Damien Chazelle’s Babylon isn’t a film for everyone. And that’s what I love about it.
Babylon is what you call a “big swing” film. Chazelle’s script eschews a tight, razor-sharp narrative expected in most films. His direction thrives on larger-than-life scenes stuffed with unhinged, chaotic performances. He fills each frame with lavish, eccentric period detail in various colors and textures. He’s not afraid to offend, to take risks, and to let the camera free-flow through a scene seemingly with a mind of its own. He gives the audience the feeling of tripping heavily on the best drugs, and by the time it’s over, you’re not exactly sure what you’ve seen. In my case, I quite loved it.
Best described as The Wolf of Wall Street meets Singin’ in the Rain, Babylon stars Diego Calva and Margot Robbie as Manuel “Manny” Torres and Nellie LaRoy, two hugely ambitious Hollywood wannabes trying to break into the business on the advent of sound pictures. He takes any opportunity that he can through hard-scrabble work while she uses her beauty and “anything goes” nature to become a star. The loose narrative of Babylon traces their journey into the Hollywood machine: its high highs and its low lows. They intermingle, rather Altman-like, with a bevy of supporting players in various Hollywood roles, including Brad Pitt’s (in a career-best performance) silent film star Jack Conrad and Jean Smart’s (brilliantly delivering a show-stopping monologue) La La Land journalist Elinor St. John.
Chazelle’s script doesn’t exactly provide deep or particularly meaningful character development. They’re really archetypes within a basically classic Hollywood story. Instead, character-driven moments provide the connecting tissue between fabulously insane set pieces that are, I suspect, truly at the heart of what Chazelle wants to achieve with the film. He opens with an enormous bacchanalia stuffed with nudity, sex, coke, booze, dancing, music, an elephant, and yes elephant shit. That’s even before we’re presented with the opening title card. It’s a thrilling, intoxicating start to the 3-hour film — one that announces itself in as loudly and as brashly as any film I’ve seen since the obvious inspiration of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But nuance is not on the menu here. Chazelle serves excess, gorgeous excess, as the main course, and he asks willing audience members to whole-heartedly embrace it like a child opening presents on Christmas morning.
The film meanders, less an aimless way but more of a slice-of-life way, from sequences like this, not all dripping so heavily with the seedier aspects of 1920s-era Hollywood. Clearly, Chazelle’s heart lies within the filmmaking narrative, and it’s no surprise that Babylon’s two best set pieces send up silent and early sound filmmaking. Following the opening credits, our main cast sets up camp in a desert locale to film a silent sword and sandal epic, and it’s nearly as chaotic in its rhythms as the earlier decadent party sequence. There, Robbie gives her greatest performance in the film as her Nellie dances back and forth between her coquettish and her “real actress” personas. To say that Robbie gives the scene her all is a gross understatement. She’s a force of nature, a perfect storm of emotion, mania, and sex appeal. We as voyeurs are as stunned by this wildly erratic performance as the characters in the film are, but she’s brilliantly moderating her performance to the pitch of the film. Here, more is not enough. It has to be everything, and Robbie gives Chazelle every ounce of what he asks.
As The Jazz Singer makes its seismic impact, Hollywood reacts, and Chazelle gives us our next great set piece. For my money, a sequence in which a very green production team makes their first attempt at a sound picture shows Chazelle delivering his finest moments as a director. The roughly 20-minute sequence pulses with tension and anxiety as sound — voices, footsteps, doors, drops of sweat — becomes this seemingly insurmountable and untamable enemy. Chazelle tightly orchestrates these moments with a panache and control on a scale of which I’ve not seen him deliver before. It’s a brilliant, jaw-dropping sequence that holds the audience rapt in adoration for the craft of filmmaking.
There’s a third set piece toward the end of the film that approaches the same level of tension but to completely different effect. I’ll spare details as it’s essentially the cinematic equivalent of the steep drop on a roller coaster. You know it’s coming, you feel the energy pulsing around you, and you’re not exactly sure you want to experience what you’re being forced. It is, as with the rest of the film, a demented journey — a dark reflection of the filmmaking process itself, which is the overall theme of Babylon. Chazelle’s film is less a straightforward “rags to riches and back again” saga as it is a visual, sensual exploration of the emotional process behind Hollywood filmmaking. I suspect, through this journey from silent to sound, Chazelle wants us to understand the beauty and the horror of making movies. That is his Babylon.
Naturally, the crafts on display here are excessive and excessively stunning. Production design, costumes, make-up and hair, and editing are all among the year’s best. I also save a special place in my heart for Justin Hurwitz’s kaleidoscopic score which rather anachronistically delivers a pulsing dance/circus music hybrid in the most insane and insanely lovely way possible. Your appetite for all of this visual and auditory excess will depend entirely on your patience for “big swing” movies. In my eyes, I’ve never felt more cinematically alive than I did watching Babylon. It’s as far away as you could get from the intimate indie dramas we’ve been served during the last few pandemic-influenced years, and I’ve missed the genre of grand Hollywood epics. Babylon isn’t a perfect film — the narrative doesn’t fully justify the film’s length — but it’s an unmistakably brilliant journey into madness of movie making and an ode to Coppola, Altman, Scorsese, among others.
Like Nashville before it, it’s the damndest thing I ever saw.
Babylon opens nationwide Thursday night.
Saw it yesterday & loved it! Was long but didn’t feel like a slog. Haven’t seen a lot of “Oscar worthy type” movies yet because haven’t opened up near me yet or haven’t tried hard enough find them on streaming. But this is one of my favorite of the year. Liked the review/article.
By the way I also loved Babylon and I hated Wolf of Wall Street !
Now it’s at 58%
60% on rottentomatoes right now and sure to drop into the dreaded “rotten” zone starting with 59%.
Sounds like there is a lot of Boogie Nights in there from the description
Pitt’s storyline is exactly the same as The Artist.
Good thing I don’t remember a thing about The Artist.