Babylon (2022)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters in an era of unbridled decadence and depravity during Hollywood's transition from silent films to sound films in the late 1920s.
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67 films that influenced Babylon
What critics say influenced Babylon
The camera enters the movie’s opening party on a sinuous, elaborately choreographed long take (the first of several such shots) that’s a conscious homage to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights —another movie about a dying industry that’s structured around a series of increasingly sordid parties.
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.”
Unabashedly borrowing from the likes of Martin Scorsese (pilfering the exaggerated dark comedic streak of The Wolf of Wall Street , Margot Robbie not being the only member of that cast present) and Paul Thomas Anderson (carbon-copying full ideas from Boogie Nights , another look at a corner of the film industry fighting for legitimization) with unfettered abandon, Chazelle may still be searching for an original voice, but his primary goal is to entertain.
A sequence depicting how hard it was to shoot with sound was done better and in significantly less screen time in Singing in the Rain , and the final violent act feels like a copycat version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Long Way Down (One Last Thing)” sequence from Boogie Nights .
And we haven’t even gotten to Babylon’s sex-dungeon territory, in which Chazelle appears to lovingly rip-off Boogie Nights’ infamous late-film robbery scene, except that this time Alfred Molina is swapped for a bug-eyed Tobey Maguire, firecrackers are replaced by hacking spittle, and, also, there’s a dude who eats rats.
The tepid response to "First Man?" Whatever it was, his grand tribute to the early days of Hollywood is equal parts "Boogie Nights" and "Apocalypse Now," and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here, since "Babylon" very much feels like an End of the World party, a clearance sale where nothing gets left behind.
There are whiffs of “La Dolce Vita,” which Chazelle’s film evokes through its manufactured glamour and melancholy sex appeal, and also “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which “Babylon” channels throughout its go-for-broke first hour (while also borrowing half of its cast).
"Babylon" nods to celluloid classics – from “Singin’ in the Rain” to “A Star Is Born” to “La Dolce Vita.”
Chazelle takes heavy inspiration from Singin’ in the Rain , La Dolce Vita , Boogie Nights , and The Wolf of Wall Street , going as far as entirely recreating scenes with a contemporary, dirty twist.
Chazelle has said that he studied a number of movies in this paean to cinema—the production notes list examples as disparate as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).
Eventually, Nellie’s gambling and drug addiction lead to an all-time-low sequence, recalling the paranoid, cocaine-addled scenes in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), where Ray Liotta tries to manage cooking pasta sauce, dodging helicopters, and moving drugs in the same afternoon.
Most significantly, Chazelle’s screenplay echoes the up-and-down-and-down-and-down arc of Anderson’s (and of “Goodfellas” before it), giving us the second-hand buzz of the high-highs, and making us pay with the low-lows.
By the time the third hour rolls around, it’s fair to say that “Babylon” does succumb to some of the problems that have plagued other epic “rise-and-fall” films (“Goodfellas,” “Boogie Nights,” etc.), where the plot becomes more manic and messy as a representation of the raucousness that has consumed our characters’ lives – especially with one extended subplot involving a drug lord played by Tobey Maguire that feels very reminiscent of the famous Alfred Molina scene from “Boogie Nights” and goes on for far too long – and while it’s not hard to see the point Chazelle is making, it also leads us to a rather dour denouement that some might say they saw coming all along.
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.
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.
We’re dealing with the same themes as “Singin’ in the Rain,” only in a bloodier, pissier vein.
Chazelle also borrows heavily from documented Hollywood episodes such as the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal and makes constant and direct references to “Singin’ in the Rain,” but most of “Babylon” is a meandering and often stultifying work of pure fiction, in which extended set pieces overshadow anything resembling true character development or real insight about Hollywood in the 1920s.
While La La Land had Chazelle channeling Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger musicals, along with the work of Jacques Demy, Babylon has the director finding his inner Scorsese and matching it up to Singin’ in the Rain.
“Make ’em laugh,” Donald O’Connor urged in Singin’ in the Rain , a movie that serves as Babylon ’s conceptual and spiritual template, and it’s the essentially enigmatic, deeply subjective question of comedy—of whether or not something is funny, and why—that hangs over the proceedings like an old-timey anvil.
