Babylon review: Damien Chazelle’s masterful Hollywood odyssey depicts the silent era like you’ve never seen it
Shimmering, mournful, and riotous, Babylon is one of the year's best movies, thanks in part to a star-making performance by Diego Calva
Film Reviews Damien Chazelle
It’s the late 1920s at the start of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s shimmering and breathtaking old Hollywood odyssey Babylon, and the desert-like soils on the screen look nothing like today’s pricey L.A. enclave Bel Air. And yet, that’s what the masterful tragicomedy’s title card says about the remote reserve, which is eerily quiet until a truck cuts through the silence. There is a high-profile party somewhere thrown by Tinseltown mogul Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin). And to his shock, the driver needs to transport an elephant there, as insisted by a wide-eyed and ambitious fixer looking for his big break in the business.
Among the most fiercely talented filmmakers working today, Chazelle wastes no time rowdily hinting in this early scene that the Hollywood machine has always, well, crapped on the hardworking people that keep it running. But the aforesaid fixer Manny (Diego Calva, in a soul-stirring and star-making performance), a Mexican immigrant as obsessive in his pursuits as any of Chazelle’s former protagonists, can’t smell its relentless stink yet. In fact, he has no clue that the dreamy engine he worships is about to swallow him whole and spit him out.
Manny is our white rabbit as he leads the way (and the poor elephant) to perhaps one of the craziest and most kaleidoscopic parties ever put on the screen, one that immediately summons countless references from near-term cinema alone: from mazy Boogie Nights bashes (with far more indulgence), to Gaspar Noé’s Climax, to, chiefly, Martin Scorsese’s coke-fueled sequences. With an electric score by Justin Hurwitz (that occasionally resembles the chords in Chazelle’s La La Land too audibly), it’s all pure, eye-gouging debauchery for 30 or so minutes. Before the suggestive title Babylon appears, there will be plenty of orgies, mountains of drugs, sexual fetishes, naughty performance bits, projectile vomiting, and more sweaty bare bodies than one can count.
But even amid such normalized madness where one can barely notice the elephant in the room, you can’t ignore the aspiring starlet Nellie LaRoy—loosely inspired by silent-era star Clara Bow—played by a hypnotically vigorous Margot Robbie. Knowing that she is born a star, the hard-drinking and coke-snorting “wild child” from humble beginnings and a dysfunctional family manages to sneak into the fete. And predictably, it doesn’t take long for her to grab the attention of the right sort on her way up the ladder and become the selfless Manny’s passionate object of affection.
All this culminates into a darkly funny and dizzying sequence written and choreographed (like the rest of the picture) through meticulous long takes by Chazelle, a filmmaker with a knack for fluid narrative and visual coherence. And the segment’s breathless aftereffect isn’t just a pointless how-did-they-pull-this-off realization designed to merely wow with empty calories. This extensive intro—one of the year’s most impressive feats of filmmaking—feels as exhausting as Chazelle clearly intended it to be, serving as a denunciation of a town overflowing with unnamed skeletons concealed by the shadow of those who managed to claim the spotlight. Indeed, for every anonymous starlet who tragically ODs in some backroom, there is a bona fide movie star like Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who routinely changes life partners and takes his position of power for granted in an industry on the cusp of The Jazz Singer and the talkies that might have no room for him.
Pitt’s Conrad is meant to somewhat resemble silent-era leading men such as John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino. But unable to deliver the diction that talkies demand, he equally brings to mind a character from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood; not the stuntman he played, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s aging Western actor with an immense fear of the new wave that’s leaving him behind. While Conrad claims he’s pro-progress, the talkies sadly take a toll on the career of the aging star. In a merciless monologue, the great Jean Smart’s columnist Elinor St. John—call her an amalgamation of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and All About Eve’s Addison DeWitt—tells him as she sees it: the party is over, in the identical way it will one day be over for every A-lister that would come after him.
That same party also comes to a shattering halt for the jack-of-all-trades talent Lady Fay Zhu (a mesmerizing Li Jun Li), a sexually liberated chanteuse (the hilarious song “My Girl’s Pussy” that she sings is a very much real ballad of the era) who writes title cards for silent pictures and milks the town’s orientalist fetishes to make ends meet. The last of the main characters is trumpet master Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who graduates from playing for parties and creating mood music for silent films to actually performing on the screen once sound becomes the star that changes everything. One of the film’s most heart-shattering scenes is one that pits Sidney and Manny against each other, with the legitimacy-hungry latter using the former in an act that highlights the era’s bone-deep racism.
Babylon mostly operates in a structure of set pieces, thoroughly earning its not-a-minute-too-long runtime—a whopping 189 minutes—and it’s packed to the gills with stunning craftsmanship. From Linus Sandgren’s effortless camera that captures every insane intricacy in long, snaky takes on 35mm, to Mary Zophres’ dazzling Roaring ’20s wardrobe that takes minor yet studious liberties with the period’s clothing, all elements of Babylon ground the era in an accurate world that would aptly feel progressive to those who lived in it. In that regard, Babylon isn’t overwhelmed by cookie-cutter drop-waists and cliched finger waves; but unruly styles with a refreshingly forward-looking attitude.
The set pieces themselves grab your attention immediately and maintain it thanks to Chazelle’s character-focused proficiency on the page and his apparent love of Old Hollywood (as well as, needless to say, Singin’ In The Rain). His deliciously decadent Babylon has disorderly film sets owned by MGM as well the more ramshackle (and fictional) Kinoscope Studios. With these simultaneously unfolding productions (edited snappily in parallel by Tom Cross) there is always a problem. Nighttime snake fights. David Lynch-ian psychedelia that plunges the viewer deep into the bowels of L.A. (featuring an unforgettable Tobey Maguire). And one especially memorable segment when the Kinoscope crew tries to film a single scene with sound. You lose count of the unsuccessful takes, feel the studio’s overwhelming heat (they can’t run air due to sound quality) and wonder how anyone survived this transition. As fictional director Ruth Adler, Olivia Hamilton particularly leaves a strong impression through these repetitive takes, representing the era’s behind-the-camera female talent—a more common occurrence those days than most think—with casual authority.
But the heart and soul of Chazelle’s jazzy and freewheeling opus are Manny and Nelly, who each experience their own rise and fall through hearty plotting that the writer braids compassionately. In the end, this is Manny’s all-consuming love story: he can neither give up on the self-destructive Nelly, even when she chips away at his life and career with one poor decision after the next, nor the Hollywood apparatus that’s a drug to him.
Always a flirter with longing and nostalgia if the melancholic La La Land, the mournful yet proud First Man, and the uncompromising Whiplash are any indication, Chazelle gets at something so deep throughout Babylon about movie love. To movie-lovers around the world—audiences and creators alike—the biggest and most important thing in the universe is whatever’s on the silver screen and however far it reaches. And his observation feels especially weighty at a time Hollywood is going through another irreversible transition, with theatrical movies like Babylon sadly taking a backseat to streaming trends that shrink the size of any star.
Still, this is perhaps Chazelle’s most clear-headed and least nostalgic film, being about the ephemeral and destructive side of an overwhelming obsession. Though he can’t help but wink at the fruits of that fixation either. In that, Babylon is often subtly and sneakily self-referential, highlighting how life often imitates art, as cinema is conceived from the truths of life itself with the power of moving one into savage tears. It’s beautiful stuff.
70 Comments
This movie looks dope! My only concern is that there doesn’t appear to be any SPR3 on the soundtrack!
“My Girl’s Pussy”OBLIGATORY:
I’ve been trying to figure out if this is based on the discredited book “Hollywood Babylon” but no review so far has mentioned it.
