‘Babylon’ Review: A ‘La La Land’ Successor
A Totally Reel Review
Rate It Out of Eight
6/8
Hot take: I loved Babylon. For those unfamiliar, it takes place in the 1920s and chronicles the tumultuous changes in Hollywood with the transition from silent movies to “talkies.” Imagine an R rated version of Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby and Singin’ in the Rain. It’s frenetic, manic, extravagant, and to some, it’s unfocused. Obviously it’s not a perfect movie; the last part of the movie was so tonally different that it gave me whiplash (sorry I couldn’t help it). Like La La Land, I had to sit with the movie for a bit to really process what I’d just seen.
However, whatever your criticisms, you can’t call this movie boring. Few movies have left me as confused and overwhelmed as this one, but that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather watch three hours of this than sit through yet another 2.5 hour super hero movie. Damien Chazelle is taking a risk and I want to see more directors do that. This movie isn’t for general audiences and that’s okay. But for those willing to stomach the long runtime, it’s a wild ride.
Beautiful and Meticulous Chaos
Visually the movie is beautiful, featuring a lot of whip pans and one shots similar to La La Land. The score is grand and pompous, the acting is top-notch, and the costumes are the finishing touch. Chazelle really went all out with the movie’s budget and spared no details (one particular scene with bodily fluids comes to mind).
The entire cast was great, but I especially liked Brad Pitt’s performance. He embodied such tragedy under his veneer of glibness. I remember in one scene, he’s asked if he misses silent movies and we see his hands shake slightly as he pauses and answers unconvincingly “no.” He reminds me of a child who’s had everything handed to him his entire life and then struggles to adapt.
Margot Robbie breathed life into Nellie LaRoy, adding depth to an otherwise relatively superficial character. She faces similar challenges to Brad Pitt’s character Jack, but the script fleshes him out a bit more. One of my favorite scenes is when she and Diego Calva’s Manny are in a car, shortly after visiting her mother. They have a brief heart-to-heart and that scene alone says just enough about Nellie to leave us wondering with more questions. I wish we had more scenes like that, because otherwise her character often gets written off as comic relief — a brash, unrefined woman with a Jersey accent who flounders in the age of “talkies.” Like Emma Stone in La La Land, Margot Robbie made her character more three-dimensional. I’m not saying Chazelle is terrible at writing female characters (after all, Nellie is leagues better than Margot Robbie’s character in Amsterdam, but compared to his male characters, the script needs talented actresses to add color.
Nothing captures the magic of movies more than the long sequences featuring the characters on movie sets. Manny’s first day on set is hilarious as we see him scrambling to find a camera and Nellie’s first day was just as eventful. There was one specific one shot that followed Nellie as she walked through the various sets on the lot — mirroring a similar shot in Singin’ in the Rain, which heavily inspired Babylon. Later in the film, we spend 15 or so minutes watching Nellie film her first “talkie” and we laugh at the crew’s growing impatience as she continuously missed her mark or ran into technological problems. Yet another reference to Singin’ in the Rain but this movie has a notably darker, more tragic tone.
After the Music Stops
Babylon has a lot of thematic similarities to La La Land and even to Whiplash. All three of these movies are about people chasing their dreams, about them risking and sacrificing everything for a sliver of fame and recognition. Whereas La La Land has a bittersweet ending that sees the two protagonists each achieving their own dreams, Babylon starts with the characters reaching or at the heights of their career. Whiplash and La La Land show us the lead up to success, but what happens after? Everyone’s career and art will inevitably peak, so where does that leave artists? In Tinsel town at least, the answer isn’t pretty.
Babylon exposes the way Hollywood horribly treats its actors and crew — the very people the industry depends on. Actors are easily replaced or are forced to do awful things to keep their jobs. Many interpret this movie as Chazelle’s love letter to cinema and a hate letter to Hollywood.