As Babylon makes constant references to one of Chazelle’s most beloved films, Singin’ in the Rain , it’s difficult not to muse on how certain classism and sexism tropes continue to be recycled on-screen despite so-called progress, with LaRoy’s more obvious inspiration Clara Bow similarly sidelined from movie history, then caricatured in Singin’ itself as a cartoonishly dumb blonde who viciously attempts to sabotage the virtuous ingénue.
Chazelle borrows a similar playbook from Singin’ in the Rain (1952), wherein the filmmakers struggle to capture sound for tomorrow’s audience with crude equipment under riotously brutal conditions—hot lights and temperamental recording devices.
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Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is the bawdy wild woman reminiscent of “It” girl Clara Bow, while Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the top-of-the-world heartthrob who recalls silent movie legend John “Great Lover” Gilbert.
I’ve long suspected that the venom inspired by Damien Chazelle’s films is proportional to viewers’ devotion to their subjects—that his abuse of jazz in “Whiplash,” of acting and jazz in “La La Land,” and of history in “First Man” bothers most the people who care the most about those topics.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle – the man behind the much-more-subdued 2016 movie homage “La La Land” – the boisterous mess “Babylon” (★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) is a Tinseltown tale of fame, fortune and coke-snorting excess with real-life A-listers playing fictional A-listers.
The “La La Land” director doesn’t skimp on the lore baked within his film either, incorporating real life figure Irving Thalberg (played by Max Minghella), in the film as a reference point.
That begot the massive popular success of “La La Land,” a swell variation on themes laid out in “Guy and Madeline.”
Ken Russell may have already supplied a portrait of early Hollywood hedonism and celebrity with Valentino (1977), but Chazelle uses the setting to replay themes found in his Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016), and First Man (2018).
I won’t go into any detail, except to note that Chazelle delivers within this a 6 minute reverie on the entire history of cinema, starting with memories from within the film but then going back to the very beginning… the black jockey on the horse ( see: Nope )… Georges Méliès… the silents (many of which were referenced through the film)… color… epics… international cinema… Sensurround… electronic cinema… Spielberg… Cameron… Wachowski… etc, etc, etc… and then back around the the foundational nature of color and emulsion, the cinematic origins, like Kubrick’s apes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Anna May Wong, the leading Asian American idol of the period, is the obvious model for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), though Fay’s very public smooching of a woman is more of a nod to Marlene Dietrich, in “Morocco” (1930).
She owns the party, as Anna May Wong once did, but this time with Dietrich swagger as she recreates the famous same-sex kiss from Morocco (1930).
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Though with obvious homages to Eyes Wide Shut (masks, bare breasts, and an immediate OD that must be dealt with discreetly), the background actors may as well be Mr. Popper’s Penguins, gyrating sexless wobbles against their partners as if a middle-schooler’s play-humping was assigned as routine office work (but remember to smile!).
Despite all the jazz, drugs, sex, confetti, balloons, dancing, and breasts, I hadn’t seen debauchery this boring since 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut , and the film still had OD’s, vomiting, and plenty more depravity to go.
A late-film trip into Hollywood’s even-seedier underbelly (guided by an unexpected guest star whose identity I won’t spoil) descends into a truly perverse labyrinth of sideshow freaks and deviant sex, as if Tod Browning directed Eyes Wide Shut.
In many ways, that’s the charm of the film, in a real situation, being with these people, being at one of their parties (which makes the ones from “ Eyes Wide Shut ” seem like a Disney tea party), and watching their blind-luck of being in the right spot at the right time and with the passion to jump in with both feet when opportunity presents itself.
(Nothing lands with a more predictable clunk than the sequence in which Manny goes to New York to catch the première of “The Jazz Singer,” in 1927, rushes to a pay phone, and exclaims to Jack, back in Los Angeles, “Everything is going to change.”)
Babylon situates itself at that pivotal moment in the medium’s first century when silent movies were forever cast aside by the sound of Al Jolson crooning his way through The Jazz Singer .
Manny’s in the audience at the premiere of “The Jazz Singer” (1927), for example, and understands what a very big deal sound will be.
“Babylon” begins in the early 1920s, before “The Jazz Singer” revolutionized the movie business with the “talkies” in 1927.
(Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer was released in 1927.)
Cinema as folks have heretofore known it is about to change: talking pictures loom just over the horizon with the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer .