played by somebody a bit less synonymous with superstardom. It feels like this is a large reason as to why Calva’s role is so effective, especially when paired with his wonderful performance. It’s one full of wonder and yearning, that all comes barreling to a head in the final moments of this film. I’m unsure if my brain will ever fully heal from what Chazelle goes-for-broke with in the extended finale of Babylon, but one thing is certain: audiences may very well never see anything like it ever again. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to the viewer at the end of the day.
Grade: C+
