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Damien Chazelle is obsessed with the punishing pursuit of perfection. Whether it's finding an immaculate tempo, hurtling into space, or making it big in Hollywood, his films feature characters who are willing to endure physical and emotional torture to reach the finish line. If " La La Land " was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck. Multiple sequences in "Babylon" detail how much work goes into two seconds of film, whether it's a field of dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is obtained or the difficult perfection needed when recording sound. Those two excellent scenes remind us that none of this is easy, even if it all looks so much fun.

Is it all worth it? That's the tough question. Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him. "Babylon" is a film of stunning parts—both individual scenes, performances, and tech elements—but it feels like the magic touch that Chazelle needed to pull them together in an honest way eludes him. There's something to be said about a film being so robustly unapologetic, but I felt as manipulated and deluded as the outsiders in this film who are eaten up by the Hollywood machine by the time it was over. One might argue that's intentional—a "feel bad" Hollywood movie is rare—but it's the difference between pulling back a curtain and simply rubbing your face in elephant shit.

And that's how "Babylon" opens, introducing us to Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of the silent film era. He's trying to get an elephant to an insane Hollywood party, the kind of drug- and sex-fueled affair that was only whispered about in the gossip rags of the time. Chazelle uses the orgiastic bacchanal to introduce his players, including an aspiring actress perfectly named Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), who catches Manny's eye just as her star is about to rise. We also meet the suave Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star about to leave his third wife and be struck by the fickle finger of fame as talkies come into the picture and the wheel turns to a new era of stars. There's a jazz trumpet player named Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) and the underwritten role of a cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ). Gossip journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ) writes about it all while recognizable faces like Lukas Haas , Olivia Wilde , Spike Jonze , Jeff Garlin , and even Flea flirt on the edges of the story.

It's an undeniably ace ensemble, led by another fearless turn from Robbie and a star-making one from Calva, but Pitt is the stand-out, conveying a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a star for over 30 years—he's seen legends like Jack Conrad come and go, and he imbues his performance with a relatable melancholy that gives the entire film depth that it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle's ambitious tapestry approach focuses on the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less). Even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be. All of them become power players in their own way—Nellie holds the screen in a way that few actresses other than Robbie could convey convincingly; Sidney's musical talent ascends as sound takes over the silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on a set, and that grants him an increasing number of decisions. There's an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this film is more about the love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also loaded with an overwhelming blend of historical detail and urban legends. Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And, once again, it feels like the filmmaker's commitment elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren's fluid cinematography gives the film a lot of its momentum—his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz's score might be the best of the year, finding recurring themes for its characters that gives the entire piece more of a sense of opera—a connection that fits this story's dark tone and tragic endings. The production design straddles that line between feeling genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from the excellent editor Tom Cross , but that's more a product of Chazelle's occasionally unfocused script than anything in the editing room.

About that script. "Babylon" is a test of whether or not a film can be the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of "Babylon" that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes. A film like "Babylon" can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found it hypocritical when it tries to play the "isn't it all worth it" card that everyone knows is coming in the final scenes. Fans of this film seem to be adoring this finale, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle's career.

There's a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don't get " Singin' in the Rain " if lives aren't destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies, and isn't it great that we got that movie ? That's a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking. If he thinks he's pulling back the curtain on a broken industry, he reveals himself to be a part of that warped system in the end. It's like he doesn't want to seriously consider how his beloved art will destroy its dreamers as long as his raging party keeps going.

Available only in theaters on December 23rd. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

• Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren
• Justin Hurwitz

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‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.

The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.

Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.

There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed .” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.

Babylon Rated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of an actress. She is Margot Robbie, not Robinet.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘babylon’ review: margot robbie and brad pitt get blitzed by damien chazelle’s nonstop explosion of jazz-age excess.

Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li and Jovan Adepo also star in this feverish look at Hollywood’s transition from silents to talkies, as depravity was edged out by moralism.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The opening half-hour here, from the sepia-toned vintage Paramount logo to the delayed appearance of the movie’s title, is such a syncopated concentration of hedonistic revelry — including a thinly veiled blow-by-blow of the Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe scandal — it could virtually have fleshed out a full-length feature. Chazelle mashes up bits of historical Tinseltown lore and real-life inspirations with the kind of lurid detail that filled the pages of Kenneth Anger’s once-banned muck-raking compendium, Hollywood Babylon , and there’s no denying the hyper-kinetic energy of the enterprise.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon. The show-offy flashiness behind one elaborately conceived and choreographed sequence after another becomes an impediment to finding a single character worth caring about.

Manny is working on the household staff of producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) when he meets and is instantly intoxicated by wild child Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) at one of the legendary parties at DW’s mansion in the hills, still surrounded by miles of undeveloped land.

While the already wired Nellie helps herself to the copious amounts of cocaine and other substances provided for guests, the two strangers bond over their dream of being on a movie set. Nelly is a New Jersey transplant with no credits and no representation, but she’s a creature of driven self-invention. “I’m already a star,” she proclaims, and when Robbie crowdsurfs the dancefloor with ecstatic moves that make her seem possessed, you don’t doubt it.

That extended opening is Chazelle at his most flamboyant. DP Linus Sandgren’s cameras weave at a breathless pace among a heaving throng of bodies either dripping in bugle beads, sequins and fancy headdresses or nude to varying degrees and indulging in more uninhibited sex and drugs than your average night at Studio 54. Just in case you miss the message, the entertainment includes a dwarf bouncing on a giant penis-shaped pogo stick that shoots confetti.

The chronicler of all things Hollywood is Photoplay columnist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), based on British novelist Elinor Glynn, with a dash of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. There’s also Black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), inspired by bandleader Curtis Mosby; and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who makes a sultry entrance in a lesbian-chic tuxedo, singing “My Girl’s Pussy,” a pointed homage to queer icon Anna May Wong. But aside from Manny, the people of color in the cast are thinly outlined character sketches.

Chazelle maps the rise and fall of these players in the evolving Hollywood ecosystem as they are chewed up and spat out by the moral decay that eventually was rejected by the American public. That narrative already proved bloated and shrill in John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust . Clearly feeling the urge to cement his status as a visionary, Chazelle pumps it up into something louder, longer, gaudier and more extravagant, but seldom more interesting.

Manny and Nellie achieve their dream of getting on a movie set faster than they imagined. Jack takes a shine to Manny, commandeering him as an assistant, and he swiftly makes himself indispensable during production on a battle scene in a sword-and-sandal epic. A couple of rickety shooting setups away on the Kinoscope lot in the desert, Nellie steps in for the unfortunate starlet who overdosed while cavorting with Fatty Arbuckle — here named “Piggy” — and her exhibitionistic abandon makes her a natural.

Soon Manny is shimmying up the production chain while Nellie is catapulted to stardom before anyone figures out that her partying, gambling and generally trashy behavior might cause problems. The script takes a lazy stab at injecting some poignancy into their connection by showing that both are alone in terms of family, even if Nellie’s opportunistic father (Eric Roberts) turns up to get in on her earnings. But there’s not enough meat on the bones of either character to help them compete with the movie’s hyperactive focus.

The most out-there sequence is a sweaty detour into a criminal underworld so decadent it makes Babylon ’s version of Hollywood seem sanitized. This occurs when selfless Manny, having offered to cover Nellie’s gambling debts, pays a visit to James McKay, a mob boss so seedy he basically exists so that Tobey Maguire can attempt to out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined. McKay leads Manny through an underground maze of freakdom where the gangster can hardly contain his excitement over a rat-eating muscleman. The fact that we’ve seen more imaginative variations on this theme as recently as Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley might make it easier for you to contain yours.

Despite all its meticulous craftsmanship — particularly Florencia Martin’s elaborate production design and eye-catching costumes by Mary Zophres that reference the period with distinct contemporary flourishes, a duality notable also in the women’s hairstyles — much of Babylon feels like overworked pastiche.

Chazelle’s intentions seem serious enough in attempting to shine a light on the non-white and queer people generally given minimal visibility in vintage Tinseltown narratives. But the storylines are so flimsy they seem no more real than the fanciful camp of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood .

Aside from Nellie’s giddy spiral as the free spirit who won’t be tamed, which Robbie plays with unstinting commitment even when the frantic more-is-more of it becomes abrasive, the only story Chazelle really seems to want to tell is Jack’s.

Babylon follows his fortunes from being the highest paid star in Hollywood to getting unceremoniously dumped by Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella) after failing to make the transition to talkies and having his career decline cruelly chronicled in Photoplay . That yields the movie’s best dramatic scene, in which Jack confronts Elinor with guns blazing and the tough-as-nails columnist coolly douses his fire with some hard truths about the ephemeral nature of stardom. Only the movies endure, she tells him, which is not exactly true given that no one gave a thought to film preservation back then. But Pitt and Smart both seize on the rare breathable moment to find welcome dimension in their characters, even if the outcome that follows for Jack is drearily predictable.

