Mark Reviews Movies: BABYLON (2022)

Babylon, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 22, 2022

Movies are the best—illusions of reality that help us escape from actual reality. The making and business of them, on the other hand, are parts of that harsh reality. That's the inherent contradiction of Babylon, writer/director Damien Chazelle's ode to the magic of the movies and elegy for those who have the misfortune to believe so much in that magic that they get into filmmaking.

At its best, Chazelle's epic deals in specificity, whether that be a triptych of montages showing an ordinary—and regularly hectic—day in early Hollywood or a scene detailing the unexpected complications of shooting with synchronized sound. There are individual sequences here that display a sense of barely controlled chaos, real comedic invention, or genuinely unsettling terror. As a whole, though, Chazelle's movie lacks focus or any insight about the power of the movies and the perils of Hollywood that hasn't already been explored countless times.

The bulk of the story spans about five years and revolves around three major players—with a fourth one hovering in the background, waiting for Chazelle to do anything with him. At the center of it all is Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who works as a gofer for a fictional movie studio, circa 1927.

In the opening scene, Manny has to get an elephant to a party at a Bel Air mansion. If the explosion coming out the back end of the beast isn't enough to signal how dirty and nasty this business of show can be behind the scenes, the lengthy bacchanal that follows certainly makes the point over and over again.

A young starlet urinates on a gleefully gracious man—before she overdoses on something or some things or other. The main hall is filled with dancing and all sorts of public sex acts. Manny leads aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) to a back room filled with any drug one could imagine, and star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) gets over another wife leaving him by having sex with a server in an upstairs gallery. The fourth and mostly forgotten figure is a Black trumpet player named Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who just wants to get through another gig so that he can have a next one.

The scene is long and repetitive (since Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren get at the main point with an elaborate camera move that floats and falls through the space to spot all kinds of debauchery), while revealing very little about characters who have little to reveal in the first place. Manny wants to work on set. Nellie wants to be the movie star she knows she could be. Jack wants to stay ahead of the game in order to remain relevant, and Sidney exists as a way for Chazelle to deal with the racism of early Hollywood by, well, mostly evading the actual reality of it.

Yes, this is a trio of rise-and-fall tales, bolstered primarily by the strengths of Robbie's portrayal of energetic self-destruction, Pitt's refined depiction of a slowly crashing star, and Calva's easy charm as a guy who gets exactly what he wishes for—and regrets every moment of it (Adepo is quite good, too, especially considering his character's inclusion in the screenplay feels like an afterthought). The plot itself is more a series of centerpieces than a cohesive narrative, meaning that, while each one possesses isolated momentum, there's little to the overall arc of the story.

Those sequences, though, can be astonishing. Take the one that introduces the main characters getting exactly what they want over the course of a single day of production. While Jack waits to shoot his big scene (showing an acumen for negotiating and predicting future movies he surely won't live see), Manny witnesses the bedlam and bloody carnage of a production prior to even the thought of on-set safety regulations (He has to wrangle a mass of drug addicts to sacrifice their bodies and lives for art). Simultaneously, Nellie proves her charisma and talent on one makeshift set among dozens, crying and even producing a single tear on cue. The whole thing bursts with energy, humor, and the irony of so much disaster resulting in maybe one moment of on-screen enchantment.

Anyway, the era of the silent picture comes to a close here (Keen audience members will at least sense Chazelle's ultimate punch line with the outline of the story and some specific moments), resulting in the movie's most inspired scene, as Nellie's enthusiasm and a crew's spirits are crushed by take after take with microphone-based mishaps. Her addictive personality leads her to increasing gambling debts, and as Manny becomes a bigshot at the studio, Jack's fortunes fall as he, like so many others, becomes a relic from just a couple years ago.

All of this proceeds in mostly predictable ways, apart from a trip into a hell of cage matches and geek-show disgust (The casting of the tour guide is amusingly against-type). That includes the movie's ambitious but manipulative misstep of a finale, which tries to be both cynical about how Hollywood eats its own in order to regurgitate the mess and affectionate about the results. Babylon ends with tears, because all of this ended, and a forced smile, because it happened, and such a clichéd sentiment is at least consistent with the rest of the movie's central ideas.

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