It’s this sort of machine that was built by humans but kind of wound up very quickly dwarfing them, and it swallows humans up and chews them up and extracts their souls and spits them out and then moves on to the next generation. And that’s kind of horrific. — Damien Chazelle Interview
SPOILERS AHEAD, if you have no seen Babylon, please skip to The Flip Side of ‘La La Land’
Hollywood is a machine endlessly devouring people’s liveliness and we see that at a very personal level as we follow not just the movie stars, but also the lives of Lady Fay Zhu and Sidney Palmer. I do appreciate that Chazelle chose to highlight two non-white characters, even if they were only minor characters. Lady Fay Zhu was clearly inspired by Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star. However, Fay Zhu was ultimately discarded for the sake of Nellie’s rising star. Similarly, Sidney Palmer just wanted to play music, not necessarily in movies. He’s forced to do something he’s deeply uncomfortable with and Diego Calva’s Manny gaslights him when he tries to quit. Is it worth putting up with this humiliation in the name of art?
In the End, Is It All Worth It?
La La Land’s semi-happy ending would have audiences believe that any sacrifice is worth it to achieve our dreams. Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning audition scene sums up the sentiment so beautifully and ends on an optimistic note that she’d do it all again, knowing the heart ache that comes.
SPOILERS AHEAD, if you have not seen Babylon, please skip to The Flip Side of ‘La La Land’
Babylon gives a more nuanced answer. The price that Jack Conrad paid was his own life; Nellie was forced to assimilate with the pretentious upper classes; even Manny, who’s not directly in front of cameras, changes his back story to say he’s from Spain, rather than Mexico. This isn’t even to mention what Hollywood did to Lady Fay and Sidney Palmer.
The best that humanity can achieve in terms of art, in terms of the sublime, in terms of expression, and the worst that we ever see from humans… That became kind of this guiding principle for Babylon, which means that in some ways, every frame was equal parts celebration and equal parts condemnation. Equal parts love, equal parts hate. — Damien Chazelle Interview
Yet somehow, Chazelle still ends the movie on a cautiously optimistic note. In one of the best scenes (there were many), the movie critic Elinor St. John tells Jack not to despair too much about the end of his career as talkies take over. She tells him “No one asks to be left behind, but in a hundred years, when you and I are long gone, any time someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you will be alive again.” That entire monologue is the heart of the movie, though it didn’t offer Jack too much consolation. Art is timeless and I don’t think I can phrase the importance of movies as eloquently as Elinor did.
One day every person on every film shot this year will be dead. And all those films will be pulled from the vaults and all their ghosts will dine together, and go on adventures together, go to the jungle, to war together… A child born in fifty years will stumble across your image flickering and feel he knows you… Your time today is through but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.
Chazelle argues that despite how terribly Hollywood treats people, despite how disposable people in the industry are, what these people create is pure art that lasts through the ages. The ending scene in particular, when Manny goes into a theater and watches Singin’ in the Rain, the movie cuts to a long montage of movies through the ages including James Cameron’s Avatar. I’m personally not a fan of the montage, I think he got the point across with Elinor’s monologue and the montage was a little too in-your-face (though Chazelle defends how extra it is). When asked about the mixed reactions to the movie, Chazelle said he wants to leave the movie up to the audiences to interpret: “Nothing I say should ever supplant what an audience might bring to it because it’s just as legitimate as whatever the intention of the artist might have done.”
The Flip Side of ‘La La Land’
As I’ve mentioned before, I loved this movie. It’s loud, it’s brash, and definitely shocking at times. The movie elicits strong reactions and I appreciate that Damien Chazelle is taking a risk. La La Land is a romantic, optimistic movie while Babylon is more of a reality check. Just as in Biblical times, Babylon was an advanced civilization that reached great highs, but then turned into a symbol of sinfulness, full of people who didn’t believe in God. This movie chronicles the highest of highs and the subsequent lowest of lows of people pursuing their dreams. As much as I love this movie, I highly encourage everyone to see it for themselves and interpret Chazelle’s message.
Especially after something like La La Land, it felt like I had this sort of desire to try to really get at the darker underbelly of Hollywood. Which I think is just as much a part of the whole equation, to borrow that phrase, and to try to paint a portrait a little bit of the machine of Hollywood as an overall entity. So it’s bigger than any one person.
And now we go to Letterboxd for some user reactions
