Babylon (2022).
Hollywood has been making movies about movies for almost as long as there have been movies. This is not surprising given the town’s penchant for self-mythologizing; the dramatic potential of silver-screen fame, always an Icarus flight on wax wings melting in the California sun; and the allure of a glimpse behind the scenes into the factory where the dreams are made. It would be hypocritical to mock the self-importance of a place that exerts such an inexhaustible fascination—on me, I own, and probably on you—and Hollywood’s addiction to turning the cameras on itself has produced a few masterpieces of clear-eyed ambivalence. It has also revealed, even in less successful efforts, a strain of insecurity and self-loathing under the celebratory tinsel. Some films portray the industry as crass and cruel, spitting out used-up stars and corrupting artistic integrity; some exploit chaotic, unhinged movie sets for laughs or thrills. Even affectionate comedies, like King Vidor’s effervescent Show People (1928) or Preston Sturges’ razor-witted Sullivan’s Travels (1941), tend to patronize the pictures as loveable hokum, all corny costume dramas and pie-throwing slapstick.
Babylon does all of these things in spades. Damien Chazelle’s bombastic saga of Hollywood in the last days of the silent era buries its subject in a steaming, writhing tangle of contempt and ballyhoo. At intervals throughout the three-hour-plus marathon of excess, characters hold forth about the magic of the movies. Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a starry-eyed Mexican immigrant who rises from menial gopher to studio executive, breathlessly proclaims that cinema is Bigger Than Us. People can go to the pictures to escape their problems! “They feel something!” the coked-up starlet Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie) excitedly concurs. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a boozy, much-married matinee idol facing his waning days in Hollywood, wistfully muses, “It was the most magical place in the world, wasn’t it?”
It was? By this point, we’ve been sprayed with vomit and elephant shit, treated to interminable joyless orgies, screeching tantrums, scatological humor, a rattlesnake gorily chomping a woman’s neck, and several deaths laughed off as gags. None of this is even mildly funny, nor genuinely provocative, but it makes abrasively literal the film’s crude condescension towards its subject. For the pièce de resistance, a gangster named McKay (Tobey Maguire in ghoulish makeup) leads Manny into the bowels of a dank and sordid dungeon-cum-nightclub to watch a man eat live rats. “He’s just made for the movies!” McKay enthuses. The gangster is a creepy loon, but when he adds that the geek “will do anything for money,” it’s evident that this is, in fact, intended as an allegory of the bottomless depravity of the movie business.
Chazelle wants to plumb the corruption and tawdriness of Hollywood—its callousness, its racism, its fundamental ineptitude and peddling of mediocrity—and at the same time celebrate the immortal wonder of its cinema. There is nothing wrong with this ambition—the paradox is real, and many films have confronted it. The problem is that Chazelle has no control of the clashing tones, so the film lurches back and forth between vulgarity and sappiness. It offers no clue as to how movie magic emerges from a community that it portrays as a bunch of self-indulgent bunglers whose primary talent is their ability to show up on set after ingesting vast quantities of cocaine and alcohol the previous night. The film might hold together as an epic, nasty joke at the expense of anyone who has ever rhapsodized about cinema, but its muddled grandiosity seems all too sincere.
There are films that succeed in etching scathing portraits of the film industry while still nursing an unillusioned love for movies, like Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1953). In Nicholas Ray’s devastating In a Lonely Place (1950), the embittered, washed-up screenwriter played by Humphrey Bogart rails against producers who are “popcorn salesmen,” but remains a devoted acolyte of Hollywood’s truest religion, storytelling. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a caustic tale of delusion and fatal ambition, but it gleams with spells of real, unforced enchantment, like two young screenwriters’ midnight stroll through the deserted Paramount lot, or forgotten silent diva Norma Desmond basking in a spotlight during her visit to a set. Of course, these films have breathtakingly intelligent scripts, honed by Wilder’s acid wit and Ray’s bruised romanticism; they don’t put a defense of movies into the mouths of their characters, but reveal their faith through the passionate craft that gives the films their dark beauty, elegant flow, and wounding emotional power. Babylon has lines like, “What happens on that screen means something!” but never inspires the audience to reach that conclusion themselves.
With masses of naked revelers and such puerile touches as a character who gets his head stuck in a toilet, Chazelle seems to imagine he is making a scabrous, Felliniesque satire of Hollywood decadence. Nowadays, the term decadent has been dumbed down to menu-copy for indulgent desserts, but it contains a rich complexity of meaning and layers of artistic history. Babylon, like a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza and many a cautionary showbiz tale, sells a grotesquely exaggerated vision of hedonism, offered for our titillation and/or disapproval. But decadence also implies decline—the word has the same root as decay—and the portrait of frenzied debauchery, moral rot, and collapsed dreams erases the reality of late 1920s Hollywood, which was anything but an age of overripeness and disintegration.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
The art of silent film reached its pinnacle in its last years: 1927 saw Buster Keaton’s The General, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, and Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld. Babylon instead caricatures silent filmmaking as primitive, hokey, and slapdash. The film’s publicity campaign has touted Chazelle’s research into the period, which clearly leaned more on Kenneth Anger than Kevin Brownlow. This research is strewn about the landscape like so many Easter eggs, and sometimes scrambled into hash. Nellie La Roy is largely a cross between the self-destructive, phenomenally talented Jeanne Eagels and Clara Bow (her institutionalized mother, an episode of her rivalry with a more established actress, her discomfort with talkies, and her resentment of society’s snobbery towards her lower-class origins all link her to Bow), plus a soupçon of Jean Harlow and her legendary iced nipples. Jack Conrad suggests John Gilbert, the Great Lover who fell from his pedestal and into a bottle when audiences laughed at his first talkie—more because of the flowery dialogue than the pitch of his voice. Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is plainly modeled after Anna May Wong, though she performs a direct quote from Von Sternberg’s Morocco, when Marlene Dietrich, in top hat and tails, kisses a woman in the audience during her nightclub act. There is also a recreation of the “Singin’ in the Rain” number from MGM’s Hollywood Revue of 1929, and a blink-and-miss-it glimpse of a scene being shot from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s 1918 short comedy The Cook.
