BABYLON (2022)
Updated: Jan 28, 2023
From Damien Chazelle Comes the Dark Side of Old Hollywood.
Grade: A
If there is one word that can be used to describe Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, it is “insane.” Taking place from the latter half of the 1920s to the early 30s, it is, in many ways, the inverse of the 1952 masterpiece Singin’ in the Rain, which is featured towards the climax. Singin’ in the Rain offers a more humorous take on the decline of silent pictures and the rise of “talkies” in Old Hollywood. Babylon tears off this romantic façade and instead showcases a cutthroat industry where people are chewed up and spat out, and only a few can survive.
The film follows the interconnected stories of several people in Los Angeles who make it big in showbiz and live to regret it. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a famous silent film actor, finds his star fading when talking pictures come around. Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is an energetic actress who also becomes less popular when people can hear her voice on-screen. Manny Torres (Diego Calva) begins as an errand boy for partygoers, and he ultimately becomes a studio executive. But later, when he tries to help a down-on-her-luck Nellie, he finds himself forced to enter L.A.'s dark underbelly. Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a black jazz musician, is told to put on makeup to make himself even more black to match his costars. Disgusted, he immediately quits and therefore escapes a potentially horrible fate.
Babylon is three hours long, and Chazelle makes every minute count. The stories the characters go through are presented in a huge variety of editing and cinematography techniques, from tracking shots and long takes to montages and rapid-fire editing. In this way, the film bombards us with its content and often taboo subject matter, burning it into our minds.
Movie sets featured are often chaotic and plagued by violence. In the desert outside the city, a furious medieval battle sequence is shot in which all the cameras are destroyed, and many extras are injured or even killed. Later, when Nellie is acting out a scene for her first sound picture, the set is beset with problems involving the sound equipment, pushing the cast and crew to the edge of their endurance. The cameraman, operating in a large wooden box, ultimately dies from the intense heat. Manny explains to Nellie early on that he wants to be in film production so he can be “part of something bigger.” Movies here are big, all right. Big and brutal.
The finale of Babylon was like an out-of-body experience for me. As one of the characters watches Singin’ in the Rain, a montage ensues chronicling the history of innovations in the film industry. It spans from the early years, when people were frightened of a train coming at them, to the special effects breakthroughs of films like Jurassic Park (1993), The Matrix (1999), and Avatar (2009). What is the point of this? Simple: like any industry, movies change as new things are invented. Some people can survive and adapt to these changes, others cannot. Babylon shows several worst-case scenarios for people who were forced to endure the rise of the sound era. They thought their time in the sun would last forever; Babylon reminds us that everything changes, and only we can decide what to do about it.
I was willing to walk out of Babylon during the first fifteen minutes, which featured some of the most disgusting and vulgar scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. It took the film a long time to win me back over. But it was all part of the point Chazelle was trying to make here. In keeping with the movie’s exposure of the reality of Old Hollywood, he holds nothing back. He wants to push things as far as they can possibly go, whether it be through a decadent party, a half-insane actress running around with a snake biting into her neck (she survives) or an underground world of unspeakable horrors. Many entertainment companies these days are trying to dial things down with their content to avoid bothering people. With Babylon, Chazelle thumbs his nose at this notion and instead sucks us into a world of anger, desperation, and depravity.
Director: Damien Chazelle
Screenplay: Damien Chazelle
Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton
Cast: Brad Pitt (Jack Conrad), Margot Robbie (Nellie LaRoy), Diego Calva (Manny Torres), Jean Smart (Elinor St. John), Jovan Adepo (Sidney Palmer), Li Jun Li (Lady Fay Zhu), P.J. Byrne (Max), Lukas Haas (George Munn), Olivia Hamilton (Ruth Adler), Max Minghella (Irving Thalberg), Rory Scovel (The Count), Katherine Waterson (Estelle Conrad), Tobey Maguire (James McKay), Flea (Bob Levine), Eric Roberts (Robert Roy), Samara Weaving (Constance Moore), Olivia Wilde (Ina Conrad), Spike Jonze (Otto)
Rated: R (for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language)
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