Babylon (2022) Movie Review
Uncovering Contemporary Hollywood
Babylon was a divisive movie. And I think whether you loved or hated the movie depends on your relationship with cinema and what you think the movie was about.
Some critics praised certain aspects of the movie (such as the editing, performances, cinematography) but despised other aspects (e.g. obscenity, and the ~190 minute runtime).
Here are my thoughts.
I think the movie is about a lot of things. And because of that, critics criticize (what else are they supposed to do?) Chazelle for "not knowing which direction to take," but I think that misses the point. If Chazelle whittled the movie away to make a more streamlined final product,1 then something would be missing. The intertwining stories are all interesting in themselves, and certainly a movie about just one of them would have made for an interesting 90-minute movie about early Hollywood, but bringing them all together as Chazelle has done, and making us sit with them for as long as we do, both tells a fascinating story about Hollywood today as well as 100 years ago and flies in the face of the "Hollywood picture."
Typically, movie executives are hesitant to greenlight long movies and R-rated movies, because both of those features turn audiences away and hurt the box office numbers. Here, Chazelle has made a movie too long for most people featuring some of the most lavish obscenity put to film by a mainstream production company in the twenty-first century.
The question no one has asked of Chazelle, and of Babylon, is why? Why did Chazelle insist on such obscenity? There must have been pushback from somewhere, so this didn't just happen. And Chazelle is the man behind La La Land, whose only connection with Bablyon is a love of cinema and a slightly too-long runtime. La La Land was a highly praised love letter to old Hollywood, to the musical numbers of the fifties and sixties that didn't feature any obscene re-writing of history. This isn't just a director who likes obscenity like Tarantino likes violence or like James Cameron likes CGI. It was most certainly a choice to include all of this obscenity.
What caught my attention, particularly, was the dissonance I experienced during some of the most obscene scenes. The lavish party that begins the movie, for example, features some scenes that felt completely out of place–or rather out of time–with the setting. Of course, I can't know for sure, but when I picture even the most wild of parties in the 1920s, a midget jumping on a giant penis-shaped pogo stick isn't what comes to mind. Such visuals not only pull you out of the scene for being remarkably unique (I haven't ever seen such a sight before, and I'm no prude) but also for being not-quite-right. In the midst of the chaotic camera movements and ecstatic sound, you as the audience member are pulled out of the moment. Such scenes almost act like a subliminal reminder that you are watching a movie, which seems totally out of place in the middle of a long one-take shot that feels designed in every way to throw you into the party and make you forget that you're not actually there.
Again, some critics merely criticized the film for being overly obscene and left it at that. Others simply praised the movie in spite of or without mention of the obscenity. But as the movie went on (and on), I found myself leaving the former group and discovering a potential answer to the question of why?
Chazelle is revealing something not only about Hollywood in the time the movie is set–the late twenties and thirties–but also about Hollywood now.
It comes as no surprise, I hope, when I say that Hollywood has its fair share of immorality swirling around. And I don't mean immorality in the sense that it produces violent movies full of anti-heroes, and movies with sex in them, etc. No, I mean the exploitation of vulnerable persons by those in positions of power that are not held accountable for their actions, Epstein/Weinstein, etc. And the acts that have come to light are less likely the only instances of misconduct, and are more likely a surface-level insight into the depravity that goes on behind the closed doors of Hollywood. Perhaps Chazelle is showing us the inside look.
A very telling (and genuinely frightening) scene in the movie occurs when Manuel, one of the main characters, travels with "The Count" and "McKay" to an underground party. McKay, played brilliantly by Tobey Maguire, is a man to be feared. Manuel shares his company only to pay back the out-of-hand gambling debts of Nellie LaRoy, Margot Robbie's tragic "star." I won't spoil the entire suspense of the scene, but Manuel and the Count are invited to go with McKay to witness a great spectacle that McKay says would make a "great" movie.
McKay, interestingly, decorates his house in Beatles-era Indian fabrics, cushions, and art. This man to be feared is somehow a man of culture? Rich enough to import these myriad of items from abroad and willing to spend his money there rather than on domestic riches. Is this purely an aesthetic choice, or is Chazelle telling us something here? Apart from his rather disturbing appearance (both before and after he applies white powder to his damp face), McKay might come across rather like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Aside from the bodyguard present with a firearm and the stories we've heard about him, nothing about him would indicate that he is a terrifying person. Nothing indicates that he is someone to be feared. He's polite, offers a drink, and wants to pitch movie ideas. But the ideas are rather strange. Something Chazelle put some effort into thinking up for McKay to spill. Hollywood's fascination with children goes beyond Epstein and his lurid abuses of minors.2 McKay's first movie idea is about a child–about 11 years old or younger, I believe–who acts and behaves just as an adult would. The explanation being that it is actually a 55-year-old man in an 11-year-old's body. Early in the movie, a man is fooling around with a girl in a private room as the lavish party and she ODs. It's clear they were engaging in sexual conduct together. Her age isn't mentioned, but she's clearly young. We are told to trust in an ever-increasing diversification, but McKay represents the negative side of that equation. He is the "white man" selling us on this in order to profit even more.