A 1952 coda has Manny wandering into a movie theater to see Singin’ in the Rain and that film’s parallels to his experience in the ’30s trigger a magic-of-cinema reverie that dives back into the past and soars into the future. Some folks will eat this up, with Chazelle informing us that great art will always be bigger than the fucked-up, self-absorbed people making it. Or something like that. But it’s hard to imagine the overstuffed yet insubstantial Babylon finding its way into many screen-classic montages.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

Margot Robbie plays an ingénue, Brad Pitt a silent film star and Diego Calva a dreamer in this exuberantly messy look at La La Land's early days — an acid spin on 'Singin' in the Rain.'

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With brash and bawdy “ Babylon ,” director Damien Chazelle blows something between a poisoned kiss and a big fat raspberry at the same town he so swoonily depicted in “La La Land.” Separated by nine decades and nearly an ocean of cynicism, the two Tinseltown-set films seem unlikely to have sprung from the same head; we might never suspect they had, were it not for musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz’s busy, hyper-jazzinated score. Here, Chazelle rewinds the clock to Hollywood’s raucous early days — specifically, the transition from silent filmmaking to talkies, when the industry was still fresh and figuring out what it could be.

Popular on Variety

Chazelle lets us know right out of the gate the kind of picture he has in store when a rented elephant empties its bowels on an unlucky animal wrangler (and, given where the camera is placed, on our heads as well). That outrageous spectacle is instantly topped by a kinky scene in what could be Fatty Arbuckle’s bedroom, as a corpulent silent comic giddily awaits his golden shower. Later that night, the starlet who indulged him will be dead of a drug overdose, forcing a desperate studio fixer (Flea) to tap Mexican employee Manny Torres (Calva) to get creative in disposing of the body. Characters major and minor alike are constantly dying in “Babylon” — no fewer than eight over the course of the film, plus two more name-checked in Variety obits at the end — but the tone is pitched at such a satirical extreme, not a one registers emotionally. Not even you-know-who’s.

Chazelle has essentially orchestrated a loud, vulgar live-action cartoon of a film, and while it’s exhilarating at times to witness the sheer virtuosity of his staging, the performances are all over the place. “Babylon” sorely lacks a point of view. Manny’s the closest thing the movie offers to an audience proxy, starting out as a wide-eyed outsider to the opening fete and working his way up to a studio executive position. But when asked by force-of-nature party crasher Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) why he wants to be in showbiz, the best Manny can muster is “I just want to be part of something bigger, I guess.”

Nearly all the main characters get a why-movies-matter monologue. Nearly all are shabbily written. “All the c—s in Lafayette called me the ugliest mutt in the neighborhood. Well, let them see me now!” Nellie shouts after her dancing at the party gets her discovered. The way she sashays is out of period, but that’s one of Chazelle’s incongruous rules for the movie: He spent 15 years researching the era, tapped production designer Florencia Martin and costume pro Mary Zophres to get every little detail right, then banished anything (like the Charleston) that he thought might take audiences out of the experience. Later, movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt, mugging it up as a John Gilbert-like romantic lead) will question, “The man who puts gasoline in your tank goes to your movies — why? … Because he feels less alone there.”

Witnessing it all is a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who dictates her dispatches from the sidelines. She’s a curious character, an ahead-of-her-time Hedda Hopper, though she’s by far the most eloquent. Her “why they laughed” speech — “It’s those of us in the dark, those who just watch, who survive” — is the best scene in a movie full of far showier set pieces. Elinor will later be hired by the studio as a kind of manners coach for Nellie, which makes no sense, but then, neither does the idea that a scene-stealing bisexual woman named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), loosely inspired by Anna May Wong, serves as a cabaret singer by night but pays her bills painting intertitles.

The middle hour of the film, which finds Jack and Nellie adapting to the advent of sound, owes a huge debt to “Singin’ in the Rain.” Chazelle stacks one big set piece after another — a string-of-pearls structure, with bawdy comedy more than music being the focus of each — then smash-cuts to the next scene, often to a blaring burst of jazz, or else the melancholy plunk of Hurwitz’s broken-player-piano score. You could argue that Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is also one of the film’s main characters, although he gets a far more anemic share of the plot and could have been cut out completely without much changing the film’s chemistry. Whereas all the other principals get overwritten introductions, Sidney makes his entrance onstage, playing his trumpet. Chazelle is obsessed with jazz, so maybe that solo takes the place of a monologue. Or maybe editor Tom Cross is confronted with too many threads.

There are myriad other flamboyant characters in a whirling ensemble that borrows more than is reasonable from other directors. That big opening party, for example, appears to be Chazelle’s way of one-upping “New York, New York,” though it lacks Scorsese’s instinct for privileging character over camera moves. Toward the end, an on-set drug dealer who calls himself “The Count” (Rory Scovel) gets Manny in a fix with a strung-out gangster (Tobey Maguire in a most unsettling cameo) — a rip-off of the Alfred Molina/Wonderland sequence in “Boogie Nights,” until it takes a deranged turn that suggests the “Gimp” scene from “Pulp Fiction.”

In his book “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger spills the secrets of the Golden Age stars. “Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers,” he writes. “The legend overlooks one fact — fear. That ever present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.” Chazelle borrows both his title and that kernel of wisdom from Anger’s trashy tell-all, focusing on an alarming phenomenon from the late 1920s and early ’30s — before anyone dared to label such entertainment “art” — in which so many industry types took their own lives.

Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Marc Platt, Wild Chickens, Organism Pictures production. Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Tobey Maguire, Wyck Godfrey, Helen Estabrook, Adam Siegel.
• Crew: Director, writer: Damien Chazelle. Camera: Linus Sandgren. Editor: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.
• With: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'babylon'.

Bob Mondello

Director Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" is a comically over-the-top look at scandal-ridden 1920s Hollywood. It's a celebration of an art form in turmoil as silent films give way to talkies.

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Babylon is absolute fire — and everyone in it is burning

Whiplash director Damien Chazelle offers a Hollywood opus defined by passion and destruction

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The first widely available film stock in America was made with a nitrate base. Highly flammable and barely stable, this nitrate film — used from the earliest days of filmmaking until the introduction of safer acetate film stock in the 1940s and ’50s — became more dangerous with age if it wasn’t cared for properly: It released flammable gas as it decomposed into goo, then dust. In the final stages of its breakdown, it was capable of spontaneous combustion, setting history ablaze if it got hot enough on a summer day.

Countless films were lost in this way. There were fires in a Fox film vault in 1937, in MGM’s in 1965, in the National Archives in 1978 . In the silent-film era, projection-booth fires were commonplace, as the heat from projectors was often enough to ignite the nitrate film running through them.

As for the nitrate film stock from that era that survives? Much of it has fallen into decay. In Bill Morrison’s 2002 avant-garde film Decasia , scenes from silent-era films are presented in collage in their eroding state, as images that once depicted great emotion or intrigue are overtaken by the rot of time.

And yet the movie stars that once drew people to these films dreamed of immortality.

Immortality is what everyone wants in Babylon , the divisive new film from Damien Chazelle, acclaimed writer-director of Whiplash , La La Land , and First Man . It starts at the top: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the biggest movie star in Hollywood at the peak of the silent-film era, surveying his kingdom with pride, knowing he’s fueling the dreams of the common folk and has built something that will last. Nellie LaRoy ( perennial Harley Quinn Margot Robbie ) has nothing but a self-selected name and the conviction that she deserves to be as big a star as Conrad. And Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a waiter to the rich who dreams of making something that lasts, like a movie.

Babylon follows the fates and fortunes of these three and others around them as they diverge and intersect over the course of years. It starts with an extended party, a raucous bacchanal all three of them attend — Jack as a guest of honor, Manny as the help, and Nellie as a party-crasher. Their story is the same one Hollywood continually tells about itself and the people that sustain it: a story about big dreams and the grand life that might follow for a few people who are crazy enough to believe they might come true.

Across Babylon ’s 188-minute run time, Nellie and Manny see their stocks rise. The former becomes the star she always believed she was, and the latter becomes a studio executive, all through a lot of grit and a bit of right-place, right-time fortune. Meanwhile, change is on the horizon, as the 1927 premiere of The Jazz Singer throws showbiz off its axis, and Jack Conrad’s world begins to fall apart. Then everyone’s world follows, because fame is fickle and fleeting, and no one gets to be on top forever.

This is a song most movie-lovers can sing by heart, and one Chazelle has been singing in some form or another since Whiplash , his breakout film. His stories are about extraordinary people who dare to dream, who drag themselves from the wreckage — literally, in some cases — to realize that dream and be lionized for it, even if it costs them everything else in their lives. In Chazelle’s cinematic vision, art is more vital and beautiful than life itself, and the people who would set themselves ablaze for art, whether in Earth’s orbit or behind a drum kit, are the noblest of souls.

A message like this — pursuing fame is an act of hubris, and artists are transcendent in their foolish vainglory — is highly dependent on its messenger, and Babylon dances on a razor’s edge from its first frame. Yet Chazelle, alongside his longtime editor Tom Cross and composer Justin Hurwitz, are among the most accomplished dance partners making movies right now.

There’s a musicality to Chazelle’s films as he, Hurwitz, and Cross use the visual medium of film with the improvisational vigor of jazz musicians, and Babylon is their showstopper. The cuts are syncopated to get the audience moving. The color palette is bold and brassy, blurring the line between the images on screen and the horns that fuel them. The camera lingers on performers and performances: a showstopping, manic dance from Nellie LaRoy in the film’s opening bash/orgy, a drunken climb up a hill by Jack Conrad, utterly wasted, right before he miraculously pulls himself together to deliver a perfect take. The tightening of Manny’s brow and lips as he assumes the role of an executive, and does whatever it takes to convince the movers and shakers that he belongs in the room with them.

