Babylon (2022) | REVIEW

Directed by Damien Chazelle — Screenplay by Damien Chazelle.

Damien Chazelle has fast become one of my favorite filmmakers of his generation. His Whiplash is one of the most exciting, propulsive dramas of its decade. La La Land is a beautiful modern Hollywood musical that is now unfairly remembered for an Oscars gaffe. His First Man is a quietly moving and technically impressive character study. To make three films that are that sublime in a row is no easy feat. Last year, for his follow-up to that incredible run, Chazelle had reteamed with extraordinarily talented frequent collaborators of his like cinematographer Linus Sandgren, editor Tom Cross, and composer Justin Hurwitz to once again, like with La La Land, tell a story about the entertainment industry. Only this time it would be with a star-studded and expensive three-hour period piece epic. Did Chazelle recapture lightning in a bottle for the fourth time in a row? Well, let’s have a look.

Taking us from the mid-to-late 1920s and all the way to the 1950s, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon primarily follows Manuel “Manny” Torres (played by Diego Calva), a Mexican studio fixer or factotum who dreams of making it in Hollywood. The film opens as he, in 1926, is doing whatever he can to make sure an elephant gets to a debauched bacchanal where Hollywood decision-makers and lucky-people-on-the-guest-list come together to have sex, do drugs, drink, and dance until they pass out. At the party, Manny runs into a star and a fellow dreamer. Nellie LaRoy (played by Margot Robbie) is obsessed with partying and becoming the star she has always known she already was destined to be. She’s beautiful, she’s energetic, and she’s ambitious, and it is almost love at first sight for Manny. While Manny is rebuffed when he asks his boss to work on a film set, Nellie is picked from a crowd of people to replace a young actress who overdoses. 

But even though Manny doesn’t know it at that point in time, luck is just around the corner for him, as he meets Jack Conrad (played by Brad Pitt), a genuine Hollywood film star, who takes a liking to Manny and brings him along with him on a road that may allow Manny the opportunity to chase his dream from the very bottom of the studio system. Meanwhile, jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (played by Jovan Adepo) and cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (played by Li Jun Li) also hope to be noticed and make it big in this film with — as a previous Chazelle film might put it — plenty of fools who dream, crazy as they may seem. 

Few recent directorial ascents have been quite as fast and powerful as that of Damien Chazelle, the La La Land director, who became the youngest winner of the Best Director Oscar at only 32 years of age. He experienced the highest highs of Hollywood very early in his career, but while his very next film, First Man, was still lauded far and wide by critics, it was also his first underperforming film at the box office, just like it was mired in controversy started by right-wing nationalists and the then-American president over how the filmmaker had chosen to show the American flag. It was perhaps an experience that showed him what it means to be on the other side of immediate success in Hollywood, and I suspect the complicated feelings exuded from Babylon are the byproduct of those kinds of experiences that also include the infamous Oscar’s mix-up. 

Chazelle’s early career trajectory had made it so that he had had an early taste of stardom but also of being politically targeted, misunderstood, and had his magnum opus undeservingly made turned into a meme on the grandest stage of them all in Hollywood, Babylon — a gloriously conflicted, dark, and sometimes quite grimy 3-hour period epic — reflects that journey. Here Chazelle celebrates and defends the art form with great vigor just as he launches into sharp critique of the system gatekeeping it in America. It has all the style of Chazelle and his collaborators in perfect form, but it is also relatively startling in how explicitly it puts the spotlight on excess and hedonism. It wants to discuss the miracle of moviemaking, cinematic expiration dates, and Hollywood at its worst, and sometimes it does feel overstuffed — but it is a thrilling watch.

Babylon is right in your face. The opening thirty minutes feature excessive nudity, extreme sexual fetishism, drug use, elephant droppings, breasts shoved right onto Brad Pitt’s face, but also period-appropriate music and entertainment. It is a startlingly uncensored and absurd fever dream that Gaspar Noe and Baz Luhrmann would both look at with envy. In fact, at one point I remember thinking that one would almost expect Jim Broadbent to show up and do his Moulin Rouge! rap. But instead of Luhrmann’s disorientating editing style, Chazelle’s style is in full force here. You have whip pans, close-up shots of trumpets, and long takes. It is complete with extraordinary production design and costumes. A later sequence where the film cuts between Manny and Nellie’s first day on a film set is expertly edited and features an intense and invigorating musical theme. From a technical standpoint, Babylon is as sizzling as any of Chazelle’s previous efforts. In general, Justin Hurwitz’s score is instantly iconic. Although certain themes do resemble a La La Land leitmotif, this also feels deliberate given how this film is showing an indecent and dirty version of the industry that the romantic La La Land, which Babylon always feels in communication with (partly a contrast to), steered clear of. Hurwitz also employs a timeless original theme that is so energetic that it could easily be used at a party today.

The film is about the development of the American film industry from silent to sound, and in this process, he highlights how in the sudden technological advancements of Hollywood some people are left behind, which feels like a commentary that is still extremely relevant today. At the same time, it also focuses in on the kind of on-set stress that can hit. There is a tense and exhausting scene in which a scene of a film has to be reshot repeatedly because of a slight issue. It is comedic but it also speaks to how difficulties in artistry can still, ultimately, add up to a final product that has the kind of enthusiastic impact that makes you live forever. Chazelle’s film is perfectly aware of the privilege of Hollywood, but, as expressed, he also zooms in on the hard work and long days that go into it. 

On top of this, it is very clear that this is also a film about selling your soul for stardom and success in the pursuit of the American Dream. We see a relatively fast ascent of a dreamer be paired with the kind of studio involvement that eventually transforms him to such an extent that he himself becomes a part of a toxic cycle. Later, there is a taut sequence in which a character essentially descends into hell for lost misfits of entertainment, and it is one of the most unforgettable and shocking sequences of the entire film.

The intoxicatingly beautiful Babylon features a splendid cast with notable A-listers, but it is relative newcomer Diego Calva who plays the pivotal central part. Calva delivers a solid performance as the factotum who is also a perennial dreamer who works his way up through the system. Margot Robbie plays the intoxicatingly entertaining Nellie LaRoy with courage and potency — you can’t take your eyes off her. Brad Pitt is quite entertaining as Hollywood royalty inebriated by the stardom and the advancement of the art form, but his character is also someone who, in spite of championing the art form’s development, doesn’t know that he is stuck on the station as the train of cinematic innovation darts past him. That trio is splendid. 

To reiterate, some of the sections do feel overstuffed, and I do feel like Lady Fay Zhu and Sidney Palmer are characters that maybe merited more screen time given what Chazelle is trying to say with their characters. I don’t think the length of the film is all that much of an issue, in spite of the fact that you have to take quite a lot of time out of your day to see it. Because, frankly, the film is structured in such a way that the first hour is intense and exhausting in the best way possible with these bold extended and exhilarating sequences, and then the subsequent hours also feature extremely memorable extended sequences that are so effective that the film, I think, flies by, to a certain extent. While I get the criticism that this film is messy — and it is — I think most of that mess is by design. When I say that Chazelle is making a movie about the miracle of moviemaking, I am specifically thinking about how studio involvement and a wide variety of other uncontrollable aspects can make moviemaking hellish for some, but then — as the strange but audacious late sequence that takes us through a tour of cinematic history highlights — that arduous undertaking can culminate in a final product that can fill you with an intoxicating and infectious joie de vivre. Movies are little miracles for how challenging they are to make and how magical they can, ultimately, end up feeling. 

9 out of 10

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.