Babylon (2022)
Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) flings herself into heedless 1920s Hollywood in Babylon
Movies about moviemaking always face daunting choices. Do their creators want to express affection for the movie industry (as in Singin’ in the Rain, 1952), feel driven to expose Hollywood’s artistic compromises (as in Mank, 2020) or bitterly gnaw the hand that feeds them (as in Maps to the Stars, 2014)?
Damien Chazelle, Babylon’s writer-director, adopts all three of these stratagems and more. Ultimately, does he love or profoundly mistrust the movie industry? It’s hard to say.
His screenplay opens in 1926, when Hollywood was awash with expendable millions and big stars lived in bacchanalian splendor.
In its opening scenes, an elephant is trucked along a roadway to a gigantic hedonistic bash (be warned: what happens en route will deeply repel you).
Once we get inside a large manse with a party roaring at full blast, we’re shown a spectacle that suggests Rome teetering on the edge.
Nothing in particular is being celebrated. It’s just another night with the wanton, corrupt, lewd folks. Hundreds of them. Writhing to blaring music.
Among the freest spirits is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who’s crashed the party hoping to make her way in this endless blowout that is Hollywood. With no acting, singing or dancing experience, she announces she’s already “a star”.
Also in the house is movie idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who comes to admire Nellie’s moxie, backs her rise, and is soon vindicated. Working within the restraints of the silent era, Nellie quickly figures out how to move lithely, bat her eyes seductively and cry on cue.
As Jack helps Nellie realize her star potential, he also takes in a Mexican immigrant, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), as a go-fer, fixer and eventually a low-level producer.
Nellie and Manny team up to see how they both can survive in the new Hollywood that’s approaching.
Talking pictures are coming in, and Babylon wants to show the ways that sound technology roiled the industry, separating survivors from losers like a scythe.
But how does the wild partying we see figure in how this trio will maneuver through radical technical change?
Jack’s awkward entrance into talking pictures is a flashing danger signal. To his dismay, he’s a flop with audiences (he sneaks into a theater showing his new movie and, in the dark, sees patrons laughing at him onscreen as he butchers his lines).
Superstar Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and henchman Manny (Diego Calva) size up their options in Babylon
He no longer projects the masculine radiance he effortlessly pulled off in silent movies. He longs for the raucous old days, wants the heedless energy of the silents brought into the new sound era.
But talking pictures require nuance in writing and finesse in acting. The freewheeling way silent pictures were made doesn’t hold up when scripts and performance become more intricate and ambiguous.
We get it. Change has come. So why does the movie keep feeding us relentless gross outs?
We see people fight a six-foot-long rattlesnake, who strikes and nearly kills Nellie. And we watch the unlettered Nellie make a degrading spectacle of herself at a party of Hollywood swells, finally flinging food around the room and vomiting on the host.
Is Chazelle saying that this kind of excess was inevitable in nervous early Hollywood? In an interview I saw, he described the riotous Hollywood he’s portraying here with a kind of longing. What have we lost, he seemed to be asking.
I guess he’s sorry that talking pictures of the ’30s didn’t bring along more impudence and pugnacity from the silents of the ’20s. Diminishing the fact that talkies brought in a coruscating wit that the silents usually didn’t have the means to show.
But in recreating ’20s freeform moviemaking, he doesn’t show us much more than luxury, abandon and funny, ingenious, seat-of-the-pants filming techniques.
We understand that early movies gave us glorious art along with all the cavorting, and Chazelle’s depiction of those knockabout formative days makes a useful history lesson.
But nothing more. Which is why in a lengthy closing montage he chooses a few clips from great movies of the past, then resorts to repeating shots from his own movie, the one we’ve just seen.
He seems to hope that his brashness, which I’m afraid he mistakes for courage, will make us hanker for an earlier time when the industry was less programmed, more intuitive.
You wonder: Was that way of making movies inherently better than the way they’re made today?
