Chazelle’s trip to Babylon leaves us cold
Babylon, this season’s third (yes, third!) movie about the movies is by far the worst of the trio. While The Fabelmans and Empire of Light have a few pluses, Babylon is too bloated and draggy to recommend. Writer/director Damien Chazelle (La La Land; First Man; Whiplash) clearly loves the movies, but with Babylon, he’s made one that might actually steer his audience away from the form instead of toward it.
Chazelle’s problem here is his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink method of filmmaking. Frenetic and chaotic, the picture is filled to the brim with too many characters, sub-plots, and shock value set pieces. And at three hours and eight minutes long, Babylon requires several double espressos to get through. The film follows four major characters and their experiences in the movie industry as the silent film era of the 1920s gives way to talking pictures (echoes of Singing in the Rain are intentional, as Chazelle pays homage to it repeatedly).
Margot Robbie is Nellie, a brash New Jersey-raised starlet with impulse control issues and a voice not dulcet enough for the talkies. Brad Pitt is Jack, a charming, Douglas Fairbanks-esque leading man worried about aging out of the public eye. Jovan Adepo is Sidney, a Black trumpet player angered and humiliated by the industry’s racism, and newcomer Diego Calva is Manny, a young Mexican-American eager to break into the business. He’s the picture’s main protagonist and the audience’s surrogate into the chaotic, hedonistic, and often unforgiving world of movie-making.
At various points in the film, some of these players are up and some are down, and the picture’s central focus is on their initial enchantment with Hollywood life, their eventual disillusionment, and, in some cases, their downfall. The problem for the viewer, though, is that the film cuts from one character story to another and back again so quickly that we never have time to fully absorb or care about any of them. Instead, we get a series of elaborate, frenzied, over-the-top scenes that seem to exist solely for Chazelle to show off and say, “Look what I can do!” He seems to want to make a paean to movie-making, but what he’s made here just feels like the worst kind of vanity project. A montage of clips of much better classic films at the picture’s end – – in some sort of weird wrap-up tribute meant to remind us of the joy of cinema – – instead simply reminds us that far better movies exist than what we’ve just seen.
Robbie, Pitt, Calvo, and especially Adepo are all excellent, and deserve kudos for turning in fine work out of a tedious hodgepodge of a script. Tobey Maguire also gets a scene-chewing supporting role as a creepy crime boss who brings Manny to a Nightmare Alley-type underground club that features some of the film’s more grotesque scenes.
Reconciling scenes like that with one in which Brad Pitt’s Jack states earnestly about the movies, “What happens on that screen means something,” becomes difficult, and makes us wonder about Chazelle’s overall point. All the characters give up some part of themselves to be in the movie business, but are their sacrifices worth it? Chazelle celebrates the movie-making machine at the same time he acknowledges the toll the Hollywood grind and the dark side of fame can take on idealistic, creative types. The message is mixed, and his three-plus hour bacchanalian epic ultimately leaves us as confused as he seems to be about the whole enterprise.
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Babylon opens today at Bay Area theaters.