Yet for all of Babylon ’s glorying in art and artists, in Hollywood and dreams, it would all be in vain without a compelling reason why . This is where the film is most volatile. Its title deliberately evokes Hollywood Babylon , Kenneth Anger’s notorious (and largely fabricated) 1959 tell-all about the golden age of Tinseltown, a book that helped cement in the public consciousness the idea that the glitz and glamour of show business came part and parcel with a seedy underbelly of sex, drugs, and violence — often at the cost of women and queer people caught under its sensational gaze, and the tabloids that preceded or followed the book’s publication.

Babylon leans into this sensationalism, first with its title, then with its opening party, an orgy that climaxes with an elephant parading through a mansion in order to distract from the body of a girl who overdosed after a sexual rendezvous. As Nellie’s and Manny’s fortunes rise, staying in the game forces them both to make compromises that chip away at their humanity. Nellie burns bright and hot, turning to drugs and gambling. Others, like the burlesque singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), lose their livelihoods to her wanton appetites. Manny’s naked ambition causes him to treat other marginalized people as stepping stones, going as far as to ask Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) to perform in blackface in order to appease markets in the South, keep a shoot on schedule, and save his bosses’ money.

The beautiful collision between Nellie and Manny at the start of Babylon signals the start of their respective rises. As the film builds toward its conclusion, it tangles them together again in freefall. Their rapid descent reaches its nadir as Manny embarks on a trip to Hollywood’s version of hell, hosted by loan shark and lurid thrillseeker James McKay (Tobey Maguire, one of Babylon ’s producers, playing wonderfully against type). In his hands, the salacious orgy of the film’s opening meets its horrific opposite.

Babylon is long enough that it can cause viewers to wonder — multiple times! — whether sensationalism and navel-gazing are the film’s only tricks. The movie echoes the sensational shock and awe of the star machine, inviting the audience to marvel and recoil at the wonder and horror it has wrought. But Chazelle is deft enough to suggest, more than once, that he’s playing at something deeper and more challenging.

In the broadest reading, Babylon is a profane paean to film as a uniquely communal medium, gathering the collective hopes and dreams of everyone who experiences them. The film celebrates cinema as the ultimate end goal, a worthy reason for these messy, broken people to immolate themselves in the act of creation. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jack Conrad confronts entertainment journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) over a negative profile she wrote. In response, Elinor tells him the truth of things: Neither of them matter. The movies do. There will be other stars and other journalists, but they are all in the service of what the beam of light projects on the silver screen.

This story, however, has been told. We’ve seen it in bona fide classics like Singin’ in the Rain , and in more recent works like the 2011 Best Picture winner The Artist . Both those films are concerned with similar ideas, and set in the exact same era. Chazelle has even already delivered a loving homage to Hollywood in La La Land , his musical about an aspiring actress who sings about the fools who dream. Babylon , in all of its sound and fury, is redundant. And then Chazelle makes one final audacious pivot: He acknowledges this in the text.

In an astonishing finale, Babylon marries bombast and tragedy in one fell swoop, embracing Chazelle’s hubris as an artist by letting him insert himself into the cinematic canon, while he’s endeavoring to earn his place there at the same time. In its final moments, he isn’t content to just tell another story about the rarefied few who dreamed, and built an empire where countless others could dream along with them. Instead, he weeps over what was destroyed to keep that dream alive, and what’s been forgotten so others can hope to be remembered.

Babylon ’s most significant moments don’t come during the big events in Nellie, Jack, or Manny’s stories. They’re the quieter scenes, tracking what happens in the wake of their flaming parabolic arcs. They’re about the people who are forced out of the business or choose to walk away — the queer people forced into hiding to bolster studios’ public image, the marginalized forced to bear indignities so white actors can chase immortality.

This is the Babylon of the film’s title: The burnished image left behind after the people who built it are gone. It is easy to get caught up in the magic of movies and only see Jack Conrad, or Damien Chazelle — and if that’s all you see in Babylon , revulsion may come naturally. But Babylon is also concerned with what happens in the periphery of Hollywood’s white heroes. Chazelle shoots his stars with a lens wide enough that it’s not hard to see who lingers in the periphery, and the parts they have to play. Keep an eye on those people as they come and go, and Babylon becomes a cacophonous dirge for them, weeping for their anonymity in all the beauty that came at their expense. Their nitrate went up in flames and left us with lovely little lies of living forever.

Babylon premieres in theaters on Dec. 23.

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Babylon Reviews

Ultimately a condemnation of the Hollywood machine that crushes everyone with equitable cruelty and an ode to the innovative artistry and ineffable magic of the movies, whose siren call continues to lure audiences & filmmakers alike towards its warm glow.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Babylon isn't all bust, or even unwatchable, it is just overlong, overindulgent with nary a care...

Full Review | Jan 25, 2024

Babylon is provocative, but, at the same time, it highlights what almost serves as a thematic watermark in Chazelle's filmography: choosing success often means choosing suffering or torture. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Unsure if my brain will ever fully heal from what Chazelle goes-for-broke with in the extended finale, but one thing is certain: audiences may very well never see anything like it ever again. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to the viewer...

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 30, 2023

Babylon is built on the idea that the primary goal of the film world is to make the viewer feel something even if it is disgust and pity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 8, 2023

All-embracing, all-consuming, and yet wholly intimate, Chazelle’s masterful epic is not only an ode to where film came from but where it will further journey to continue capturing our hearts, minds, and souls.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

An eyeball-searing trip into a version of writer-director Chazelle’s Hollywood.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2023

Babylon’ goes big and refuses to be ignored, even if a much better, much shorter movie exists somewhere inside the messy sprawl.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Movie lovers will take to "Babylon" with a great deal of admiration, while others might struggle to notice how much it resonates within the film industry as part of historical importance.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Damien Chazelle’s Love Letter to Hollywood, Movies, Filmmaking, & its stars. A beautiful, hilarious, insane, ride through the debauchery of Hollywood & the stunning aspects of making a film. Wolf of Wall Street meets Hollywood. I LOVED it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

Chazelle cracks the fantasy facade of the film by breaking down the moving images into a collection of frames and solid colors that make us question how we actually perceive the screen.

Babylon is pure excess, to its own detriment. Chazelle became so lost in frolicking in the playground of the 1920s Hollywood he’s created that he forgot to tie it all together into something meaningful.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Babylon is a visual feast full of committed performances, charting years of the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age with all involved clearly having a riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Chazelle frames it as a tragicomic exercise that underscores power dynamics and the filmmaking process in a golden age of Hollywood cloaked in frenzy, elegance and fading stars on the brink of the abyss. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 4, 2023

Repulsive, wretched excess...

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 4, 2023

A fascinating mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 26, 2023

Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

For all that is great and grand in its use of history, the film is long and you can feel it, a problem when making an epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2023

As it stands, after two movies that started the “White People Freaking Out About Jazz” genre, I don’t have a lot of faith in Chazelle telling these stories and Babylon has shown me that my fears were founded.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

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There’s History in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon , But Where’s the Thrill?

All great directors are perverts. This is not a knock but a compliment meant to evoke the great, subterranean forces that power the medium. Film inherently taps into the rapture of looking — the voyeuristic thrill that comes with exploring worlds and peoples sometimes far from your own. It isn’t exactly escape so much as reflection, warped by the pleasure principle. In writing and directing Babylon — the three-hour-and-eight-minute tragicomedy that charts the hothouse machinations of the silent era and the fallout that happened when Hollywood moved into sound — Damien Chazelle of La La Land fame reveals himself to be anything but a pervert. He’s far too interested in the logistics of moviemaking to capture the emotional surge or exceptionable eroticism that defined not just Hollywood’s incandescent silent era but films at their most powerful.

Beginning in 1926 and ending in 1952, Babylon opens by introducing one of the narrative’s crucial leads, Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva), a sweet-hearted Mexican fixer who dreams of leaving his mark on the world through film, which he considers bigger than life itself. For now, he’s transporting an elephant to a party hosted by the mogul he works for. Chazelle quickly plunges us into a world of excess and the people who inhabit it with a hedonistic soirée. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren — who has worked with Chazelle consistently, as well as lent his skills to films like No Time to Die — lets his camera swoon, skitter, and saunter through the carefully coordinated proceedings, lingering on a Fatty Arbuckle type getting pissed on by a young dame before expanding to explore the full breadth of the occasion. (The dame later goes so hard she looks damn near dead and needs to be carried out with the elephant as a distraction.) As a Black jazz outfit, led by trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), blares Justin Hurwitz’s bombastic score into existence, we are thrust into pure delectation.

