The Exhausting, Vulgar Banality of "Babylon"

Damien Chazelle's ode to the excesses of old Hollywood ultimately collapses under its own considerable weight.

For a long time, I loved movies about old Hollywood. There was, I thought, something innately pleasurable about seeing the film industry reflect on its past, and I was particularly enamored of those films which included present actors playing their predecessors in the industry (I even wrote a list on Ranker about just such films). Perhaps it was my love of historical films, or my love of old Hollywood, but I always made a point of watching them.

And then along came Babylon. 

I have so many churning thoughts about Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed La La Land, itself a love letter to Hollywood, and I have to admit that I was quite prepared to love this film. Imagine my surprise, then, when exactly the opposite came about.

To put it bluntly: I hated this film. I didn’t feel that way at first, and in fact I didn’t feel that way about it for most of the time I was watching it. Sure, I was grossed out and repulsed and puzzled by it, but I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t until I sat and thought about it for a while that I found myself increasingly disgusted, dismayed, and frankly revolted by what I’d just seen. 

If you haven’t seen Babylon, the plot is best described as Singin’ in the Rain refracted through the cynicism of Quentin Tarantino with the lack of restraint of the most excessive form of B-movie. That is to say, it’s all about the pivotal period of Hollywood during which the heady, bacchanalian days of the silents gave way to the more staid period of the 1940s and 1950s. Note that this isn’t exactly the most historically accurate way of talking about the period but, on the whole, Babylon’s lack of historical accuracy is arguably the least of its many sins. 

There is, I think, a very good and thoughtful film lurking somewhere in this bloated behemoth, but it’s buried under so much excess and vulgarity and bad taste and self-regrading navel-gazing that it’s only barely discernible. It emerges most clearly, I think, with three characters in particular: Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad, Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, and Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John. 

When the film begins, Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad is at the height of his powers, the type of matinee idol who commands huge paychecks and can deliver a knockout performance even after a day of drinking. However, as the viewer knows (and as Jack himself seems to sense), his days are numbered, and the introduction of sound spells the end of his career. He slowly sinks into oblivion, before taking his own life. His story is made all the more tragic by the fact that, as Elinor St. John reminds him, none of this was because of anything he did. There is, quite simply, a logic to the industry, and the audience, that defies logic. His time is over, and nothing he can do will stop. The fact that he will be immortalized on celluloid is cold comfort, as his subsequent suicide amply demonstrates.

If Jack Conrad is the megawatt superstar incapable of preventing (or accepting) his own obsolescence, Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is the opposite, an up-and-coming starlet with star potential. She clearly has the makings of a star, but the introduction of sound draws unwanted attention to her broad New Jersey accent. She can’t quite shake her sordid roots and, much like Nina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, she’s an object of mingled pathos and mockery. 

She is also, ultimately, the victim of her own id-driven desires, but Babylon doesn’t give her the final dignity of an on-screen death. Instead, she’s relegated to a small newspaper headline during a montage. Arguably, the film intends us to understand this as the final indignity for Nellie: having used her up, Hollywood casts her aside without a second thought, leaving her to die penniless and in obscurity. However, it would take a much more sophisticated and nuanced film than this one ever becomes for this particular message to land with any impact and, more to the point, it doesn’t even seem that invested in critiquing the gender politics of classic Hollywood (but more on that in a moment). 

And then there’s Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist who largely avoids the excesses of the industry, preferring to watch and observe and write from the sidelines, a strategy which affords her the type of bird’s-eye view so many of her contemporaries lack. It’s this perspective that allows her to inform Conrad, in a no-nonsense way that only Jean Smart could deliver, that his time is over. Yet even her story is punctured with sadness, and her death is, like Nellie’s relegated to a newspaper clipping, testament to time’s inexorable forward march.

Of course, missing in all of this is arguably the main character of the entire film, Diego Calva’s Manny Torres, who starts out as an errand boy but gradually climbs the corporate ladder of Hollywood. There’s a good reason for this: namely, he’s boring. Don’t get me wrong. Calva is a superb actor, and I think he’s going to go very far in Hollywood. It’s just that the script gives him almost nothing to do other than act as a sort of audience surrogate, someone who (like Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian in La La Land) is entranced by the idea of the movies, even if he is also horrified by the bacchanalian excesses of the industry. By the end of the film, he’s been so traumatized that he’s fled Los Angeles altogether, finding a measure of peace and domestic tranquility in New York City.  