Pretty sure it’s an intentional allusion to the book, but insofar as the book is a series of retellings of real Hollywood scandals spanning the early silent era to the 1960s, it can’t be based on it in any meaningful way. “Inspired by” seems more likely.
cookie-cutter drop-waists and cliched finger waves
Huh?
Chazelle gets something so skin-deep […] And his observation feels especially weightySkin isn’t that deep, that’s the point of the phrase.
Drop-waists and finger waves are two styles —fashion/clothing and hair, respectively— that were common in the 20s and are often depicted in cliched terms in period movies. This film takes studious liberties with them.
“Always a flirter with longing and nostalgia if the melancholic La La Land, the mournful yet proud First Man, and the uncompromising Whiplash are any indication, Chazelle gets something so skin-deep throughout Babylon about movie love.”Something’s missing here, right?
A comma after “nostalgia” would make it a little clearer.
“Always a flirter with longing and nostalgia if the melancholic La La Land, the mournful yet proud First Man, and the uncompromising Whiplash are any indication, Chazelle gets something so skin-deep throughout Babylon about movie love.”
I mean, it would be nice if the first half of the sentence connected in any coherent way with the second. And skin-deep means superficial, so that doesn’t help things. Bone-deep would have been a better choice.
Wow this and the Jezebel review couldn’t be more different
I’ve only see the trailer (before every single movie for the last three months) but it gives me what the Jezebel review says more than what the AVClub says.
(before every single movie for the last three months)The trailers for this and Amsterdam have been stalking me at every turn.
That review sounds pretty spot-on. The question is whether this kind of movie excess is your thing.
Oddly, while Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge was so “busy” in every way imaginable I was never able to enjoy it, I do feel kind of eager to see this one.
Jezebel doesn’t like any film where lesbians don’t scissor each other.And I’m totally inclined to agree with them. *high five*
This writer also fawned over Avatar: The Way of Water earlier this week in a piece that was so over-the-top it was almost unbelievable. At the time I thought it might just have been AV Club’s fixation on crowning Avatar the Movie Event of the Millennium, but then this review came along. It’s the same tortured prose and excessive praise, wrapped up in a writing style that is really, really hard to navigate. Why so many parentheticals, which take the reader out of the sentence? Why so many paired and tripled adjectives when one good adjective will do? Why so many adverb-adjective combos, which tend to make writing sound stilted or insincere?*Maybe this reads fine to others, but I found both this review and the review of Avatar to be very hard to read. And I read academic journal articles, which contain some of the most inscrutable writing imaginable, for my day job. Laffly’s style makes her writing difficult for me to navigate. Juzwiak’s writing style and analysis are both more cogent. These two reviews are actually great examples of how writing style can affect the author’s ethos: Juzwiak’s style projects objectivity whereas Laffly’s comes off as uncritical because it’s so fawning.*Seriously, so many adverb adjective combinations: eerily quiet, fiercely talented, hypnotically vigorous (what does that even mean?), darkly funny, especially memorable, refreshingly forward-looking, deliciously decadent, especially weighty, and subtly and sneakily self-referential.
“And I read academic journals,” said the asshole with his pinky in the air.Might I suggest that if you don’t like this writer’s style you read someone else, rather than purport to critique his writing through your pince nez? Or maybe stick to your precious academic journals?
I can’t help but notice that his last bunch of reviews have basically been A, A, B+, A. If the films are genuinely great, that’s wonderful, but it’s a bit hard for me to believe that all of Hollywood is suddenly on a hot streak. I miss Ignatiy and his more discerning taste.
I believe Tomris Laffly is a woman, but besides that, I generally agree with what you’ve said.
“Why so many paired and tripled adjectives when one good adjective will do? Why so many adverb-adjective combos, which tend to make writing sound stilted or insincere?”I accept that many people associate this maximalist style with “good” writing, but I keep imagining how my high school creative writing teacher would react to this. “Trim the fat!” “Let nouns and verbs do the work!” “Never use three words when one will do! Never use three syllables when one will do!” He used to give us adverb quotas and mark us down half a grade every time we exceeded them.
