Damien Chazelle’s post-cinema epic is infatuated with cultural self-destruction.
Although Babylon is set in 1927, it’s really about the moral decline and dysfunction of Millennial Hollywood. What’s wrong is that director-writer Damian Chazelle glorifies this collapse. His notion of “Babylon” is not biblical or political but simply degeneracy — civilization’s decay that was heroically fought against in the ancient Babylonian sequences of D. W. Griffith’s silent-era mega-masterpiece Intolerance. Chazelle embellishes his inside-baseball perspective as if it was arcane insight.
Let’s go Chazelle one better: In 1987, the Taviani Brothers, Italy’s politically committed aesthetes, made their one American film, Good Morning, Babylon, about the immigrant artisans who constructed the elephant sculptures for the famous, enormous sets in Griffith’s vision of pre-Christian civilization. Chazelle’s film is post-Christian, intermixing the godless careers of early Hollywood denizens: jaded film actor Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who can’t put his artistic dream on screen; East Coast party girl Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who hustles her rise to stardom and then fall; and Mexican immigrant Manny Torres (Diego Calva), who moves from the fringes of the industry to become an insider. That’s one story point short of Griffith’s symphonic narrative unless you count the real-life elephant whose bowel movement begins Chazelle’s saga.
None of these characters are excited about a new art form, its sudden wealth or unprecedented popularity. That’s because Chazelle’s conceit is also post-cinema. He doesn’t expect anyone to recall the Tavianis’ cinephilia; instead, he amplifies today’s brutalizing culture by emphasizing orgies, excessive egotism, and career idiocy as essential to Hollywood’s formation.
Babylon rewrites the mythic Hollywood tales already commemorated in Good Morning, Babylon, The Wild Party, Nickelodeon, and The Cat’s Meow to suggest that Hollywood, like America itself, was always corrupt and no good; it’s a 1619 Project conceit.
That’s how Babylon is being sold — and probably why it failed at the box office. (Moviegoers want escape, not penitence.) But Chazelle is inconsistent. An inveterate film buff, he can’t help indulging his moronic fanboy idealization/condemnation of Hollywood high life. His sub-DeMille vision of wickedness is capped by a montage of That’s Entertainment–style clips — projected from Hollywood’s later historical achievements. (No silent-era masterworks.) It emulates Cinema Paradiso, but That’s Entertainment came first, when the studios were auctioning off their inventories in the 1970s. Chazelle turns that Golden Age elegy into a jinx.
PHOTOS: Babylon
Babylon epitomizes contemporary cinema as the least creative moment in cultural history — so unimaginative that Chazelle disrespects his own characters. Each is an impostor, whether pretentious actor-producer Jack (who name-drops “Bauhaus” even though “form does not follow function” in his own overwrought productions); whorish Nellie (who refuses to distinguish manipulation of others from her own self-delusion); or opportunistic Manny (who sells out his fascination with Anglo movies, then sentimentalizes it). These figures are not prototypes of actual early-Hollywood legends; it’s as if a dusty copy of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger’s 1959 book of scandals, fell off a shelf and bopped Chazelle on the head.
To call this three-hour-plus movie “ambitious” ignores that Chazelle lacks Anger’s avant-garde daring, which came partly from his outré filmmaking obsession. Anger was titillated by scandal; Chazelle is moralistic and sentimental. Exhausted, alcoholic Jack says he’s “tired,” then he blows his brains out in a hotel room. Nellie projectile-vomits to shame a gathering of Hollywood snobs. Manny is accosted by a murderous white supremacist who tells him, “Get the f*** out of L.A.! Disappear!” — forced to humiliate himself, he cries, “I’m nobody!” None of this is titillating, just woke.
It gets worse when Chazelle pushes the D.I.E. agenda, using his diversity-inclusion-equity cast to expose America’s rot. Near the end, he adds industry-town parasite James McKay (Tobey Maguire), a pale, baggy-eyed, yellow-toothed ghoul who escorts Manny through L.A.’s bloody illegal-wrestling underbelly (and even more orgies). There hasn’t been an Expressionist red hell on screen since Steve McQueen’s Shame, but Chazelle exaggerates the cultural purgatory we’re living through. Instead of his finale’s undeserved montage of Singin’ in the Rain and other innocent classics, Manny should anticipate trash such as Tár, Decision to Leave, She Said, The Batman, The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, or the January 6 show-trial miniseries — products of our new Babylon.
The film’s intersectional, multiethnic subplots (an Asian lesbian, an aggrieved black) appease white liberal sensitivity, yet Chazelle doesn’t realize that blacks, Asians, and Latinos will instantly see that Manny’s unrequited love for Nellie is doomed, because the gringa is not a silent-era ideal like Lillian Gish or Greta Garbo or Louise Brooks but is clearly nuts. (Plus, Margot Robbie is wearing out her spark; she’s maniacally flirty to no purpose.)
When Chazelle condenses his message, it’s spoken by Jean Smart’s haughty gossip-columnist-posing-as-prophet. She sermonizes to Jack: “Your time today is through, but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” Her “house-fire and cockroach” metaphor for Hollywood’s legacy is the year’s most ludicrous, puerile screenwriting.
This childish moral fable proves that everything in Whiplash and La La Land was, indeed, false. Those clumsy tales revealed Chazelle’s pusillanimous career ambitions. Wunderkind Chazelle seriously needs artistic supervision. Babylon is the first Millennial film so misguided that it seems hell-bent on destroying itself. If this sordid, unsophisticated cynicism shows how Hollywood views its legacy, Hollywood is in trouble.
