Babylon is The Kind of Wildly Excessive, Self-Indulgent Labor of Love That I Generally Dig But I Actually Hated It!
As someone who is both SIXTEEN YEARS into a column on flops and deep into writing a book about American movies about the film industry, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon was seemingly made for me.
It’s an insanely, even uniquely ambitious movie about American film’s rocky transition from silent to sound that was a SPECTACULAR flop.
Babylon shocked no one by dying an exceedingly public death at the box office but part of what makes it such a unique proposition is that it seems INTENT on failing.
It’s as if Chazelle figured that La La Land was his The Deer Hunter so he figured that the universe owed him a chance to make his own Heaven’s Gate.
I fucking LOVE Heaven’s Gate. That’s just one of the many, many ways that Babylon should resonate with me.
I should love Babylon. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of abrasive orphan I created My World of Flops to both champion and eviscerate. It’s THREE FUCKING HOURS of cinematic excess that delights in disgusting an audience it seems to hate nearly as much as its characters.
Babylon is wildly personal to the extent that it feels like an X-ray of its creator’s soul. As I outline in a blog post that goes up today, when I was a perverted little shit I became fascinated by both the television and book versions of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.
Hungrily devouring the experimental filmmaker’s lurid jaunt through the fetid sewers of rumor and innuendo left an indelible impression on me at a suggestible age. The book’s anecdotes might not have been true but they seemed like they should be true. That was enough for me.
I felt like I was being given a voyeuristic glimpse into the secret sexual history of Hollywood. As its title suggests, Babylon is equally fixated on sin, sex and sensationalism but that is not, unfortunately, enough to redeem it.
Babylon is the kind of widely disparaged mega-flop that invites apologists and defenders rather than fans.
Babylon is excessive. It’s wildly self-indulgent. It’s vulgar. It’s obsessed with the sex, sin and transgression of American film before the dreary dictates of the Hays Code ruined its mojo and made an industry of sinners sexless, saintly and deeply hypocritical. Babylon seems to actively dare audiences to hate it with its misanthropic, foul-mouthed and sexed-up take on Old Hollywood as a Sodom and Gomorrah-like pit of degradation.
Babylon very much seems like the kind of thing that I would love. So why didn’t I love it?
For starters, while Babylon is a very direct reflection of the personality and sensibility of the man who created it I’m not sure if Chazelle’s personality and sensibility are ones that I enjoy or wish to experience on a regular basis.
I dug Whiplash, Chazelle’s breakthrough as a precociously gifted writer-director, which I saw at Sundance, but I absolutely despised his follow-up, 2016’s La La Land to the point that I had no interest in seeing his next film, 2018’s First Man.
And it took seven months for me to finally get around to writing about Babylon for My World of Flops and The Fractured Mirror.
Ten minutes into Babylon I was asking myself why it took me so long to get around to seeing it because it is one hundred percent the kind of thing I not only like but adore.
Twenty minutes in, I knew that Babylon was not for me and that the ensuing TWO HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES would be an endurance test rather than a delight.
Very early in Babylon an elephant is being transported to a wild party and very loudly and extensively defecates all over one of the film’s poor unfortunate souls. That is Chazelle’s way of cheekily broadcasting that what follows will be both elephantine and shitty.
We open at a debauched soiree where Manuel "Manny" Torres (Diego Calva), an immigrant who quickly rises up the Hollywood ladder due to his Irving Thalberg-like genius for problem-solving, is addressing a dilemma involving an elephant.
Thalberg and Manny are responsible, sober adults in a movie world playground otherwise filled with overgrown children like Nellie LaRoy (Margaret Robbie), a New Jersey sexpot who rockets to superstardom on the basis of her charisma and unstoppable sexual magnetism.
Though Chazelle has said that Nellie is based on Clara Bow she seems equally inspired not by Jean Harlow’s real life but rather the way she, or a surrogate, was depicted in the two 1965 biopics that bear her last name and 1966’s The Carpetbaggers.
Like Harlow in those movies, Babylon portrays its female lead as an idiot-savant who could barely read and lurches through life in a feral state, fucking strangers indiscriminately, popping pills and swilling booze yet turns into a perfect movie star the second cameras start rolling.
Like the deplorable 1965 films entitled Harlow, Babylon depicts the sexuality of its female lead as a dangerous, destructive force that threatened to destroy her and anyone who comes into contact with it.
Nelly is not a role so much as it is a sustained insult, to Robbie as well as the memories of Jean Harlow and Clara Bow. Like the Harlows, Babylon doesn’t seem to understand why its stubborn conviction that it’s too bad that the film world wasn’t kinder to a talentless, dim-witted slut who owed everything to her sex appeal might be deeply hypocritical.
Manny and Nelly meet at the party and begin rapid ascents up the Hollywood ladder. Brad Pitt, who costarred with Robbie in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, a movie that resembles Babylon enough to suffer terribly by comparison, stars as macho movie star Jack Conrad, a virile matinee idol who is also an artist and an intellectual.
Incidentally I am impressed and a little horrified that when it came out that Pitt had done some awful and abusive things to his family while drunk his PR people were able to shift the narrative from, “Brad Pitt is an abuser” to “Brad Pitt is extremely handsome.”
Jack represents every macho heartthrob of the silent screen whose career was threatened by the terrifying, exciting introduction of sound while Jovan Adepo is absolutely wasted in the nothing role of Sidney Palmer. He’s a jazz trumpeter on hand solely to look concerned, play the horn and climactically darken up his face for pragmatic reasons. It’s egregious tokenism. Adepo’s entire role could be edited out and it wouldn’t hurt the film in the least
Babylon follows Manny, Nelly, Jack and Sidney as they navigate the choppy waters of early sound film with varying degrees of success and ease.
Late in its third hour Babylon briefly threatens to become interesting with the left-field introduction of a scene-stealing Tobey Maguire as a mob kingpin who seems evil on a biological as well as moral level.
Chazelle seems as obsessed with ugliness as beauty. Babylon is regrettably fixated with defecation of all kinds. In addition to the early explosion of elephant feces Robbie is burdened with a cringe-inducing scene where she shows up some cartoonish so and sos by projectile vomiting all over the guests of a fancy party.
Robbie deserves so much better. She comes close to redeeming a sexist caricature through talent and willpower alone but the movie never stops running out of ways to punish her for being sexual and careless and careless in her sexuality.
Babylon closes in 1952, with a now aged Manny taking in a screening of Singing in the Rain that becomes a wild cinematic solo where Chazelle, that jazziest of auteurs, creates a rhythmic, staccato montage that leaps deliriously into the future.
Chazelle closes by trying to sum up the magic, mystery and wonder of seventy years of cinema history in a mere matter of minutes.
It’s the film in a nutshell. Chazelle is taking huge swings. He’s aspiring nakedly to greatness, to meaning, to historic significance. Chazelle’s love for film as an art form is palpable and infectious.
It’s a bold and audacious way to end the film but it just doesn’t work. I can appreciate what Chazelle was going for but it felt like he was taking one of film’s history’s most unearned and inappropriate victory laps.
Babylon dreams big and aims high. That means that its failure is just as massive.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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