Hollywood History Unravels in ‘Babylon’

Chazelle has an oblique approach to indignity. He wants to eke out sympathy for his lead character, Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican American handyman with big Hollywood dreams, so he opens his film with a sequence about Manny transporting a diaharretic elephant to a fancy Hollywood party, by pushing it up a hill in sisyphean fashion. As an additional metaphor for oncoming industry hurdles, literal elephant shit rains down on…some other character entirely, who just so happens to work alongside Manny. Calva is too handsome, too classically movie-star-like, for Chazelle to really put him through the wringer, a trend that continues for several scenes, when only fatter characters—reduced by the camera to mere background details—are made to feel the movie’s scorn.

The party that evening devolves into a sprawling orgy with mountains of cocaine, but Chazelle’s approach to all things sexual and illicit has a conservative, prudish quality. The film’s depiction of BDSM veers between cartoonishly evil and oafishly slapstick, but it’s never truly alluring, nor truly repulsive. It’s more of a tween’s blushing idea of sexuality—think Steve Carell describing women’s bodies in The 40-Year-OId Virgin—but the ugliness the movie does land on feels almost inadvertent.

See, the plot kicks off when wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) sneaks into the party, finding herself at the right place at the right time, since the evening’s producer host has found himself in sudden need of an actress the next morning. In a private room above the orgy, a rotund and powerful man who enjoys being urinated on—congratulations to Chazelle for figuring out people have kinks; if only he could stop giggling at the thought—rolls around childishly as he cavorts with a young actress. She then overdoses nearly to the point of death, leaving a risqué Western without its leading lady. This forces Manny and his bosses to stage a comedic cover up presented in farcical fashion, but this incident also bears striking resemblance to the real world case of Virginia Rappe, the bit-player whose death was at the center of a scandal involving actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1921. It’s hard to say what’s worse: that the movie might be drawing from this horrid real-world tragedy to craft a comedic set piece, or that the similarities are accidental, despite the case being well-known. Either way, Chazelle’s perspective on the time period feels careless at best.

(Lady Fay Zhu’s) identity, as someone who isn’t a straight white man in Hollywood, feels strangely incidental, and rarely results in insightful depictions of the era, and how it might be navigated from a different perspective.

The aforementioned party introduces all the important characters, who cross paths here, and then many more times as the next decade unfolds, and Hollywood transitions from silent pictures to musicals and talkies. You have the starry-eyed Manny and the hedonistic Nellie, who have a brief romantic spark, but whose journeys up the Hollywood ladder are connected only incidentally. You have the aging screen star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who enjoys a drink or three, and who chafes against his obsolescence in a changing world—the closest the movie comes to a profound human statement—but whose story is disconnected from Manny and Nellie. You have Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose jazz band plays at the party, but who seems poised for greater success; he also makes it in the industry, but is faced with some very bizarre racial hurdles that feel plucked from Chazelle’s imagination. And finally, you have Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who feels distinctly like two different, irreconcilable characters smashed together: she’s both a silent title card artist on the verge of unemployment, and a highly sought-after lesbian burlesque performer, who brings an orientalist flare to the evening’s entertainment. However, like Manny, Nellie and Sidney, her identity, as someone who isn’t a straight white man in Hollywood, feels strangely incidental, and rarely results in insightful depictions of the era, and how it might be navigated from a different perspective.

The party is also where the film’s most important and affecting character is introduced: the earworm music by Justin Hurwitz, which repeats a singular five-note motif in a variety of re-arrangements throughout the 190-minute runtime (it’s upbeat, morose, and everything in between). During initial scenes, it provides the bustling momentum that keeps Chazelle’s montage-like approach together; in fact, it’s the only effective artistic glue. Everything else seems poised to work against emotional clarity. Rapid-fire jump cuts pervade practically every moment, whether frenzied frolic or monotonous chats. When Chazelle tries to plunge Babylon into aesthetic chaos, the result is more of an aesthetic sludge, with a wash of dim, brown lighting and color correction homogenizing the vivid costume and production design, until nothing stands out.

But when you place it alongside other films that have taken this approach, Babylon doesn’t feel “coked-out” so much as jittery and over-caffeinated.

On one hand, it makes theoretical sense to craft this particular movie like it’s the product of too much cocaine. But when you place it alongside other films that have taken this approach, Babylon doesn’t feel “coked-out” so much as jittery and over-caffeinated. The first movie that comes to mind is Scorsese’s high-octane The Wolf of Wall Street, which depicts (and embodies) a similar sense of excess over three hours. Babylon feels molded in that same vein, right down to the frenetic push-ins on characters’ faces (not to mention, its cameo from director Spike Jonze). But as the plot wears on, Chazelle’s commitment to making every scene feel just like the frenetic orgy results in over-exposure. Little in this haphazard assemblage can actually be felt, through textures and sensations, since everything is turned up to 11. There’s no fine-tuning or finessing, even while crafting moments meant to overwhelm the senses.

As the story unfolds, Chazelle’s lack of restraint is matched only by his lack of perspective. The industry changes with the advent of sound, as he remakes key elements of Singin’ in the Rain with far less pep. Jack is pushed to the sidelines, but little comes of it. Nellie develops drug and gambling habits. Manny rises through the ranks (at times, he even fails upwards; an odd decision for a character accosted with racial microaggressions at first). Lady Fay is just sort of there, hanging around in the margins of several scenes, as Li’s commanding presence is wasted. Though it’s a mercy compared to what becomes of Sidney, as a man who faces little by way of overt discrimination—until it comes time for Chazelle to depict Manny losing his soul. The result is one of the most head-scratching instances of racism ever put to film, involving a Black performer wearing Blackface; the problem isn’t that this never happened, but rather, that Chazelle glosses over its reasoning, framing it in terms that feel made up on the spot. After that? Sidney all but disappears from the movie, too.

The longer Chazelle’s jaggedly edited sequences go on, the more oppressive they feel, obscuring any real sense of humanity or struggle. It’s all just noise beyond a point, broken up by the occasional close-up of Calva. Chazelle gives him the movie star treatment, but by granting his character nothing meaningful to say, even with his eyes, the film ends up reducing him to just another pretty face. Robbie, though she brings an anarchic energy, is subsumed by a filmmaking approach that treats discordancy as rhythm, and overt depictions of unpleasantness as meaningful in and of themselves (as opposed to their aesthetics invoking displeasure or allure).

The resultant imagery bears so little aesthetic or thematic connection to the preceding film that it feels like a practical joke.

To top it all off, the film devolves into a late-third-act impression of Boogie Nights—Paul Thomas Anderson’s exploration of the L.A. porn industry in the ’70s—albeit without the joyful tension (but with an admittedly effective Tobey Maguire in the strung-out Alfred Molina role). Shortly thereafter, it wraps up with an ending best described as jaw-droppingly silly. Without spoiling much, it’s intended as an audacious tribute to the moving image and its evolution, coupled with a half-baked statement about the meaning that Hollywood extracts from its artisans, for good or for ill. But the resultant imagery bears so little aesthetic or thematic connection to the preceding film that it feels like a practical joke. To do the specific things Chazelle does here with sound and color, in the same year that we lost the great Jean-Luc Godard, is especially an affront, between the closing sequence paying him specific homage, and the film’s indiscriminate use of jump cuts—a technique Godard popularized at the dawn of the French New Wave, as part of a broader challenge to existing conventions.

Babylon, in contrast, is convention after convention strung together sans focus. Given how thoughtlessly Chazelle wields images, and how carelessly he crafts their meaning, it’s hard to read his climactic ode as anything but a reminder that better movies exist.