Bodies in fine outfits, or entirely nude, sweat and gyrate within a warm amber glow. Nellie LaRoy (a vivacious Margot Robbie decked in poppy red, whose character echoes the likes of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford) crashes into a statue: “You don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t,” she remarks. Nellie is a star in the making, voracious in her approach to everything, who will prove to be at the right place at the right time (eventually nabbing an opportunity that was meant for the girl led out unconsciously via elephant). But Jack Conrad is a star at the peak of his fame and power, played with undeniable brio by Brad Pitt, fully leaning into his charisma and the complications he brings when he lights up a screen. Isn’t that a requirement for a matinee idol? He rolls up to the party, top down, arguing with his wife (Olivia Wilde). He’s stumbling over his words, speaking Italian as she’s pouring her heart out, angry and pleading to be seen and heard. When she announces they’re getting a divorce, Jack is barely fazed. He’ll go in and out of marriages throughout the film’s meaty run time. There’s always more women.

More women. More drugs. More alcohol. More pleasure. Desires can never be met, only endlessly fed. So, when Manny and Nellie connect, they’re not just snorting lines of cocaine but sitting in front of mounds of it. With a dancerly cadence, Jack orders not just one drink but enough to get a decent-size dinner party drunk. “We’re also going to need two Gin Rickeys, an Orange Blossom with brandy, three French 75s, and can you do a Corpse Reviver? Gin, lemon, Kina Lillet, with a dash of absinthe. Two of those,” Jack says. Pitt draws out the word “dash” and leans into the server, who moments earlier yearned to catch his eye by putting her tits in his face. There are other moments of quietude amid the feverish pace of the film. Chazelle delights in such contrasts — the chaotic and the still, the virulent and the divine. Which is part of the problem: He’s more interested in how he’s looking than what he’s looking at, more compelled by the possibilities of a camera’s gaze rather than what the camera is pointed at: people with bodies as well as lives that are far less neat in trajectory than the film suggests.

The closest Chazelle’s work comes to capturing a truly heated extravagance is when Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is onscreen. She exists in a liminal space in the industry — known but not wholly respected or honored for her talent. She often writes titles for the films she fails to land auditions for. She gives the money she earns to her parents. But at the party, she’s something more. She’s a star as soon as her heels click against hardwood. Her gloved hand holds a cigarette to her lips and smoke dances along the shadows of her exquisite profile. Dressed in a way that nods to the gender-bending transgressions and silken glamour of Marlene Dietrich, Lady Fay is a sight as she sings about her love for her “girlfriend’s pussy.” Li Jun Li is marvelous in the role — tricksy and yearning — but she’s underserved by Chazelle’s impulses, which tend toward broad strokes rather than delightful details that lead characters to be more than amalgamations of archetypes pulled together from considerable research into an era clearly revered. (The film suggests a relationship between Nellie and Lady Fay, but the details of how their love affair develops are never explained beyond a newspaper spread.) Babylon ’s characters are at different stages of living and dying within the shores of Hollywood, but they are all bound to and by their cravings — for stardom, for power, for control. Chazelle is most intrigued by the vice that unspools from these desires and how they fuel Hollywood’s filmmaking on the most mechanical of levels, rather than the way it charges the people that populate these films.

Sure, there are characters fucking in a variety of positions, sometimes wearing a fake donkey head. (Notably, we don’t see any of the main characters having sex. That’s for extras.) The party scene, which clocks in at about 20 minutes, builds to a variety of drug-fueled moments meant to titillate, including one involving a man getting a Champagne bottle shoved up his ass. His face doesn’t speak to delight so much as the rush of anxiety that comes with being lost in a party of this sort. It is anxiety that fuels the film itself. Babylon is a stunning example of how sensuality isn’t simply born from having people in various states of undress. It must have a propulsion of its own, drawn from a curiosity about the figure as much as the mind and world around it.

Consider an early sequence in Babylon involving Spike Jonze as an intense German director, Otto. He’s screaming and pushing people around over the fact that the homeless extras from Skid Row are threatening to strike if not allowed to renegotiate their pay (a problem Manny figures out on horseback with a gun). More production upheavals announce themselves during the silent’s epic shoot, as titles on the screen note the time of day. Jack manipulates Gloria Swanson into taking a lower rate while knocking back enough alcohol to pickle a man in a single sitting. Manny fights the dying of the light to get a new camera across town for the movie’s most important shot. Meanwhile, Nellie gets her debut on another set, taking the place of the woman who overdosed. Nellie proves to have a preternatural skill for understanding the camera and demonstrating what Chazelle can’t: a palpable gratification from watching or being watched. She doesn’t just cry when asked — she can hold her tears for two beats before letting them drop, or summon a single one for maximum emotional pull. But back on Otto’s set, those mistakes abound. Jack is a stumbling drunk by the time Manny secures a camera — though once Otto calls “action,” it’s as if he’s instantly sober. Cast against the rose-golden sunset, he and his leading lady kiss as smoke plumes the air and the sounds of battle are drowned out by an orchestra. As if fated, a butterfly dances in the air before delicately landing on Jack’s shoulder. “We got it,” Otto says, at almost a whisper. The set roars with satisfaction. Babylon wants to engender awe for film, while only mildly critiquing the political and social mores upon which Hollywood was built. It’s as if Chazelle wants to push against our expectations of his industry’s history but is also deeply afraid he’ll lose the ability to make a movie like this again.

Babylon can be transfixing, before a feeling that the film is too polished, too neat, takes hold. The cinematography balances warmth and cloying darkness, communicating the delights and horrors in which characters are mired. The music carries itself with hard-won panache. The actors are game. The costuming, makeup, and hair design playfully experiment with the visual traits of the eras they traipse through to mixed but eye-catching results. The editing is elegant as it weaves together a cornucopia of needs, and is often a source of the film’s greatest humorous moments, cutting against expectation to place the audience further into the barely organized chaos of this ragged industry. Where it ultimately stumbles and falls is in its characterization — those particulars of humanity that the classic films Chazelle so loves excelled at portraying.

As the film marches deeper into the sound era, the lives of its main characters take bitter turns. Manny has moved up in the industry as a sound director and is newly identifying as a Spaniard, bowing to the racial strictures of the moviemaking system he so loves. Solidarity is traded in for a perch on the ledge of power, which comes to a head when Manny asks Sidney to use cork, dressing himself in blackface to put him in better balance with the darker-skinned musicians flanking him. (It’s a surface-level exploration of the cost of being a part of Hollywood then as a Black man.) Nellie’s brassy speech, classed New Jersey accent, and wild-child nature fall out of fashion for women, and she’s forced to adapt or let go of the stardom she was just starting to relish. Take after take of Nellie’s first foray into sound are marred by minor issues born of the sensitive, cumbersome equipment now required to make movies, culminating with an assistant director (P.J. Byrne) reaching volcanic levels of expletive-laden outbursts: “If anyone stops this scene again, I will shit on you. I will shit in your mouth!” Jack, on the other hand, is fighting against the inevitable: his own irrelevance. Chazelle is able to capture the general rhythms of this era but not quite the debauchery of the specifics that made rising and falling careerists tick. What he remembers most of all is the freedom all of these artists had, something he feels is slipping into nonexistence today.

America is a country built on forgetting its own sins, and Hollywood has inherited that forgetfulness. This is never more apparent than when Hollywood is playing itself. In a scene between Jack and Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist with haughty air, Jean Smart plays an idea of a person turned into a joke — a journalist who is as performative as the actors she chooses to chide in her column. As Jack’s professional reputation continues to slide, Elinor writes a blistering column questioning if his time in the spotlight has ended. “Your time has run out. […] It’s over. It’s been over for a while,” she says to him from behind her typewriter, with a lamenting splendor that matches the tenor of the score. Smart rises before the seated Jack and launches into an arch, self-conscious monologue that mirrors issues with Chazelle’s writing elsewhere:

“I know it hurts. No one asks to be left behind. But in a hundred years when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again. You see what that means? A child born in 50 years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like a friend, even though you breathed your last before he breathed his first. You’ve been given a gift. Be grateful. You’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”

But this scene worked for me, tapping into a somber quality that is wistful and nostalgic. Within the folds of this scene — Smart’s melancholic approach to the monologue and Pitt’s crystalline blue eyes brimming with sorrow — is the director’s conflict. He wants to print the legend of the silent era and what was lost when Hollywood found sound, and critique its mores at the same time. He’s torn between loving film and having to defend its existence, amounting to a movie fueled not by that scintillating thrill that powers the works he’s nodding to, but a deep fear about the extinction of his own kind. Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.

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Babylon review: Baby, it's way too much

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Damien Chazelle's starry, manic reimagining of the time before talkies.

Hollywood was born in sin: a spangled palm-tree Sodom where pretty young things sell their souls for a role, and vice and venality run free. Or at least that's the myth we've built since silent pictures, and one that director Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey in Babylon , his frantic, antic, and frankly exhausting ode to the birth of the business they call show.

It's also pretty old news to anyone who's read stuff like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon , the seminal scandal bible published nearly 60 years ago (and subsequently banned for a decade) that notoriously exposed — a lot would say exploited — many of the Golden Age stories retold here. That book, proudly operating on the far-out fringes of decency and accountability, never really pretended to be anything but what it was: a wild stew of slander and calamity as delicious as it was questionably true.

Chazelle, who became the youngest Best Director Oscar winner in history at 32 for La La Land , seems equally enamored of the industry's seamiest tales, while also coming at it like a gee-whiz kid; he needs it all to mean something. And he has at his disposal things that underground figures like Anger never did: a pile of money and movie stars, plus the high-gloss veneer of prestige filmmaking. It's still three turgid, clattering hours of nudity, depravity, and mislaid alligators, but also, you know, art.