The characters travel silently over the hill towards McKay's party where his spectacle” movie star" is. They show up at a tunnel. LA has become so prudish, this is the only place that they can really party, he tells both Manny and us.
On the one hand, by this point in the movie it is clear that Hollywood has cleaned up its act. We started with wild parties and chaotic sets, and now we have clean sets on the backlot and Nellie LaRoy has had to "clean up her act" and become "sophisticated" in order to maintain her movie-star appeal.
But this has only sent those obscene parties into the darkness. And what we discover down that tunnel with McKay is that in the darkness, evil has festered and multiplied. For a brief few moments as we follow him in, the screen is completely black. We, as the audience, are drenched in darkness. And what we find on the other side is horror, pure. People in chains, in cages. Deformed persons chained to the wall with a collar. Brutal bloody cage fights to the death. And each time we descend to a level deeper underground, it gets worse and worse. Like descending into a deeper level of hell, glimpses of red light illuminate what we'd rather not see.
The Tension of Cinema as Art, and Making it
Babylon has a lot to say about art, and cinema as an art form. There is a real tension between the artists and the business of moviemaking. In the early heyday where movies are made "on the fly" out in the "wild west" of California and shots are cobbled together hastily and chaotically, there is a real energy to moviemaking. The sense of achievement when everyone's work comes together is fantastic. You can feel the joy.
This is contrasted with a (brilliant) scene once sound studios have come into play and Nellie LaRoy, darling of silent cinema, struggles to hit her mark, the microphones are too sensitive, and we watch twelve different takes of the same simple scene. Something small goes wrong each time, and they have to start again. This painstaking process to get a "good take" contrasts heavily with the pre-sound movie-making process we witness out in the desert, where Hollywood is still a "wild west."
The movie feels conflicted about cinema as art: on the one hand, it wants to celebrate the medium, yet it also reveals to the audience many of the inherent difficulties and moral compromises made in the pursuit of the sound financial investment made in producing a blockbuster. Brad Pitt's character gives an impassioned speech about cinema as the "art of the people," comparing his current wife's Broadway success of 100,000 hoighty-toighty audience members with his movie success benchmark of one million. Not only can people afford the cinema in much higher numbers, but people across the nation with their varying cultures, classes, ideas, and ideals all have to be pleased.
This is brought to light when Manuel instructs Sidney the jazz trumpeter to put on "black face" because, in contrast to the rest of the band, he appears almost white in the spotlight and the idea of a mixed band wouldn't go down well in the South. Financially, they couldn't afford that mistake.
What Babylon ends up as is a searing celebration of the power of cinema that doesn't turn a blind eye to the darknesses that envelope much of the industry. Movie-making isn't an easy business, and it isn't an easy art. Unlike La La Land, a romanticization of a bygone Hollywood era (with its own "tragic arc"–to be returned to in a moment–) it faces the difficulties of the history of American cinema head-on. It exposes them. It confronts modern-day Hollywood with its hidden darknesses and its hidden evils. It's easy to look at the past and say "my, it really wasn't all as peachy as they made it seem," but the incorrect assumption inherent in such a statement is that we've turned a corner from such behavior. We haven’t. They've just learned to hide it better.
Chazelle obviously likes taking classic Hollywood tropes and turning them on their head: Whiplash takes the musician biopic arc and shows the reality of absolute obsession with a singular artistic goal; La La Land shows the reality of the romantic relationships usually shown with rose-tinted glasses in Hollywood dramas and musicals; and finally Babylon takes a two-pronged approach, turning Singin' in the Rain into a tragedy but also turning the history of cinema and Hollywood into a tragedy.
When we look at the history of cinema, we see great art. Babylon shows us the pain and suffering that went into making it. Both voluntary and involuntary, justified and unjustified, ethical and vile.
Fortunately for Chazelle, he has managed to produce a movie that celebrates cinema as art, criticizes the industry, and has produced a piece of art that criticizes its own history without shying away from its history or itself.
In Babylon, the working class man gets completely decimated by an Elephant’s defecation, another man gets urinated on by an up-and-coming actress and then gets punched in the face by a producer’s assistant, a former star that can’t handle her own downfall vomits all over the Hollywood elite, and Manny, who experienced the American dream and became a studio executive, is literally covered in the blood of those close to him.
Perhaps Chazelle is saying this: if you want to stay clean, stay out of Hollywood.
Calling this movie a "product" seems like heresy. It should be referred to as a piece of art, a creation, something that exists for itself and for those who cast their eyes on it, but not as something to be bought. It's a product in that is was *produced* by Chazelle's efforts, but it does not exist as a consumable product. The box office results confirm as such.
I recognize that Epstein himself was not in Hollywood explicitly, but if you'll allow me a moment of "conspiracy-theory-esque" extrapolation, I don't believe it is too difficult to believe that he ran in the same circle as many of the top dogs in Hollywood.