Lots of people think good writing “sounds” like this, but I tell my students that good writing—academic or otherwise—should sound like you, just a polished version of you. Limit unnecessary intensifiers and fill your writing with strong verbs, and that will boost the readability and style of almost any essay.
Those darned parts of speech: they definitely need to be counted on just one hand. 😀 😀
Did he say “Show— don’t tell” amongst those other academic clichés? 😀 😀 Sounds like a real winner… 😀 😀
My HS English teacher said there are two things to avoid when writing: diarrhea of the pen and constipation of the mind.
You feel movie reviews should “project objectivity”? Wow, Prof. 😀 :DAlso, as eagle-eyed editors will note, Juzwiak (whom I like too sometimes) uses phrases like “quasi-socially aware, and unabashedly trashy,” drops at least one rhyming sentence (🙄), and feels the need to use the adverb “literally”…
I wouldn’t be shocked if at some point soon they reveal that every movie review on this site since April has been written by an AI.
I’d say Robbie’s performance was more vigorously hypnotic than hypnotically vigorous.
Your comment was judiciously apropos in the sense that a Neanderthal crustacean would find it exasperatingly obtuse if said during an aventure sexuelle on a Tuesday afternoon in February.
The Jezebel review was so snarky toward Margot Robbie’s performance (I adore her), I was happy to see a change of tone over here. I can’t imagine she performed as poorly as they indicated, regardless how the rest of the movie shakes out.
The early word has been extremely split – 50% of reactions were BEST MOVIE EVER and 50% of reactions were WORST MOVIE EVER. So I would expect a lot of that.
Reading the review here, I thought maybe this is something I should try to catch in the theater. Then, I watched the trailer… eh, maybe not, but I’m not sure.Subsequently reading the Jezebel review, I can confirm I will pass on this one.
This review is a horribly overwritten mess of what someone thinks a fancy movie review should be written as.
I mean it seems kind of obvious Jezebel would hate this film. Nothing wrong with that perspective but I’d rather go in giving it a chance. I love his other movies.
I distinctly remember the slow realization that for as well as La La Land was constructed, Chazelle had absolutely nothing to actually say with it. So this doesn’t have me very excited.
Yeah, I was kinda hoping we were over Chazelle. Or at least over gushing over him.
Why do movies have to “say” something? Isn’t it enough to be a well constructed, entertaining way to spend 2 hours and then you can dispose of it afterwards?
I think there’s a place for that, for sure, in the landscape of Hollywood. If anything, we’ve got a glut of disposable entertainment. Godzilla vs. Kong fits that bill, for example. A lot of comedies are entertaining but also the cinematic equivalent of empty calories. People still go see them and enjoy themselves. I think what people like the original commenter are objecting to is the way that a lot of films and filmmakers get crowned as “important” because they have the veneer of depth, but when you look under the hood they are pretty shallow. Lots of people raved about La La Land like it was an instant classic, but when you look deeper than the shiny production values and zippy musical numbers, the actual story and its thematic development was pretty insubstantial.
You’ve described like every classical musical ever made. There isn’t a single Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire movie that has a substantial story, not one. Which isn’t to say Gosling or Stone are the Ginger and Fred of the ‘10s, but I really don’t remember anyone calling it *important*, but there was a lot of buzz around it because it was a big studio movie that studios didn’t put out anymore, which is true, and that helped it get more attention than it otherwise would have, I guess, but if you were going into La La Land for substantial themes and a great story, that’s your own messed up expectations.
Singing in the Rain has a pretty profound message about post-war existence in America, and I’d argue a lot of Judy Garland’s musicals resonate today because they have very beautiful messages around holding on and having hope.I’d say they are the ones we remember not just for the cinematic experience, but for the message they carry, and I don’t think it’s an unfair expectation to hope that for a musical as big as La La Land.