Margot Robbie 's Nellie LaRoy enters the frontier-town Los Angeles of 1926 like a hurricane, a beautiful would-be starlet with a brassy New Jersey squawk, a gambling problem, and a tendency to turn every room she enters into a bar brawl. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a much-married matinee idol sliding into middle age and ever-deeper vats of alcohol. They're both dazzling to Manuel "Manny" Torres ( Narcos: Mexico' s Diego Calva ), an aspiring producer with a Valentino face and a head full of stardust. All Manny wants is to be part of the magic of movies, whether that means wrangling an incontinent elephant for an unhinged house party or dragging strung-out talent from their beds (or whoever's bed they're in) to set by call time.

Like many of the major players here, he is Chazelle's creation: Most characters fall somewhere between composite and pure fiction, including Jean Smart 's gossip-peddling power player Elinor St. John, a ringer for real-life rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons ; Li Jun Li as a stand-in for Anna May Wong , the first major Chinese-American actress; and Jovan Adepo's gifted Black bandleader Sidney Palmer, whose career path echoes the early arcs of Louis Armstrong and Stepin Fetchit .

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt, and sex is universal currency; death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline. In one Tarantino-esque interlude, an inebriated Nelly wrestles a rattlesnake to the death in the desert; in another, she vomits shellfish at a cocktail party in an Exorcist spray. By the time Tobey Maguire arrives in the third act as a giggling, consumptive gangster, huffing a cocktail of brandy and ether, the phrase "Jazz Age Boogie Nights " feels almost too apropos.

But Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real. (A brutal scene about blackface feels both as devastating as it's meant to be and oddly unearned.) There's also a sense that all this willful outrageousness just isn't his lane: The profanity is both relentless and numbing, and even the orgies look too clean. (Were people really waxing their personal bits circa Prohibition?)

It's all part of the film's panting need for provocation, along with its frequent, confounding anachronisms, from the hair and wardrobe down to the everyday slang. Yes, pre-Code Hollywood was a place for iconoclasts and outcasts, and in that sense could serve as a bubble of unlikely equality. But even a full-blown fantasy needs its own internal logic, a thing Babylon rarely gestures to or simply disregards completely. (What kind of unique challenges might a female director like the one Chazelle's real-life wife, Olivia Hamilton, portrays here so breezily have faced back in the day? You'll have to ask the ghost of Lois Weber . Race and class, too, don't seem to mean anything, until suddenly they do.)

The script still finds more than few bravura moments of absurd comedy, and the cast can't be faulted for committing. Pitt brings a boozy, unflappable charm and later, bewildered pathos; Robbie starts at 11 and never dials down. An acerbic Smart, vamping in a series of complicated hats, feels criminally underused, apart from one blistering speech she gives Pitt near the end. Even the cameos read like a red-carpet Rolodex on shuffle: Olivia Wilde , Eric Roberts, Katherine Waterston , Spike Jonze , Flea . Calva is naturally charismatic and lovely to look at, but the movie's supposed co-lead spends most of his time simply bearing witness — one more casualty in the frenzied, preposterous rush of Chazelle's Everything Hollywood All at Once. Grade: C –

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Babylon’ is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood’s heyday

Margot robbie delivers a fearless performance as a cocaine-addled ingenue, but her character is ultimately abandoned by damien chazelle’s mash-up of a story.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Brad Pitt's character is meant to evoke John Garfield. The character of Jack Conrad is loosely based on John Gilbert. The story has been corrected.

Say this much for Damien Chazelle: He shows his audience exactly what he’s giving them within the first few minutes of “Babylon,” his bruised, black-eyed valentine to Hollywood’s sybaritic heyday. In a whopper of an opening number, Chazelle films the delivery of an elephant to the estate of film producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), a bravura scene of extravagance and excess that ends with not a few bit players covered in pachyderm waste — recalling the famous joke about the guy who cleans up after the circus every day. Asked why he doesn’t quit, he replies with incredulity: “What, and leave show business?”

That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, ultimately ambiguous portrait of American cinema before the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts on a once-glorious tribe of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imagination made movies on the fly, not to send a message but to see how far they could push a medium still in its infancy. Raffish, ungovernable and not a little unhinged, the early settlers of 1920s Hollywoodland were, by Chazelle’s reckoning, a motley crew of wackos and visionaries, prone to self-destruction but also to soaring flights of inspiration and ecstasy.

At least, I think that’s “Babylon’s” point? Quite honestly, by the time this muddled, overcrowded, tiresomely digressive trip finally crashes like so many post-binge hangovers, Chazelle’s point has gotten lost in a self-indulgent, manically erratic shuffle. Once the elephant is delivered, it becomes the centerpiece of a raging party of unfettered drinking, drugging, sex and a near-death. A fetish-y scene of an overweight man and his young date recalls the scandalous life and career of Fatty Arbuckle; the pencil-mustached Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, in a silky, endearingly sensitive turn) is clearly meant to evoke John Gilbert; and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the cocaine-addled ingenue who’s plucked from obscurity to become a star, seems to be based on Mabel Normand.

Cinema nerds will find plenty of similar parlor-game diversions in “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. (Is the director Nellie works with based on Dorothy Arzner? Anita Loos? Alice Guy-Blaché? Discuss!) But for those not keeping score at home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a narrative cracking along at a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young man she befriends at Wallach’s party, gets his own chance to leave elephant detail. Played by newcomer Diego Calva in a performance reminiscent of a youthful Javier Bardem, Manny is the ethical center of a film that whirls, gyre-like, into the outré reaches of depravity and dissolution.

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Part burlesque, part grotesque, “Babylon” takes its pacey cues and shock effects from earlier, much better films: Chazelle doesn’t tell a story so much as string together sequences that alternately quote “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights,” without being nearly as horrifyingly elegant or cringe-inducingly pleasurable as either. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” which the filmmaker will quote literally in a climax that’s meant to be a moving testament to film’s endurance as an art form, “Babylon” takes place at the cusp of the sound era, when the license and licentiousness of the silents gave way to the rationalized — and fatally sanitized — production practices of the talkies. Manny’s big break comes when he rushes from a remote movie location to Los Angeles to replace a camera; he gets back just before the director is about to lose the light, thereby inadvertently discovering magic hour. In a welcome quiet moment, a Louella-or-is-it-Hedda-like reporter played by Jean Smart schools Jack in the ways of graceful aging in a touching speech about obsolescence and eternity.

Such are the romantic touches that give “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists in a revisionist dream space in which anarchy and art go hand in hand, even as the body count piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie as a creature of insatiable appetites — for fame but most especially cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed energy fuels the entire cockeyed caravan. Lewd, lascivious, libidinous, Nellie is the heroine of a picture that begins to feel hectoring in its admiration for her most outrageous antics (the difference between madcap and mayhem lies only in a few random letters, after all). Let’s put it this way: If you must see one movie this year featuring projectile vomiting as an indictment of the upper classes, make it “ Triangle of Sadness .” Conversely, if you must see one movie this year featuring a pointless and seemingly endless snake-fight scene, “Babylon” is your best bet.

Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists in “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose travails as an African American in a mostly White medium come to an offensively absurdist head when he’s asked to perform in blackface. Although he’s a welcome addition to the proceedings, Sidney’s storyline gets lost in Chazelle’s frantic intercutting, which becomes a case of diminishing returns as “Babylon” reaches its panicky denouement: a scene featuring a ghoulish Tobey Maguire, in which he seems to be channeling “ Boogie Nights ”-era Alfred Molina by way of “ Nightmare Alley .”

By this point, the pleasure seekers decadently partying their way through “Babylon” have looked to pain for their biggest turn-on. The breathless energy begins to feel exponentially more forced (and, frankly, unpleasant) the harder Chazelle works to sustain it. Robbie delivers a fearless portrayal of a woman trying to outrun the forces seeking to domesticate her, but she’s abandoned by a story that amounts to little more than a mash-up of moments that, for all their high aesthetic and production value, feel shallow and not terribly original. Even “Babylon’s” final moments — intended to be Chazelle’s crowning paean to cinema at its most expressive and transporting — can’t bring the hazy stuff-for-stuff’s-sake into focus.

Like so many recent films — “ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ,” “ Belfast ,” “ The Fabelmans ,” “ Empire of Light ” — “Babylon” wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn. Which, in a backhanded way, might make it an accidentally honest portrayal of a medium that has always wanted to have its coke and snort it, too.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong and crude sexual material, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive coarse language. 188 minutes.

Review: ‘Babylon’ douses you with sex, drugs, vomit and elephant diarrhea. You … might like it?

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Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” begins in a dusty stretch of Southern California desert in the 1920s, with the delivery of an elephant that will serve as one of the more quixotic performers at an exclusive Hollywood house party. While being carted uphill to the venue where various movers and shakers will soon descend — and where great quantities of cocaine will be inhaled amid an orgiastic swirl of dancing, rutting, mostly naked bodies — the poor pachyderm, either sensing disaster or experiencing some early stage fright, violently evacuates its bowels in the direction of the camera.

