Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is a silent movie star who has grown bored with the Hollywood output when compared to the European art house market.  Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is a self-proclaimed born star; she just has not been discovered yet.  Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is an assistant who wants to grow outside his station and be a part of something bigger.  Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is a skilled trumpet player tired of people disrespecting the heart and soul of the music.  Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is a cabaret singer and known lesbian who capitalizes on the salaciousness of her various lovers for her act.  What do these people all have in common?  They are in Hollywood in the 1920s, at the dawn of sound and some ten years prior to the moralistic Hays Code, and this entire town is about to be rocked like never before. 

Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, Babylon is a sprawling epic with a focus on the excessive debauchery of the 1920s, and conversely, the crippling loneliness of being left behind by friends, lovers, and audiences that some of the biggest silent movie stars faced at the advent of the talkies.  With a massive runtime – 189 minutes – matched only by the massive budget, it is fitting that a film about the bold risks of Hollywood is drawing comparison with other notable lavish financial disasters such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980).  While Paramount Pictures is not at risk of closing the lot due to Babylon’s box office performance, it is unlikely that they will see a return on the estimated $70-80 million used to finance the picture. 

The film opens with Manny running a desperate errand for his boss, Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), who is throwing an extravagant party at his mansion later that evening and needs to ensure that his showstopping elephant is delivered safely to the estate.  In what cannot be more than ten minutes into the film, there is already a fountain of feces that erupts onto screen from said elephant, and with that moment, Chazelle issues his warning to audiences that what will follow is only going to grow more and more outlandish so get out now or buckle in for an unforgettable ride.  The antics will continue in a non-stop sensory assault with about a twenty-five minute long sequence at the party that plays out more like a Roman orgy where the sex, booze, and drugs flow freely before finally breaking for the title card, cued in by a rapturous gong. 

One of the first people who Manny meets at the party is Nellie and he is instantly drawn to her confidence and charisma.  While Robbie does well in the role of the determined and rising star, there is a lingering feeling that she does not quite fit in as well as she should, given that much of the film follows her perspective. Her performance is perfectly fine as she lets loose during that extravagant party, or later as a rising actress gets to prove her comically acute skills on set – Should there be one tear, or two? From the left eye, or right? – but there is something about her presence that does not seem to fit in as seamlessly into the film as the rest of the bunch. This is played up a little bit as she is seen as a trashy, east coast wannabe hailing from New Jersey, something she is not trying to hide as she does little to mask the unmistakable accent. While Nellie’s individual style, which carefully rides the line of being both unflattering and alluring, the real flaw here is that her character is a little too simply written to support such a large amount of screentime. She is discovered by total accident and has a meteoric rise to stardom, and while her voice and her spontaneity are not suited for the early talkies, her struggle is very one-note. To Robbie’s credit, she does not falter in her performance as she carries those extended sequences on set or at the fancy, etiquette classes, but her success in Babylon exists in a vacuum. By itself, Robbie puts in a lot of great work in Babylon but her role suffers due to the script and art direction, and through no real fault of her own. 

Calva’s Manny shoulders much of the film, too, as the bridge between Nellie and Jack while also becoming a pioneer in his own right. He fits better into the texture of the film, but it is strange how little this role actually allows Calva to do. For much of the first half, he is the go-for to the various execs, running around in the background, only noticed by audiences because Chazelle chooses to focus on him, but he is making very few decisions that sway the narrative. Despite the frantic movements, Manny is a very passive character who is defined by his ambition and dedication to the projects he is working on at the time. Eventually, he becomes a producer himself, helping to make important creative decisions at the studio and promoting rising talent, yet he still has a fierce loyalty to Nellie. 