When we look at movies of the ’20s and ’30s they have both charms and peculiarities, undeniable beauty and force along with some sorely outdated attitudes. No problem. Attitudes change.
But what exactly can we glean from the semi-anarchic spirit going on in the background while entertaining and sometimes-great silent pictures were being made?
That’s a fair question. But answering it has little to do with appreciating, for instance, a great silent like Intolerance (1916).
That’s a movie, one of hundreds from the era, that called for artistic daring. It didn’t grow out of wild partying in the industry.
Technically the movie can be marvelous. Chazelle has a sure grasp of the medium. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography has an alluring gloss, and editor Tom Cross cuts with fine, precise rhythm.
Their director encourages them to shock, but they also take care to make visual sense; frantic as the action often gets, you rarely lose your bearings. (Though I can’t absolutely swear to this; there were moments when onsetting vileness made me cover my eyes.)
We neither understand nor envy the gaudy, misspent, exhausting lives we see in Babylon. And how much worthwhile work did this particular gang of hedonists actually turn out? In the movie’s three-hour runtime, we’re never told.
Babylon’s very title is an indictment of what we’re seeing, yet Chazelle wants it to be an incitement. Dare to accept the electricity, the decadence, he seems to be saying. They were essential to getting movies made.
Fortunately, by now we know too much to accept his invitation. Movies like Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and The Long Goodbye (1973) have shown us a Hollywood both bittersweet and duplicitous, powerful and beautiful, but like most human enterprises, never to be taken entirely at face value.
There’s no such nuanced appreciation to be gained from Babylon. You wouldn’t for a moment wish to participate in nearly all of it.
Recapturing the clever devices deployed on ’20s and ’30s movie sets is amusing and enlightening.
But it’s hardly news that lives lived hard and fast tend to end badly.
Technically the movie can be marvelous. Chazelle has a sure grasp of the medium. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography has an alluring gloss, and editor Tom Cross cuts with fine, precise rhythm.
Their director encourages them to shock, but they also take care to make visual sense; frantic as the action often gets, you rarely lose your bearings. (Though I can’t absolutely swear to this; there were moments when onsetting vileness made me cover my eyes.)
Justin Hurwitz’ score throbs and probes and insists relentlessly but aptly. Out of control behavior deserves its moment, Hurwitz clearly believes.
Nellie (Margot Robbie) and Manny (Diego Calva) fighting self-doubts in Babylon
Robbie performs superbly in a sequence where, when sound has just come in, essential dialogue spoken on a soundstage – treacherous new territory – can be ruined by a sneeze.
This deep dive into the craft of movies is instructive and impressive. Making movies has always required discipline, not just audacity.
Pitt as the fading star who’s thrust into a way of working that he can’t accept, makes Jack dour and, by the end, kind of a drag. This onetime life of the party turns morose when, cast in talking pictures, his good looks can’t cover his clumsy line readings.
Jack pines for the old days, but Elinor St. John, a Hollywood columnist played with cool rigor by Jean Smart, explains that he and his kind of moviemaking existed only in a fleeting moment.
Its glimmer may have been captured on celluloid, she tells Jack, but it’s the film stock that will endure, not anyone’s personal desires about what might have been captured on it. We’ve got the movies. We don’t actually need the madness.
Chazelle’s writing in this scene is sharp but still understates its own larger meaning. It’s the people who worked in early movies we should be missing and mourning, not the silent movie medium itself, which is still there for us to appreciate.
Chazelle mashes together the medium and the people, as if industry workers’ phenomenal split-second adroitness and their personal mayhem somehow energized each other.
But how fascinating movies got made in spite of the messiness is the accomplishment Chazelle should be helping us to grasp.
I think that then or now, technique, whether it’s slapped together or meticulously wrought, never by itself binds us emotionally to a movie.
Its technical excellence surely isn’t enough to make me sit through Babylon again.
Without taste, sheer dauntlessness — which Chazelle has to spare — isn’t likely to generate work that lasts.