The movie concludes, some three hours and roughly three decades later, with something no less messily eruptive. Let’s be tactful and call it an explosion of cinema, a simultaneously dazzling and depressing survey of a motion-picture medium whose formative years we have just, in some measure, witnessed. These two sequences might sound at first like incongruous bookends. But after enduring — and I must say, enjoying much of — this wild and pungent cinematic bacchanal, I’m of the mind that they actually form a logical progression.

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The point seems to be that Hollywood, dreamily identified here as “the most magical place in the world,” has in fact always been a seething cauldron of iniquity, vulgarity and vice. The vast, underdeveloped sprawl of Los Angeles, seen here in its pre-metropolitan infancy, is both a literal Wild West and a freewheeling filmmaking bazaar, populated by gangsters, con artists, imbeciles and madmen, and as yet ungoverned by any semblance of a Production Code. Movie stars — like the ones played here by a crisply tuxedoed Brad Pitt and a wildly vampy Margot Robbie — are indulged but also manipulated, exploited and treated like high-priced chattel. Bit players, musicians, sound guys and various other expendables have it significantly worse.

What this ragtag empire produces, against considerable odds, is entertainment: emotion, wonderment and, on occasion, art, to be lapped up by an eager and easily enchanted moviegoing public. But if we were to glimpse what actually transpired in the belly of the beast, to see everything the system chewed up and spat out — well, that elephant’s fecal shower might start to feel pleasant by comparison.

These are hardly new ideas, as the movie’s title — with its glancing nod to Kenneth Anger’s scandal-choked “Hollywood Babylon” books — duly acknowledges. But there is some novelty in its sourness, coming as it does from the writer-director of the enchantingly sweet and sunny “La La Land.” (Several collaborators on that picture are reunited on this one, including cinematographer Linus Sandgren, editor Tom Cross and, most recognizably, composer Justin Hurwitz.) Then again, the soul-crushing struggles and dashed dreams of working artists have long been grist for Chazelle’s creative mill, and in some ways the corrosive showbiz cynicism of “Babylon” feels less like a reversal than a strategic reframing.

You could think of this movie as “La La Land’s” manic, mean-spirited cousin, spinning like a tornado through the Hollywood hothouse of the 1920s and ’30s, and spraying booze, excrement, vomit, gunfire and blood in all directions. At some point — maybe when Robbie tussles with a rattlesnake, or when someone ingests a live rat — you may well wonder: Is this movie a bloated, ghastly wreck, or merely a credible depiction of a bloated, ghastly wreck? That may be a distinction without a difference. In any event, I’ll admit that I found much of “Babylon” mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

Its most attention-grabbing headliner is Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a temptress in red who’s a star already in the making and unmaking. Recently arrived in L.A. from New Jersey, she’s first seen gate-crashing that epic party and tearing it up like a demon on the dance floor, high on cocaine and her own confidence. But Nellie’s is just one of a few loosely intertwined stories this movie has to tell. The camera, sweeping gracefully through the party crowd (as though borne aloft by the few sober revelers in attendance), briefly zeroes in on Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a gifted trumpet player in the band, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a singer who’s basically Anna May Wong by way of Marlene Dietrich. Taking the stage in a tuxedo and top hat, she naughtily teases the crowd with a double-entendre overload of a song — a performance calculated to remind or reveal to you that silent-era Hollywood wasn’t as straight, white or male as you thought.

Mostly, though, the camera gravitates toward a droll A-lister named Jack Conrad (Pitt), first seen surveying the festivities from a balcony; several hours later, he’ll take a drunken tumble from his own. Is the sight of him floating face down in his own swimming pool meant to evoke Jay Gatsby or Joe Gillis ? At any rate, he survives with his ego, his dreams of screen immortality and his sky-high ambitions for the medium intact: “We got to innovate. We got to inspire. What happens on that screen means something,” he tells Manny Torres (a fine Diego Calva), the elephant transporter and eager jack-of-all-trades whose wide-eyed gaze ties most of these stories together.

The naive outsider who becomes the consummate insider is a convention of numerous movies, though “Babylon’s” wannabe-epic sprawl and coke-fueled energy bring Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” especially to mind. One sequence in particular strongly evokes — did I say evokes? I meant it blatantly, gleefully rips off Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” an allusion that’s nothing if not instructive. Hollywood moviemaking and San Fernando Valley smut peddling may have their differences — here, an actor’s visibly tented crotch counts as a blooper rather than a highlight — but they are united by the same antic, anything-goes energy and improvisational spirit.

The most electrifying sequences in “Babylon” fully embrace that spirit. The first-act highlight surveys a typically frenzied day in the life of a Hollywood shoot, during which everything must go unthinkably wrong before it can go improbably right. It’s here that Manny, scrambling to find a replacement camera on a lavish medieval epic, makes his initial mark behind the scenes, while Nellie, starring in a tawdry barroom melodrama, shows off her acting chops, especially when it comes to turning on the waterworks. (Having a smart director, played by a terrific Olivia Hamilton, surely helps.)

This is the glory of moviemaking in the silent era: big, gestural performances, lavish outdoor shoots and a nonstop background cacophony that the cameras will never register. The talkie revolution, by contrast, will demand silence on the set — an irony not lost on Chazelle, who proceeds to orchestrate a riotous comedy of errors, cycling through take after aborted take on an unbearably hot soundstage. The demand for new heights of actorly precision takes its toll on Nellie, the unlucky Lina Lamont in this cruel mash note to “Singin’ in the Rain.” It also will weigh heavily on Jack, whose career end is soon prophesied by the Hollywood gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart, sharply channeling Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper).

Pitt, who often does his best work by deflecting his own A-lister aura, is believable enough as an actor who’s beginning to doubt his own stardom, and who suspects that he may have been a second-rate talent all along. Robbie, finding notes of emotional nuance in between blasts of pure Hollywood-diva id, wrings a few entertaining variations on past roles: Again she gets a kick out of watching herself in a movie, as she did in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and again she is dismissed as too unrefined for a mercilessly fickle industry, as she was in “I, Tonya.” Pitt and Robbie are both well cast in roles that don’t ultimately deserve them, that never take on an indelible, specific life of their own. They’re not playing characters so much as ideas of characters; they’re walking, talking demonstrations of just how ephemeral and exploitative Hollywood stardom can be.

Jack and Nellie are at least afforded significant screen time, as is Manny, who falls hopelessly in love with the movies and Nellie at the same time and is doomed to be let down by both. But speaking of letdowns: Sidney and Lady Fay, perhaps the two most interesting (and talented) artists onscreen, are given woefully short shrift. That’s a shame, considering they’re meant to represent the hardworking entertainers who hustled and hauled ass in the margins and achieved the prominence they deserved in a profoundly racist industry. (And a profoundly homophobic one, as we see once Lady Fay and Nellie start to generate potentially career-destroying headlines.) But Chazelle’s writing of these characters feels much too hesitant and insubstantial, and he gives Adepo and Li far too little to chew on. In his eagerness to honor undersung performers, he winds up marginalizing them all over again.

There’s something instructive in that failure, and it speaks to the raging confusion, verging on incoherence, at the heart of “Babylon” — namely, its insistence on being both a poison-pen letter and a valentine, a decadent celebration and a politically conscious corrective. It’s not that a movie about the evils of blackface couldn’t also be a movie about, say, the evils of Tobey Maguire doing his scariest Alfred Molina impression. It’s that Chazelle, a director of impressive chops and a writer of often hasty, ill-formed ideas, isn’t strong enough to make those movies breathe as one. He would have to be either much more in control or much less in control of his instincts to do so.

Maybe that’s why “Babylon” ends, either spectacularly or with spectacular foolishness, with what feels like an aesthetic breakdown. As we watch by the light of the projector beam, the Dream Factory careens into nightmare territory, and the forces of nostalgia and nihilism duke it out to a draw. Is Chazelle composing a letter of good riddance to the criminally toxic industry of yesteryear, or directing an Old Hollywood version of a “movies, now more than ever” PSA? Maybe he’s doing both, in an attempt to acknowledge the complicated legacy and the lasting, contradictory power of the movies. And why not? Somehow, elephant dung feels good in a place like this .

Rated: R, for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive language Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 23 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, ​the ​La La Land​ director’s ​overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

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Babylon Review

20 Jan 2023

You will seldom find a film as simultaneously romantic and repulsive as  Babylon . Damien Chazelle ’s palpably impassioned, occasionally overwhelming ode to the epic moviemaking magic of the pioneering studio era features at least four bodily fluids (three of which splash vibrantly across the screen during the film’s ambitious opening 45 minutes), and chucks out grotesquely framed sex acts like candy. For every shot of a single tear rolling down Margot Robbie ’s stoic face, there’s one of an elephant’s exploding rectum. It’s a visceral, mesmerising balancing act that doesn’t stop tipping throughout the film’s packed-to-the-rafters three-plus-hour runtime.