The themes are there in La La Land if you want to see them and grab on to them. And if they don’t resonate, you’ve still got the spectacular musical numbers. I just don’t get the need people have for everything to say something important.
When something is heralded as the best movie of the year… call me crazy, but I expect more than technical proficiency.
Sure, but once you get over three hours a little more substance would be nice.
There is nothing wrong with that.There’s also nothing special about it, which is why it shouldn’t be considered special.
I loved Whiplash and hated, hated, hated La La Land, so maybe I’ll think this one’s just ok.
All I know is I’m reeeaally fucking tired of seeing the trailer for this thing
I haven’t seen any. However, I did see plenty for Strange World while many people were saying the opposite. Weird.
I’m definitely one of the people that’s seen zero advertising for Strange World.
This comment comes up for literally any major movie on here.
Can I request that all future movie reviews include when the movie opens in theaters or where and when it will begin streaming? I know I can look it up myself but it would be nice to have that in the summary box with the grade and cast.
For who? This is the internet, it’s international – while it’s in theatres on the 23rd in the USA, it’s not playing in my country until weeks later.
Boy, I hope when my feature gets made, Tomris Laffly reviews it.
Does Fatty Arbuckle violate a woman a a Coke bottle?
Nobody thinks about the Coke bottle….
this looks SO BAD from the trailers but the AV Club reviewer thinks it’s good?? I’m so torn
Sounds like an indulgent, overstuffed mess. Except the mess seems to be purposeful and so does the indulgence. So, yeah. Let’s go. I bet it’s a fun time at the movies.Which, for all the hate it gets, so was La La Land. Chazelle’s not a guy you go to for repeat viewings, but he knows how to really sell that first time.
Sounds like an indulgent, overstuffed messIn fairness, that might just be the review itself being indulgent and overstuffed. And mostly incomprehensible.
189 minutes?! Sounds like he was dragging.
Not quite my tempo.
Over 3 hours?No. I can’t.
I may know less about this movie after reading this review than I knew before.
Damn, Chazelle really wants that Oscar, huh?
Half of his movies have been about Hollywood a subject The Academy creams themselves over.
We are now too far removed from this era to really depict it accurately. It is no longer actively in the cultural memory. *adjusts monocle*
By all accounts, Singin’ in the Rain (made just 25 years after the dawn of sound movies) also didn’t depict the era accurately.
Oh, indeed? *monocle shatters*
There are too many things named “Babylon”.
Please tell me Tobey Maguire is Fatty Arbuckle.
Just watched this last night. It’s a bigger version of Boogie Nights. Whereas at the end of Boogie Nights you’re kind of like “Whoa, what did I just see?” plus the “tee hee” of Porn. This one is more like (thanks to both “Boogie Nights” and “Casino” and others … Altman films) “Whoa … I know what I just saw” plus a large spoonful of “Hey everybody, the magic of cinema – amirite?” It’s kind of a more brutal companion to “The Fablemans” or a brutal prequel to “La La Land.”The movie’s achievement is that it makes it onto the same shelf with “Boogie Nights” and “Casino,” holds it’s own, and even though it has it’s eyes trained one shelf higher on Kubrick and “Singin in the Rain,” it let’s you know that it has its eyes on the higher-ups and it wants to be there, and even though it doesn’t quite get there, you’re pulling for it. And it knows you know, and is meta about it… and if you don’t mind the meta-ness, it goes down easy enough.So, brutal, but it still goes down pretty easy.
Did we watch the same movie? It was bloated, took cheap shots, had dialogue probably written by an AI and was an assault on the senses for no reason but striving for meaning or shock value i guess? This is the only movie I have really really disliked in a long time.
I’m late to this, but it was great to read a unanimously positive review, because I honestly found the film pretty much perfect as well. Some of the criticisms have confused me, in all honesty. I didn’t think anything would top Everything, Everywhere All At Once, but Babylon’s my personal #1 for 2022 (even if I didn’t get to see it until 2023).