“Babylon” is an Exhilarating but Juvenile Rampage

Damien Chazelle tries very hard to pretend that his latest film is not a product of Hollywood’s self-adoration epidemic

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. 

Babylon is the product of an artist who has more money than they know what to do with. Director Damien Chazelle's first widely-distributed feature, Whiplash, which also happens to be his most critically acclaimed and my personal favorite, was created with a budget of only $3 million. Chazelle's work has increasingly received larger budgets since, and in return, he has faced steadily decreasing critical responses. Babylon reflects Chazelle's jazz-infused and adrenaline-pumped cinematic style gone off the deep end. Over three hours of non-stop party scenes, dizzying whip pans, and the migraine-inducing innocuous internal politics of 1920s Hollywood, Babylon is rife with structural and moral issues, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most exhilarating and entertaining watches of the past year. 

The majority of the runtime is occupied by exhausting and sweaty feverishness, underlined by the notion that only the world's most beloved idols have the privilege of embodying euphoric nihilism. A constant barrage of overstimulating maximalism, Babylon is never dull, alternating between juvenile antics and brief glimpses into solemn depths of perverse depravity. During its first acts, Babylon is an all-out celebration and mockery of the absurdity of stardom in an era where the Hollywood celebrity world was first figuring itself out.

Babylon follows three primary protagonists; aspiring director Manny Torres (Diego Calva), who hopes his adjacency to stardom will fulfill his Hollywood dreams; actor Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who is flung into instant celebrity status after her artistic chops are accidentally discovered; and washed-up actor Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who is having trouble grappling with the reality that the world doesn't particularly like him anymore. Their careers intersect, and their individual creative endeavors are punctuated by their frequent partying and incessant feuding. Robbie and Pitt's performances are perfectly acceptable within Babylon's context, but when their characters act in films within the diegesis of the era, they fail to maintain the illusion of the period. However, Calva consistently dominates and is, refreshingly, one of the few actors who extends any empathy to his character. 

Luckily, Babylon is a film that's entertainment value doesn't rely on its performances. The first two hours of the movie are treated with absurdity and clownishness — nothing more than a kaleidoscope of party drugs, emotional outbursts, and eclectic stunts. And Babylon certainly is entertaining. Chazelle's percussive style, underlined by Justin Hurwitz's catchy score, makes the film thoroughly exhilarating and exciting. Unfortunately, the inconsequential enjoyability of Babylon does not last. 

While the absurdly extravagant glamorization of early Hollywood is undoubtedly meant to be taken comically, the film suffers from its glaring historical omissions. 1927's The Jazz Singer, a substantial feature of the plot, is just as famous for its pioneering of sound as it is infamous for its liberal and lighthearted use of blackface. However, Babylon's worship of The Jazz Singer includes no caveats for Al Jolson's minstrelsy, a historical omission that should gnaw at the soul of any audience member familiar with the basics of film history. Films should not be discarded from the canon of historical interest because of components such as blackface, but to blatantly omit any mention of The Jazz Singer's celebration of racism is an intentional artistic choice that should not be overlooked when discussing Babylon.

In fact, the film refrains from discussing racism almost entirely. The only mention of blackface is when Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a Black trumpeter-turned-movie star, is asked to darken his skin to match the complexion of the other Black actors in the scene. Caught in a moral dilemma, Sidney gives in to the director's wishes, and we experience one of the few empathetic moments in the movie — a long close-up on Sidney, overwhelmed with emotion as he hits a crescendo on his trumpet, burnt cork obscuring his face. However, this pause for contemplation is short-lived. Following the scene, Sidney strides off the studio plot, hands in his union card, and returns to playing jazz clubs, divorced from the film industry entirely. His only scene following this poorly-approached reckoning features him playing a brief trumpet solo as a "where they are now" newspaper montage catches us up on every other prominently featured character. It is an odd addition that attempts to be vengeful, poignant, and satisfying but is awkward and feels shoehorned in. All other bigotry in the plot is limited to offhand anti-Latino comments or antisemitic tirades, but Chazelle ignores that discrimination is a substantial and relevant obstacle to Hollywood stardom. 

Chazelle's mentions of bigotry within the film have an odd structural correlation with the ebbs and flows of the film industry. Chazelle's reminiscence of pre-sound Hollywood comes across as resentful of even the earliest strides for diversity in film. The responsibility for the "impurity" of cinema falls solely upon the actions of upwardly mobile minorities. Their successes are framed as complete accidents, and their failures single-handedly mark the downfall of the industry. 

The conclusion of Babylon is a truly torturous aspect of the viewing experience. Despite its clearly outlined and consistent problems, the writing and editing prevent the film from ever being dull. The shock, disgust, and exhilaration make the three-hour runtime a reasonably easy undertaking (despite the poor social commentary), but Babylon's ending is upsettingly out-of-place. As the third act unfolds, Chazelle seems to need to convince us that we just watched a much deeper movie than we actually have. The film concludes with the now-disgraced Manny Torres, forgotten by his own industry, taking a seat at a screening of 1952's Singin' in the Rain. Overwhelmed with emotion as he looks at the flickering technicolor images, Chazelle cuts to a montage of flashing color, character close-ups from Babylon's crucial plot points, and famous shots from cinema past and present. From Ingmar Bergman's Persona to James Cameron's Avatar, Babylon implies that cinema's unfolding history would not be possible without the real-life counterparts of Nellie LaRoy and Jack Conrad and, tangentially, without Chazelle himself. Somehow Babylon masks its true intention until its final act when its ugly display of eye-rolling vanity reveals the film as another mimeograph, a product of Hollywood's addiction to self-congratulation.

OVERALL SCORE: 5/10

Babylon was released on December 23 and is currently in US theaters.