It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.
Chazelle’s La La Land, my favorite of his films, was no small affair, yet Babylon is something else entirely: a three-hour-and-eight-minute attempt at Paul Thomas Anderson/Quentin Tarantino levels of audacity (and I don’t say that simply because the movie, like Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, stars both Pitt and Margot Robbie, the latter of whom once again plays an actress who watches herself, in wonder, projected onto a movie screen). A combination of brightly lit bombast and casting-couch crud, Babylon simultaneously sprinkles us with the fairy dust of moviemaking while rubbing our noses in the exploitation that is also a part of Hollywood. I’m just not sure that Chazelle, who wrote and directed the film, has the right sensibility for such an undertaking.
The movie opens with a party at a California mansion populated by Hollywood movers and shakers, desperate aspiring starlets, bewildered servants, and, eventually, an elephant. It’s impressive in scope and scale, though oddly managed—never quite precise and choreographed enough to be a full-on musical sequence (despite musician characters providing a natural soundtrack), yet not chaotic enough to truly feel like a sordid bacchanal.
Nevertheless, both Pitt and Robbie get great introductions during the extended sequence—he with a humorous sleight of hand; she with a dazzled spotlight. Pitt’s Jack Conrad is a seasoned pro, blithely waving away wives and hangovers. Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is a hungry rabble-rouser, a born star just waiting for the studios to catch up with her. It’s perfect, if familiar, casting. Pitt doesn’t have to work too hard (when he does, during one argument scene, it’s one of his few false moments). Robbie has the advantage of already proving her star quality in other pictures (there are times when Nellie registers as Harley Quinn with less sartorial style).
Watching these two is Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a wannabe Hollywood player who is stuck, largely due to his ethnicity, at the bottom of the ladder. Nevertheless, by proving himself useful in any situation (he’s the one who manages to procure the elephant), Manny eventually becomes an assistant to Jack and a confidante to Nellie, interweaving his own story with theirs over the next handful of years.
For a while, Babylon manages a nice parallel structure, as it follows all three of these figures through various ups and downs. But eventually Manny falls by the wayside and becomes more of an observer. Meanwhile, Chazelle admirably tries to bring more diversity to his story by introducing a Black trumpet player (Jovan Adepo) and a Chinese-American nightclub singer (Li Jun Li), but to varying success. While Adepo’s Sidney Palmer gets a convicting scene in which he’s asked to wear blackface on a set in order to match his backup musicians, Li’s Lady Fay Zhu mostly registers as an object of exotic fascination (and that includes her queerness, which is only facilely explored).
Despite the historical injustices Babylon nods to—and a third-act, underground party sequence that means to be an even bleaker bookend to the opening debauchery—the movie ultimately wants to be yet another of 2022’s love letters to the movies. And so Pitt’s Jack poetically describes a movie set as “the most magical place in the world.” He also has a later conversation with Jean Smart’s gossip columnist that’s meant to be a poignant ode to the immorality of art, but struck me as cloying and inert. The film eventually ends—and this isn’t a spoiler, at least in narrative terms—with a bizarre collection of clips from other Hollywood movies, in the manner of an Oscars montage. I honestly thought the film proper had ended and a promotional reel for the theater chain had kicked in. Essentially, Babylon is something similar: a feature-length, red-band trailer for itself.
(12/16/2022)