Chazelle wastes no time in setting his tempo, as he plunges into a 35-minute tour of a buzzy Hollywood party, rife with undulating dancers, live jazz and an Aladdin’s cave of hard drugs. Aspiring star Nellie (Robbie) has been snuck in by the puppy-eyed industry rookie Manny (Diego Calva). A freshly single A-list actor Jack ( Brad Pitt ) is the man of the hour. It’s a triumph of a set-piece; a relentlessly kinetic jamboree with Robbie at the epicentre, like a red spinning top with long, erratic limbs. It will leave you reeling. Only no sooner has the dust settled, it’s kicked it back up again, as the next day the three head to a huge, violent and tumultuous film set in the desert; Nellie making her debut in a dance scene, Jack roping Manny in to help on a grand battlefield-set romance. Here the film is at its most enjoyable, as Chazelle gleefully explores every corner of production, from the throbbing, sweaty temples of the directors working across different shoots to the vast sandy vistas peppered with exhausted extras.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one.

As Nellie, Robbie is impressively athletic, whether she’s wrestling a rattlesnake or making a stomach-churning exit at an upper-crust party. Yet her range is set firmly to Harley Quinn in ’20s Hollywood — maniacal and exuberant — which leaves Nellie’s more emotionally demanding moments somewhat lacking. Clumsy dialogue contributes to this problem elsewhere: a two-hander between the brilliant Jean Smart as a seasoned gossip journalist and a post-heyday Jack descends into saccharine talk of ghosts and angels and the enduring power of celluloid.

Chazelle assumes his audience shares his obsession with what cinema means, but it’s never made entirely clear what that is. When Manny falls down a depraved rabbit hole with shady crime boss James ( Tobey Maguire , on creepy, excellent form), the film veers off track, painting marginalised performers as feared freaks without the celebratory or comedic subtext. And storylines involving Li-Jun Li’s queer performer and Jovan Adepo’s session musician-turned-on-screen star get overshadowed by the film’s insistent messaging on the power of film.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one. The set-pieces are masterful, the comedy caustic and bold, the ensemble cast commanding even in the face of chaos. Its ambition is undeniable. Yet even with all its flair, what it’s trying to say about cinema gets lost in the noise.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 23, 2022
• Diego Calva as Manny Torres; Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy; Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad; Jean Smart as Elinor St. John; Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer; Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu; Tobey Maguire as James McKay; Lukas Haas as George Munn; Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg; Samara Weaving as Colleen Moore

Home Release Date

• January 31, 2023
• Damien Chazelle

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

They called them the Roaring Twenties, and few places roared louder than Hollywood.

This scrub-littered corner of California was home to big dreams and bigger appetites, a place where the Wild West lived on and grew wilder. Snow wasn’t in the sun-drenched hills, but on coffee tables. Sex lived not behind the bedroom door, but the ballroom floor. A sweeter, innocent time? Don’t make me laugh.

Perhaps one could expect little more from an industry still so young, so new. Dreams were stamped on celluloid here, and the people that made them were blessed with a kind of immortality. They were stars , these first denizens of the silent screen—untouchable and glorious. By the 1920s, the film industry itself was in its adolescence—unfettered by any guardian, with the house to itself.

Perhaps it’s fitting that this particular story begins at a party, high in the hills.

Manny Torres arrives with an elephant literally in tow. The livestock truck (with probably less horsepower than today’s Honda Accord) nearly slid down the hill before it finally crawled up. Manny smelled of sweat and feces and elephant, but he was quickly drafted into backroom duty anyway—donning a tux to make sure that the party went smoothly and its loaded attendees stayed happy and drunk.

Nellie LaRoy arrives in a stolen car, driving smack into a statue that she insists hopped out of nowhere. She’s not on the guest list, but that’s not going to stop her. She’ll find her way in. Fate demands it. She’s not in Hollywood to try to be a star, Nellie tells Manny. “You either are one or you’re not. I am.”

Jack Conrad arrives on a wave of attention as always, adulation lapping ‘round his ankles like the tide. His wife leaves the party before even entering it—divorce soon to crash in her wake. But no matter. Tonight, Jack is It —life of the party, stealer of scenes. At a party with a literal elephant, he’s still the biggest star.

But change is coming to this glittering galaxy, an earthquake just down the road from the San Andreas. It’s called sound . And when the industry feels it rumble outward, not everyone will be left standing. It comes with a roar all its own.

Positive Elements

Of all the characters we meet in Babylon , Manny might be the most decent, the most down to earth. The son of Mexican immigrants, Hollywood attracts him because he wants to be a part of “something that lasts, something that means something.”

His work ultimately does mean something. He gives a talented Black jazz player a chance to wow audiences on screen, not just behind the cameras, for instance. And he seems to have an understanding of the medium’s power and potential. When he’s forced to make cruel decisions, he clearly feels bad about it.

But he’s at his most caring when it comes to Nellie. He’s perpetually protective of her and (without giving too much away) saves her from one scrape after another—sometimes at huge risk to himself.

We can offer a bit of a golf clap to Jack Cramer for giving Manny his start in the business (though you get the vibe that he’s about as conscious of that kindness as a motorboat towing a water skier).

An exotic performer named Lady Fay Zhu fearlessly saves someone from a rattlesnake and helps her family’s business when she can.

And perhaps we can offer a bit of praise to some protestors and the moviegoing public, oddly enough. “There’s a new sensibility now,” Manny tells someone as Babylon moves into the mid-1930s. “People care about morals.” And while he says that like it’s a bad thing, we know differently.

Spiritual Elements

We should start with the movie’s title here. The name Babylon is intentionally aiming at a biblical vibe: It’s a place of unbridled hedonism and sin that, perhaps, can’t see the writing on the wall. Perhaps it’s telling that in the first party we see, a reveler wearing an oversized devil’s head is conspicuous.

And that’s not the only biblical allusion we’re treated to. As Hollywood transitions into sound, we see a scene featuring the song “Singing in the Rain” (a popular song in 1929 and into the 1930s, long before the Hollywood musical). The singers, dressed in raincoats, stand in front of a huge painting of Noah’s ark—likely a bit of visual foreshadowing that Silent-Era Hollywood (and all its vices) is about to be swept away.

A director offers a lament to God during a filming delay: “You gave us such beautiful light and we f—ing squandered it,” he says. We hear some references to Hollywood being “magical.” There’s a reference to someone being Jewish.

Sexual Content

The party mentioned in the introduction is filled with countless people in various stages of undress. We see several—perhaps dozens—of topless women. Some wear no clothes at all, and people in various corners (which we mainly see in a flashback) look as if they’re engaged in various sexual acts. (While brief, the scenes feel pornographically explicit.) Both same-sex and opposite-sex couples are pretty free to show their (ahem) affections for each other. In an upstairs bedroom, another explicit sexual tryst involves someone urinating on another person.

The party’s audience quiets down long enough to hear a breathless, titillating song from Lady Fay Zhu, a bisexual/lesbian entertainer who whisper-sings a song that centers on a bit of female anatomy. She strides through the party, as if selecting someone to seduce, and she ultimately shares a passionate kiss with a woman. It’s part of the act, and their “relationship” goes no farther.

Zhu does eventually embark on a fairly steady relationship with another actress—one that begins with a passionate kiss in the desert. We later see newspaper photos of the two women holding hands in a field, images that ultimately spell the end of Zhu’s employment with a studio. (The studio fires her due to moviegoers’ changing moral attitudes and the scandal that might hurt one of the studio’s biggest stars.).

Nellie’s growing stardom is predicated on her sexuality. She introduces herself at the same party by wearing a next-to-nothing outfit (the “neckline” of which sinks down to her waist) and her ridiculously sultry, seductive dancing. She’s given a part as a sexual bauble in a Western, where she’s asked to dance on the bar. She uses her sexuality (and acting chops) to turn the movie—where she calls herself a “wild child” and tells the cowboys she was voted the “least-dressed woman” at one point—into a star vehicle for her.

Subsequent roles play up her tawdry sexuality, and her personal appearances feature her wearing a variety of barely-concealing outfits—presaging the Kardashians by nearly a century. Her frustrated overshadowed co-star accuses her of “icing her nipples” so they’ll be more visible to the camera—something that Nellie denies but secretly does. She attends a party wearing just a pair of overalls (sans shirt) with the entire football team from the University of Southern California in tow (most of whom are dressed only in their underwear and with lewd pictures and messages scrawled across their chests).

In a scene depicting, both literally and metaphorically, a Hollywood underworld, various people are engaged in all manner of degrading activities for the people watching; the rooms go by at a pretty big clip, but we can tell that onlookers are being titillated by scantily-clad fighting females and a place featuring mostly undressed dwarfs and farm animals.

We see characters kiss, both on and off screen. Jack takes a tumble into a pool in his underwear. (When he gets out, the material clings a bit to his rear.) Publicity shots and movie posters depict women in some very revealing garments. We see sexual toys.

Violent Content

That underworld lair mentioned in the section above is filled with literal violent “acts.” The women fighting in a cage seem covered in mud or blood (or possibly both). An alligator guards an entrance to the most taboo room—where a man will eat anything for cash. (The man plucks a live rat out of a box and gobbles it up.) A man is killed in that underground space—skewered in the neck with a spike-covered mace. (The place is filled with seemingly Medieval torture weapons and vaguely sado-masochistic decorations.) We see the blood pour out of the wound as the man slumps to the ground.