Somewhat lost in all of this chaos are the two stories that should actually matter, because they depict two individuals who, because of their identities. Jovan Adepo’s Sidney Palmer and Li Jun Li’s Lady Fay Zhu are absolutely captivating, both as performers and as characters. Adepo’s Palmer is a Black man who finds his own sense of dignity and self-respect called into question, and Li’s Lady Fay is a queer Asian woman who likewise finds herself shunted to the sidelines. However, because they are so tangential to the central narratives swirling around around them–to say nothing of the film’s absolutely relentless (and random) vulgarity–they end up becoming footnotes to the main narrative, a rather ironic twist in a film supposedly invested in critiquing the system. 

This, to me, is the central problem with a film like Babylon, one that takes itself so seriously and so clearly has something REALLY BIG to say to its present-day viewers. It wants so badly to have a meaning, but yet it stubbornly refuses to do the very things that would allow said meaning, if it actually settled on one, to land with any impact. Time and again throughout its (incredibly bloated and unnecessary) three-hour runtime it distracts from its own message either by undercutting it or indulging in moments of blunt, banal vulgarity, sometimes both at the same time. 

To take just one of the more egregious examples, as Manny rushes to try to save Nellie from being brutalized by gangsters to whom she owes a great deal of money (their romance is one of the many undercooked elements of the screenplay), he runs afoul of James McKay (an almost sepulchral Tobey Maguire), who takes him on a tour of the dark underbelly of Los Angeles. Deep in the catacombs, poor, innocent Manny experiences a number of things that are supposed to horrify both him and the audience, ranging from a chained-up alligator to a masked man who eats live rats for money. 

It’s hard to know just what to make of this sequence. Is it, as I think might be the case, an allusion to Dante and the descent into Hell? Is it supposed to be a commentary on the cinema of sensations–filled with blood and gore and senseless violence–that will come to dominate the industry in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Or is it something else altogether? It’s really impossible to tell, because it just feels so self-indulgent and gross, like so much of the rest of Babylon.

Yet I could even this relentless, exhausting vulgarity if it weren’t for Babylon’s other cardinal sin: its hypocrisy. 

As the film draws to its much-belated conclusion, Manny sits in a movie theater, watching Singin’ in the Rain, Babylon’s most obvious and deepest inspiration. As he watches it unfold, scenes from Singin’ are intercut with the events that have transpired during this film’s narrative, and it’s not hard to see what we’re supposed to take away from all of this. All of the sacrifices and death that were made by the studios in their riotous early years were all worth it for, you see, they gave us things like Singin’ in the Rain, a true work of studio system art if ever there was one. This is quite a claim for a film like Babylon to make, particularly since it has dwelt with such unrelenting attention on the cost of such excesses, the trail of bodies left in the wake of its march toward greatness.  

Time and again, we’re asked to take in the full darkness of the studio system–the way that those enmeshed its gears are chewed up and spit out, left to make of their lives what they can in a world that no longer cares about them. We watch as both Jack Conrad and Nellie LaRoy spiral into death, we watch as Sidney and Lady Fay have their careers stalled by the inability of the studio system to challenge entrenched systems of power. We witness these in all of their horrors and yet, at the end, we’re also supposed to reach the conclusion that it was all worth it. 

You’ll excuse me if I find that more than a little repugnant. 

It’s very clear what Babylon was supposed to be. It was supposed to be one of those love letters to Hollywood that come along every few years, whether it’s Chazelle’s La La Land or Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood or David Fincher’s Mank. 

Or, perhaps not. Perhaps it was meant to be a giant middle-finger to the industry from one of its favorite boy geniuses.  

I can’t say that it succeeds on that level, either, because it ultimately collapses under the ponderous, elephantine weight of its own excesses. For all of the sound and fury, the elephant poop and dark dungeons of exploitation, the mountains of cocaine and the dead extras, it ultimately doesn’t add up to much. In trying to create an epic that would show something meaningful about the transition of Hollywood to sound, Babylon ended up creating nothing more than a hellacious mess, one that has surely ignited a fair bit of internet commentary (including this essay!) but which I suspect will never be seen as the important cinematic landmark that it aspired to be (its relative paucity of Oscar nominations speaks volumes). 

Unfortunately, this seems to be the fate of most recent films that try to tell some fascinating truth about the horrors of old Hollywood and its deep-seated corruption. I remember being similarly disappointed with Mank, which was another star-studded voyage into the olden days helmed by an auteur and which, like  Babylon, seemed to forget the pleasure to be gained from the films of classic Hollywood. 

Maybe what it comes down to is this: I’ve sort of fallen out of love with movies about movies, whether it’s Babylon or Mank or Hail, Caesar! (the latter of which I also did not care for). Far too often, it seems to me, they fall so much in love with their own cleverness and their own ability to heap one allusion on top of another that they lose sight of their own stories. If I’m going to watch a film about the perilous price of Hollywood, I think I’ll just stick with Singin’ in the Rain and A Star is Born. 

At least I know I won’t be disappointed.