Babylon is bigger and it is more boisterous, a three-hour version of Hail, Caesar! by way of Quentin Tarantino, which begins with a pachyderm’s diarrhea and concludes with a long montage that serves as – unsurprisingly, given his past work – Chazelle’s big love letter to the movies. For my money, it’s a grand success until that finale, which overinflates the point made by La La Land in a movie that is already perilously extravagant.
Babylon is a sprawling film epic in the tradition of, say, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, featuring a bevy of characters bumping into each other on the way up the showbiz ladder: aspirant and ingenue Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), whose dreams of stardom occlude the perils along her way; silent star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who speaks bad Italian while proposing marriage to a different woman every other scene; accidental stagehand Manny Torres (Diego Calva); jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo); and gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who sees all and writes even more.
I knew just from the runtime that the decadence of Babylon was going to be the point, that its sheer exorbitance would likely be a comment in itself. La La Land was a tight two hours, but it seems that three-hour runtimes are becoming the way of the future; James Cameron needed the full three to give us the next Avatar film, while Wakanda Forever landed only twenty minutes shy. After the aforementioned elephant sequence, Chazelle stages an exorbitant party sequence that would make Baz Luhrmann blush with envy. It’s The Great Gatsby times a million, and how our protagonists react to and inhabit it will set the course for the next two hours and change.
Chazelle is a confident filmmaker, and the vast majority of the film is leisurely world-building, episodic sequences that explore the consequences of Hollywood’s meteoric rise. In some such episodes, our protagonists are asked to make moral sacrifices in exchange for fortune and glory; in others, they voluntarily sacrifice their dignity or their physical well-being for a shot at the big time. To sustain this episodic structure, a storyteller must be supremely confident and adept in ferrying the audience along, and Chazelle is certainly that, but he’s helped ably by a terrific cast.
As Nellie LaRoy, Robbie is electrifying. I’m not sure if her performance is sufficiently different from, say, her Harley Quinn to land her an Oscar, though the idea is being bandied about; she’s certainly manic and magnetic, like a dark Judy Holliday. Her chemistry with Diego Calva’s Manny is supposed to be star-crossed, but I sense that only Manny feels that way, and that’s precisely the point. This is a far cry from Mia and Sebastian of La La Land, perhaps because Babylon is largely more cynical. Meanwhile, Pitt’s terrific, as he always is, though one may be wondering why Jean Smart was given a role as toothless as Elinor until the third act, when Smart – in her role as scribe, prophet, and gatekeeper – gets an incisive monologue that could very well crop up in an awards season sizzle reel. Indeed, Elinor’s big speech makes a better summation of the film than Chazelle’s ending proper, which leads me to my conflicted feelings about the film’s ending.
I was deliberately not looking at my watch throughout the film but felt it must surely be on its way toward denouement when Chazelle began to stage his final episode before the film’s coda. Nothing I had seen so far prepared me for a terrifying performance from Tobey Maguire as mobster James McKay. In the film’s final act, Chazelle ratchets up the tension until the film descends into its own version of Dante’s Inferno – itself a perfect inversion of Babylon’s opener – with the ghastly Maguire as Virgil, our sunken-eyed guide into the underbelly of Los Angeles. From there, the film wraps up by telling us who will and won’t change, just in time for an epilogue that puts a button on the story.
It’s almost as though Chazelle is in a rush to conclude the movie in time for his final sequence, which feels less like a satisfying and integrated climax and more like the final moments of Walt Disney World’s The Great Movie Ride. Without spoiling, Chazelle’s grand point had always been clear, and the extended conclusion feels like a less successful version of La La Land’s ending – which worked precisely because it was rooted in the characters. Here, though, Chazelle is making a broader point about the filmmaking industry, and when he acknowledges, for example, Singin’ in the Rain, he tips his hand, gilding the lily and unfortunately suggesting that Babylon has just been an R-rated remake of the 1952 classic.
Babylon isn’t Singin’ in the Rain, but nor is it La La Land, which I maintain is still Chazelle’s best. If there’s an issue with Babylon, it isn’t that it lacks restraint or focus – its madcap meandering is precisely the point – but if it’s a shaggy dog story, the punchline needs to be a little more substantive and personal than where Chazelle leaves it. I still don’t know if La La Land ends on a happy, sad, or wistful note, but Babylon closes with one foot firmly in treacle, which is a sentiment the movie never fully earns. If the film had ended ten minutes earlier, this might have been a different review, but Babylon trips over its own feet right at the finish line – but what a race up until that point.
Babylon is rated R for “strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.” Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Eric Roberts, Jeff Garlin, and Tobey Maguire.
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