TMS Movie Review: Babylon

(Scott Garfield / Paramount Pictures)

Damien Chazelle’s latest Hollywood pastiche, Babylon, isn’t a love letter to cinema so much as a death note. Last week I considered A.G. Iñárritu’s Bardo to have the worst opening sequence of 2022. Well, I instantly took that opinion back the minute the title card came up on Babylon. The start of three hours of uncensored debauchery guised as commentary and a history lesson on the roots of the film industry. When I first caught the trailer, I joked about how I wasn’t expecting Chazelle to channel Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) for his next project. There are plenty of Baz-isms aesthetically in Chazelle’s new picture, but also callbacks to the graphic content of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), most obvious in the over-the-top orgy/party at the beginning of Babylon. There are even a couple of scenes that made me think of P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997). And, unfortunately, Chazelle does not reach the highs and strengths of Scorsese or PTA here.

I really, really wanted to like Babylon, and there is a lot that I did like, especially in the whole second act. But boy, what I didn’t enjoy, I REALLY didn’t enjoy. This is supposed to be my bread and butter. It’s the wild west of the latter-day silent era in the 1920s to the birth of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood’s golden age in the 1930s. Instead, this is more like ham and beans. Chazelle’s characters are very clearly inspired by real figures of old Hollywood, which is generally fine. Wikipedia says Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad is based on John Gilbert, but I was reminded more of John Barrymore. Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is a mix of the most extremes of Clara Bow and Tallulah Bankhead. Jean Smart plays an Elinor Glyn-esque gossip columnist re-named Elinor St. John. Chazelle’s wife, Olivia Hamilton, portrays Nellie’s most frequent director, Ruth Adler, a la Mabel Normand and Dorothy Arzner. Spike Jonze has a bizarrely hysterical, meta cameo as an overly animated German filmmaker who must be based on Erich von Stroheim. And the protagonist of the whole retro epic, Diego Calva, might be the most original character in the film: Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant who gets a step up into motion pictures through odd jobs on sets after befriending Jack and Nellie.

(Scott Garfield / Paramount Pictures)

The sections of Babylon that focus primarily on the process of making silent movies or ‘talkies’ are fascinating and uniquely entertaining. Such as an average day filming a giant-scale battle sequence with practical effects and no legal regulations, or the struggle to maintain control on an early sound production. These scenes are legitimately well made and executed, and naturally remind us of similar parts from Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), but with an R-rating. [By the way, if it wasn’t already obvious how much Chazelle loves Singin’ in the Rain in his previous La La Land (2016), he makes it very obvious during the last 10 minutes of Babylon]. Having a Latino as the lead of a film industry period piece feels fresh and original, with Calva delivering a solid performance. I liked how Li Jun Li’s Lady Fay Zhu is, surprisingly, more like Marlene Dietrich than Anna May Wong, and successfully subversive. Katherine Waterston doesn’t really add much as Jack’s third wife, Estelle, who feels a lot like ‘First Lady of Broadway’ Helen Hayes, but it’s nice to see her put on a Transatlantic dialect anyway. Jovan Adepo’s Sidney Palmer as a trumpet player-turned-superstar through appearances in movie musical sequences [i.e. Louis Armstrong] is a bit undercooked and predictable as a character, and ultimately the weakest link in Babylon, sadly.

But what really hurts Chazelle’s visual spectacle is just how blatantly crude and vulgar the tone and atmosphere are. I get it. Hollywood wasn’t organically sophisticated at birth, and their public makeover is mostly a put-on. I’m fine with that narrative and went into the film expecting it. The movie title is literally ‘Babylon.’ But within the first 20 minutes, we get an elephant defecating on a man, a starlet performing ‘golden showers’ on a comedic film star, cocaine, nudity and sex. It’s just gross. Every scene includes comically out of place sex jokes and foul language [which, by the way, wasn’t regularly common in professional settings that long ago]. Tobey Maguire’s cameo during the third act, as a crime lord in a segment reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) doesn’t feel necessary at all [though I admit, I did laugh a couple times]. Chazelle is beating us over the head with a cautionary tale on how fame and showbiz lead to excess and gluttony, while also trying to respect the filmmaking artform, which results in an especially jarring final scene. Damien, if you love Singin’ in the Rain so much, why are you cynically suggesting it sugarcoats the reality of the ‘talkie’ period? It’s hard to tell which aspects of Babylon are self-aware, which are satire, and which are from the heart.  

Similar to Bardo, the half-baked, throw-everything-in-the-pot formula in Babylon doesn’t warrant the runtime, and naturally makes the unpleasant progression feel tedious. Chazelle is a talented director, as can be seen in Whiplash (2014) and La La Land, which he won Best Director for with the latter. But he or someone on the production really needed to rein it in a bit with Babylon. I don’t like the word ‘nihilistic’ to describe something polarizing, but it’s totally appropriate here. Remember to trust your editors, folks.