A woman “fights” a rattlesnake in the desert. The rattlesnake technically wins, biting the woman’s neck and rendering her unconscious. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: Someone slices the snake’s body off, rips the still-attached head from the woman’s neck, eyes the pink blood-and-venom mixture oozing from the women’s neck and begins to suck it and spit it out.

A man commits suicide with a gun. While the shooting takes place off-camera, we see the blood hit the bathroom wall. (Another man kills himself off-camera, too.) A hitman guns down two men, splashing a kitchen’s walls with blood. (Other characters are threatened.) Guns are fired elsewhere. Someone dies from heat.

A massive medieval movie scene ends with several very real injuries and at least one death. (An extra lies on the movie set, impaled by a flag-adorned pole.) Guns are fired. Automobiles crash into things. An elephant sends people running. We hear of an actress who dies at a heartbreakingly young age. Someone falls off a roof and into a pool.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear roughly 165 uses of the f-word and another 30 or so of the s-word. Oh, and there’s at least one c-word in the mix, too. No surprise Babylon has plenty of other, lesser profanities in the mix—nearly all of them, actually—including “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “h—,” “p-ssy,” “pr–k” and probably a few I didn’t have time to write down. God’s name is misused at least seven times (five of them with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused four times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Hollywood’s silent-era hedonism was powered by two things, it would seem from Babylon : hubris and illegal substances.

Technically, alcohol was an illegal substance at the time, too, with Prohibition in place since 1920. But that didn’t matter, it seems, to anyone in the film industry. Countless people drink a variety of substances, and some get raging drunk to the point of unconsciousness. In one scene, Jack—who’s been drinking constantly on set during a delay in filming—needs help to stagger up a hill to where a scene’s to be shot. He can barely stand and nearly tosses his cookies before the camera starts rolling. And then, when the scene begins, he performs perfectly.

And that’s far from the only substance being passed around. Nellie and Manny bond while snorting cocaine in a back room. Nellie is constantly getting illicit substances from an on-set drug dealer, sometimes popping pills to help calm her nerves. (He presumably has another job on set, as well, but it seems most everyone knows why he’s really in demand.) A man, whom the movie suggests almost subsists on chemicals, puts makeup on his face to hide just how gray and pasty it actually is.

The opening party is full of banned substances, and one person apparently dies from it. (We see the mostly naked body with gunk crusted around her mouth. The main concern seems to be how to dispose of the body without anyone—including partygoers and police—being alerted to what’s happened.)

Characters smoke cigarettes and cigars.

Other Negative Elements

And on and on it goes.

As the elephant is being taking to the party (mentioned in the introduction), she suffers a very serious stomach emergency. Her handler gets sprayed with vats of diarrhea (and we’re subjected to a very anatomical shot of the elephant’s backside, too).

A talented Black jazz performer successfully breaks color barriers, moving from behind the camera to in front of it as he entertains audiences with his skill. But in one movie, the color of his skin is lighter than many of his jazz-playing cohorts, and he’s forced to wear shoe polish on his face so that audiences—not able to detect the difference in hue—won’t be shocked at the appearance of an interracial band.

Someone goes to a posh party and, in an aggressive act, crams as much food into her mouth as messily as she can. Before she leaves, she winds up projectile-vomiting all over the host and his carpet.

Nellie has a gambling problem, and she falls under the sway of a very dangerous criminal and his gang—putting herself and others in peril.

A couple of people try to pay off a debt using fake movie money. Moviemakers use asbestos as snow.

In the book of Revelation, we meet a woman called Babylon, sitting on a seven-headed beast and holding a “golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality.” I’m sure many a Bible reader has stumbled across the description and thought to him/herself, “What’s that all about?”

Some might have a similar, confused reaction to this dizzying, often slightly insane, movie.

First, let’s give some credit where it’s due. Babylon has its attractions. Taking place in the frenetic, chaotic, anything-goes environment of a powerful fledgling industry, Babylon gives us a sense of the era’s charms as well as its decadence. Jack often trumpets this new “art” (though it was hardly that at the time) as a powerful force for good, and Hollywood’s advertised as the greatest place on Earth. You can see what Jack sees beneath its many (many) vices: the beauty and wonder and satisfaction that comes from weaving dreams with borrowed cameras and paper sets. The possibilities that burble underneath the surface.

We should also acknowledge that, for all of Jack’s optimistic ruminations, Babylon isn’t meant to trumpet Hollywood’s past beauties as much as it is to castigate it for its excesses. This is, indeed, a place of depravity—so full of titillation that a prostitute holding a golden cup and riding a horrific beast would blend right in.

But naturally, therein lies the problem. Or, rather, problems .

Babylon is as crass and raw and titillating and intentionally disgusting movie as I’ve seen this year. It joins many a film seeking to point to a given culture’s excesses and spends hours (in this movie’s case, more than three hours) showing you just how bad it can be. “Wow, isn’t that horrible?” it says. “Now, come this way and take a look at this !”

In the opening scenes, a police officer tells Manny and his crew that you can’t “drive an elephant without a permit.” This movie has some elephantine-sized issues. And discerning viewers might want to drive the other way.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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The Correct Order To Watch The Babylon 5 Franchise

J. Michael Straczynski's "Babylon 5" began its life as a two-hour TV movie called "Babylon 5: The Gathering" which aired on February 22, 1993. There was some controversy about the series, however, as Straczynski pitched his space station series to Paramount as early as 1989. Paramount turned Straczynski down, and he took his series to Warner Bros., who approved. Suspiciously, only two months after Warner announced "Babylon 5," Paramount announced their own space station series, "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." In a Tweet from 2018 , Straczynski claimed that Paramount "put their show into high gear, spending four times what we did so they'd make it to air first." Indeed, "Deep Space Nine" first aired on January 3, 1999, beating "Babylon 5" by a month and a half. No legal action was taken against Paramount, but there has been a certain amount of bitterness ever since. 

Additionally, the "Babylon 5" TV series didn't begin airing in earnest until late January of 1994, leaving a comfortable production gap between the two shows. Despite many similarities, "Babylon 5" and "Deep Space Nine" were just different enough to form their own unique fanbases. Also, because "Babylon 5" wasn't attached to a preexisting sci-fi franchise, it was free to expand its own universe and explore its own sprawling mythology. Indeed, there have been three "Babylon 5" TV shows, six TV movies, and, as of 2023, a straight-to-video feature. 

Keeping track of the various "Babylons" might prove difficult, but we here at /Film are here to help. Here is a handy, clear list of the correct order of all the "Babylon" film media produced to date. 

The release order

Here are all the movies and shows in the order of their release. The central TV series is broken up around the release of several TV movies, and the show will be marked in bold.

• "Babylon 5: The Gathering" (1993) – TV Movie
• "Babylon 5," seasons 1 through 4 (January 26, 1994 to October 27, 1997) – TV series
• "Babylon 5: In the Beginning" (January 4, 1998) – TV movie
• "Babylon 5," season 5, episodes 1 – 17 (January 21, 1998 to Jun 17, 1998) – TV series
• "Babylon 5: Thirdspace" (July 19, 1998) – TV movie
• "Babylon 5," season 5, episodes 18 and 19 (October 28, 1998 and November 4, 1998) – TV series
• "Babylon 5: The River of Souls" (November 8, 1998) – TV movie
• "Babylon 5," season 5, episodes 20 – 22 (November 11, 1998 – November 25, 1998)
• "Babylon 5: A Call to Arms" (1999) – TV movie
• "Crusade" (June 9 – September 1, 1999) – TV series
• "Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight" (January 19, 2002) – TV movie
• "Babylon 5: The Lost Tales" (2006) – Straight-to-video anthology special
• "Babylon 5: The Road Home" (2023) – Straight-to-video movie

And that list doesn't include the 22 "Babylon 5" novels, nor the many comic books or board games the series spawned. Straczynski has said that he also wanted to reboot the series, and is currently looking for a network willing to fund it . 

The correct order is the mythology

It's important to work one's way through the Babylon series in the correct order, as the stories and characters are massively complicated, and by design. "Babylon 5" takes place on board the titular space station, constructed specifically to be diplomatic neutral ground in the wake of multiple devastating pan-galactic wars. Ships visit the station using wormhole-like "jump points," allowing everyone to visit Babylon 5 as they were able. Aliens snarl at each other, and humans, who run the station, attempt to keep the peace. The series centered on religious zealotry, post-war resentment, assassinations, psychic powers, and legitimate godlike prophecies.

One will have to familiarize themselves with the Drakh attack of the Shadow War, the Telepath War, the Earth Alliance Civil War, and the Independence of Mars. Unlike "Star Trek," "Babylon 5" never presented itself as a utopia , and was free to start wars and feature devious, fallible, wicked characters. The Earth Alliance is unlike the Federation. In many ways "Babylon 5" was the anti-"Star Trek," pointing out that utopian sci-fi was churlish and unrealistic. Humans (and aliens) may be able to travel the stars, but they'll be just as divided and petty as ever.

Yes, both "Babylon 5" and "Deep Space Nine" had wormholes near the title stations, and fans of both will be able to point out numerous parallels besides, but, as mentioned, they are indeed separate entities. It's worth noting that "Babylon 5" would eventually poach a few recognizable "Star Trek" actors, including Walter Koenig, who played Alfred Bester in 12 episodes of the show.

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