In the first few minutes of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, an elephant poops all over somebody. Such a scene would feel more in step with a low-brow family comedy or a raunchy frat-boy picture. Yet the scene feels different for being more elaborate and chaotic and gets the camera way too close for a scene of dung expulsion.
There’s a boldness to such an opening that proceeds into the more over-the-top Hollywood party of drugs, drinks, sex, violence, and even urine. What follows is a progressively dizzying and wild experience of filmmaking satire that doesn’t shy away from the wondrous and the grotesque. It’s equal parts celebration and condemnation that makes for quite the c*cktail.
Dreamers on Speed
Through the opening out-of-hand party, we meet a few fascinating characters from the late 1920s movie scene. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is a drunk actor who is lousy with women but always finds a way to go with the flow. He takes things perhaps far too easy for a party where he is dumped and then watches an elephant storm through the ballroom.
The plucky Manny Torres (Diego Calva) and the party-girl Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) are aiming to get more into the business of film. They confess their dreams over cocaine and find themselves falling into gigs as the party winds down. Nellie gets hired as an actress, and Manny as an actor’s assistant.
After listening to their vibrant desires for fame, there’s a hope that they’ll pull it off and fall in love. The fact that they even manage to find each other and form any romance amid the shifting times of filmmaking is nothing short of a miracle. It’s a small miracle between more troubling times of addiction, feuds, and dangerous dealings.
Diego Calva and Margot Robbie shine in these roles that push them through many hoops. Of course, it might not shock many that Robbie’s rowdy nature makes her perfect for the flashiness of a sexy actor’s rise and fall. It may, however, surprise for the dimensions Calva brings to his role, going from a plucky assistant to a bitter executive to a somber man longing for the glory days.
Setting Suns of the Silent Era
As sound replaces silent movies, we watch as remnants of the era struggle for relevancy. Jack, of course, is among them and finds that his acting was better left seen and not heard. While he can get blitzed before his big scene and still deliver a stellar stance, his romantic chemistry is dead when the microphone becomes involved.
The film journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) stresses the bluntness of his career’s end. She’s been in the business long enough to recognize the mortality of careers and life itself. The immortality of the movies will outlast us all, bringing about a bitter dose of existential acceptance.
We get to know a few other colorful figures who pepper the picture. Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) adds some sex to the mix for her cabaret acts and lesbian leanings in her sly nature. Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is a jazz trumpet player who finds himself getting bigger gigs in Hollywood while also facing a new kind of racism, one that creeps under the skin and makes you feel sick behind the artificial smiles and makeup.
These characters are interesting in how they segway career-wise into the era of sound but still face new challenges. There’s a bitter resiliency to rising in the world that punches differently beyond the bigger focus of Manny as an executive and Nellie as a sexy headliner. They exist in harsh boundaries where they get small moments to bite back and assert themselves. One of the highlights is when Fay chops a snake’s head and sucks out the poison when a party gets out of hand.
The Party and Movies Never Stop
As with his previous films, Damien Chazelle makes his retro revisionism complete with fast-paced editing and uproarious acting with music always present. The opening party could easily lose focus with its dozens of actors and extras cavorting in dance, drugs, and sexual acts. Yet it always feels like the camera is moving, the band is playing, and blood is pumping through every moment’s veins. It’s wild enough that the camera can whip around all over the place, yet take its time to center on Margot Robbie letting herself get lost in dance while a crowd eggs her on.
Another trademark of Chazelle’s filmmaking has Justin Hurwitz again present for the soundtrack. Hurwitz has outdone himself yet again by delivering a big, bold, and uncontrollably acidic jazz score that matches the vibrancy of the rest of the film. I still can’t get the intense track of “Voodoo Mama” out of my head for how perfectly in tune it is with the speed and rowdy nature of the entire picture.
The dark humor coursing through every scene has this ecstasy of being the ultimate release of the tension. During one blood-boiling party of stuffy elites, there’s a satisfying savageness to how the prim-and-proper Nellie pulls a 180 with her demeanor. She gets profane with jokes, sloppy with food, and christens the phony event with a grand puke to punctuate the occasion. Nearly every party and filming shoot proceeds similarly, always ending up with someone sloshed out of their mind or accidentally murdered (sometimes both).
The Many Surprises
The film features several actors who pop up in the strangest places. Samara Weaving plays a rival of Nellie that competes for attention. Spike Jonze eats up the screen as a bitterly frustrated German director. Katherine Waterston is one of Jack’s many wives but the one who is the most vocal and critical of movies, making her a great antagonist for the medium. Eric Roberts also does a fine job as Nellie’s egotistical father, more inclined to talk about himself more than his daughter at parties.
The oddest is Tobey Maguire, a weird-looking mob boss with frightening vices. In one of the film’s scariest moments, he leads two debt-owing characters to an underground world of illegal vice, arguing for a different entertainment time. His dark delights in bloody wrestling, masked fetishes, and animal-eating geeks make the best case for why the world can’t go backward. Watching Maguire play such an unforgettable creepy mafia dude is also bizarre.
A Surreal and Sublime Celebration
Damien Chazelle has a love of cinema that he wants to communicate on the screen beyond just the easy nostalgia. So many films have already done that, and there’s surely some fear that such a director will go more grandiose than grizzly with the material. Thankfully, a more cerebral angle is taken for this love of film while recognizing its faults.
In the film’s finale minutes, this rollicking montage of the film’s immortality has a daring nature to its weirdly surreal approach. There are highlights of the films that would follow from the film’s ending decade of the 1950s, but it’s more than that. We see flashbacks to filmmaking with innovations that progress imagination. We see the development of film in its most primordial state of chemicals and strips that become fluid elements in the light. We see the building blocks of movies themselves dominate the screen, where red, blue, and green overtake everything.
For what those final moments reference and attempt to communicate, it will not be everybody’s cup of tea. That daringness only makes me love this film all the more, trying to communicate something more about cinema beyond just being delighted by the lights and imagination in the movie theater. There’s something more visceral present, and Chazelle’s chaotic attempt to sound this allure through the medium.
Conclusion: Babylon
Loaded with vulgarity, passion, and energy, Babylon is one big party of an intoxicating cinema explosion. It’s an irresistible experience that brings a knowing nature to its epic chaos of stardom’s grand joys and hideous failures. With an all-star ensemble and tremendous scenes of lush allure, it’s just brilliant filmmaking.
Yes, it’s three hours, but it’s some of the most unforgettable three hours of any movie about movies. Consider that it’s shorter than Avatar: The Way of Water and so many people are willing to take that extended trip to the theater to soak in a CGI world. If you can lambast in such visual splendor, why not delight in three hours of Margot Robbie delivering a coke-fueled dance at an orgy, Diego Calva racing through traffic to deliver a camera, and Brad Pitt drunkenly falling off a balcony into a pool, all set to a vibrant jazz score hollering with life? There’s even a little treat at the end for you Avatar fans. This film has everything and so much more, making for one of the best films by Chazelle to date.
Babylon is playing in theaters starting December 23, 2022!
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