Ironically, any viewer who gets these references is also likely to notice, and be annoyed by, the film’s historical liberties and pervasive anachronisms. Every time the characters open their mouths, it is 2022; the dancing, music, clothes, and hair (Nellie’s in particular) are equally ahistorical. This was obviously a choice, and it suggests not just a disregard for accuracy but a disdain for the era in which the film is set; why else would its styles and mannerisms be so aggressively rejected? Mixing anachronisms into period settings has become the norm, and while occasionally a film does something meaningful and thought-provoking with a nontraditional treatment of the past (Christian Petzold’s Transit and Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden spring to mind), on the whole the trend feels lazy and unimaginative, fearful of alienating audiences with the unfamiliar.
Almost everything in Babylon is an homage to something we’ve seen before. The hyperactive cinematography leans on repetitive clichés: how many times must the camera swoop across a room into the horn of a trumpet in full wail? Must every audience member in a movie theater be shown worshipfully rapt and agog? The flimsily under-developed characters tread predictable paths. The Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is granted a dignity that sets him apart from the white characters. Alas, he is given nothing to do except serve as a token of liberal piety, exposing the industry’s ugly racism in a scene where Manny convinces him to don blackface for the cameras. Chazelle has said that Manny’s arc was inspired by that of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, from naïve idealist to corrupt power-monger. As Michael, Al Pacino mutates before our eyes, slowly but inexorably; by the end, his whole physical presence is transformed. Nothing about Manny seems to change except the way he combs his hair; he commits shameful compromises and betrayals—a convenient spinelessness is the secret of his success, as much as his resourcefulness—but we never know how he feels about them. Nellie is given some fragments of back story suggesting a wretched upbringing, but the script is more interested in making a garish spectacle of her than probing what lies behind her grating exhibitionism. She rockets to stardom thanks to an absence of inhibitions and abnormal control over her tear ducts. (“Hooray for Hollywood!” Johnny Mercer wrote in a mocking song, “Where you’re terrific if you’re even good.”) Brad Pitt alone is persuasive as a star of the twenties, but even he can do nothing with his character’s embarrassing, garbled speeches about cinema, which veer from populist anti-elitism to rants about how old-fashioned Hollywood needs to learn from the European avant-garde (at a time when, in fact, many of the foremost European directors were working in Hollywood).
It is easy, and perhaps intended, to read the film’s treatment of the rocky transition from silent to sound film as an allegory for today, when dwindling theater audiences and the threat of streaming prompt hand-wringing over the survival of cinema. As its characters meet variously gruesome ends, Babylon hastens to reassure us that movies will survive the endless churn of change—even though by this point Hollywood and its products have been fairly thoroughly discredited. While Manny is fleeing gun-toting mobsters, a despondent Jack Conrad visits the gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who in a plummy English accent advises him to take the long view: although his time as a star is up, and everyone will be dead someday, he will have immortality on celluloid, spending “eternity with angels and ghosts.” Since some ninety percent of all silent films are estimated to be lost (and the survival of today’s digitally-made movies is by no means assured), this is less comforting than it might be. More to the point, movies have to earn their immortality.
One that has abundantly done so, and that also happens to be about Hollywood struggling to adapt to sound, is Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain. A coda to Babylon jumps forward to 1952 so that Manny can visit a movie theater and watch it while weeping softly. I felt like crying too at this point, reminded of how much more pleasure is concentrated within, say, the three minutes of Kelly and Donald O’Connor’s “Moses Supposes” duet than in this three-hour slog without a scrap of wit or a hint of grace. To compare the films seems unkind, but this mise-en-abyme—and the similarity in their subjects—makes it impossible not to. Singin’ in the Rain pokes light-hearted fun at movies, but it attains the sublime by making colossal effort, hard work, perfectionism, intelligence, and ferocious talent appear effortless, the equivalent of levitating the Radio City Music Hall.
Babylon has one more trick up its sleeve, a montage that starts with Eadweard Muybridge’s horse and gallops through a century of cinema—Buñuel, Godard, The Wizard of Oz, Avatar, plus fake silent movies starring Jack and Nellie—in a frenetic crescendo that pummels the audience with sound and fury, signifying nothing. Like the inclusion of clips from Singin’ in the Rain, this sequence feels less like homage than hubris. Hollywood, ever since the days when studios dumped or destroyed prints of their silent films, has neglected and junked its own history even as it produced lazily inaccurate tributes to its past. True to this tradition, Chazelle burned through vast resources to construct one more false myth. “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood,” Oscar Levant famously quipped, “And you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.”
Singin' in the Rain (1952).