It is not until the final act that Manny becomes more aggressive in his control over the narrative as he tries to bail Nellie out of a massive debt she owes to the crime boss, James McKay (Tobey Maguire) who is delivering a beguiling, yet committed, performance. It is unfortunate, though, that this final hour – a literal descent into hell – is a bridge too far for Chazelle’s early Hollywood epic to take; not quite a jumping-the-shark moment, but certainly a fighting-the-snake. Structurally, it makes for a nice bookend to the opening party, however, while that initial display of depravity still had glimmers of hope and promise and new beginnings about it, this downward spiral spells the end of, for lack of a better word, innocence for Manny and the gang as the Hollywood they aspired to join has seismically shifted into new, terrifying territory.  

It can be interrupted as a fateful premonition for Chazelle’s own outlook on the exhibition industry, which was synonymous with the movies for most of their 100-year lifetime. Through the rise of streaming services and the shortening of theatrical windows, Chazelle posits that we – again, in the 20s – are experiencing a transformative shift in the industry, the results of which are still anyone’s guess as the stars of old and the pioneers of new grapple for power. Chazelle delivers his closing argument – a call to arms, or possibly, a eulogy – through an impressive montage scored by frequent collaborator, Justin Hurwitz, that encapsulates the lifetime of filmmaking, with an emphasis on film, though he does feature some notable achievements in modern digital filmmaking. Hollywood loves Hollywood, and while there have always been some films that were an ode to cinema, these stories have seen a dramatic uptick in prevalence over the past few years and quickly have become as predictable as a bingo card – the projectionist explaining the illusion of light passing through a moving strip, the main character sitting awestruck in the auditorium with the halo of a projection beam above their head – but Chazelle flips those expectations here, and regardless of intention, perfectly captures the magic of the movies while also creating a poignant endnote to Manny’s story as an angel who has been expelled from the kingdom. 

It can be argued that Babylon is Manny’s story to tell and that the nature of his life has brought these other larger-than-life characters into the fold, but there is one outlier in this sprawling cast, one who at not at the start of their journey, but the end of it; Jack Conrad. A bit of inspired casting finds Pitt back in the role of a rising “has-been” instead of the bonafide superstar at the center of the film, but while Conrad is a little bit on the outside looking in at Manny and his newfound success, he carries the emotional weight of the narrative. The grown-up party boy is introduced to audiences in the middle of his Nth divorce, and over the years, he will suffer many more losses in love, but this is not to say his role is a weight that pulls the film down. He is absolutely electric in the film and still gets to show off that lead man charisma in the incredible sequence as he shoots a scene for the newest medieval romance from perfectionist director, Otto (Spike Jonze). While Manny and Nellie’s roles suffer in the third hour, Conrad thrives thanks to an incredibly emotional performance from Pitt who plays the actor facing the sunset of his career with grace. Out of respect for the movie star, a symbol of the medium that Chazelle holds so dear and everything the old star system used to represent, he changes the tempo of the film to a rare moment of stillness and quiet as Conrad ascends the stairs of his estate for a final time and, with the pull of a trigger, turns from a fading star soon to be forgotten and into a lasting legacy who will go on to serve as the punctuation mark for this chapter of Hollywood’s history. 

The success of a film as a story is always a subjective one, but there are few films this year that are as divisive as Babylon. Through a disingenuous lens, it can be written off as overlong, meandering, pretentious, and even masturbatory by the exceptional cynics, but what cannot be argued is that while all of those adjectives do apply to varying degrees, it is done with such a high level of bravado filmmaking that has been unseen in this era of small scope Covid productions which are sent, unceremoniously, directly to home televisions and phone screens. Chazelle is a director who tries to breathe life and magic into the mundane – just look at La La Land (2016) where he mounts a show opening musical number in the middle of Los Angeles rush hour traffic – and when his baseline is the already freewheeling Hollywood of the 1920s, it is not at all surprising that this is the director’s biggest, boldest, and wildest film to date. In keeping with the tradition of these messy masterpieces, hopefully, the passing of time will open audiences’ eyes to the wonder which Chazelle commits to screen, and that they do not let the luster of the silver screen and the magic of the movies pass them by.