babylon movie review empire

Babylon Review

20 Jan 2023

You will seldom find a film as simultaneously romantic and repulsive as  Babylon . Damien Chazelle ’s palpably impassioned, occasionally overwhelming ode to the epic moviemaking magic of the pioneering studio era features at least four bodily fluids (three of which splash vibrantly across the screen during the film’s ambitious opening 45 minutes), and chucks out grotesquely framed sex acts like candy. For every shot of a single tear rolling down Margot Robbie ’s stoic face, there’s one of an elephant’s exploding rectum. It’s a visceral, mesmerising balancing act that doesn’t stop tipping throughout the film’s packed-to-the-rafters three-plus-hour runtime.

Chazelle wastes no time in setting his tempo, as he plunges into a 35-minute tour of a buzzy Hollywood party, rife with undulating dancers, live jazz and an Aladdin’s cave of hard drugs. Aspiring star Nellie (Robbie) has been snuck in by the puppy-eyed industry rookie Manny (Diego Calva). A freshly single A-list actor Jack ( Brad Pitt ) is the man of the hour. It’s a triumph of a set-piece; a relentlessly kinetic jamboree with Robbie at the epicentre, like a red spinning top with long, erratic limbs. It will leave you reeling. Only no sooner has the dust settled, it’s kicked it back up again, as the next day the three head to a huge, violent and tumultuous film set in the desert; Nellie making her debut in a dance scene, Jack roping Manny in to help on a grand battlefield-set romance. Here the film is at its most enjoyable, as Chazelle gleefully explores every corner of production, from the throbbing, sweaty temples of the directors working across different shoots to the vast sandy vistas peppered with exhausted extras.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one.

As Nellie, Robbie is impressively athletic, whether she’s wrestling a rattlesnake or making a stomach-churning exit at an upper-crust party. Yet her range is set firmly to Harley Quinn in ’20s Hollywood — maniacal and exuberant — which leaves Nellie’s more emotionally demanding moments somewhat lacking. Clumsy dialogue contributes to this problem elsewhere: a two-hander between the brilliant Jean Smart as a seasoned gossip journalist and a post-heyday Jack descends into saccharine talk of ghosts and angels and the enduring power of celluloid.

Chazelle assumes his audience shares his obsession with what cinema means, but it’s never made entirely clear what that is. When Manny falls down a depraved rabbit hole with shady crime boss James ( Tobey Maguire , on creepy, excellent form), the film veers off track, painting marginalised performers as feared freaks without the celebratory or comedic subtext. And storylines involving Li-Jun Li’s queer performer and Jovan Adepo’s session musician-turned-on-screen star get overshadowed by the film’s insistent messaging on the power of film.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one. The set-pieces are masterful, the comedy caustic and bold, the ensemble cast commanding even in the face of chaos. Its ambition is undeniable. Yet even with all its flair, what it’s trying to say about cinema gets lost in the noise.

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Damien Chazelle is obsessed with the punishing pursuit of perfection. Whether it's finding an immaculate tempo, hurtling into space, or making it big in Hollywood, his films feature characters who are willing to endure physical and emotional torture to reach the finish line. If " La La Land " was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck. Multiple sequences in "Babylon" detail how much work goes into two seconds of film, whether it's a field of dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is obtained or the difficult perfection needed when recording sound. Those two excellent scenes remind us that none of this is easy, even if it all looks so much fun.

Is it all worth it? That's the tough question. Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him. "Babylon" is a film of stunning parts—both individual scenes, performances, and tech elements—but it feels like the magic touch that Chazelle needed to pull them together in an honest way eludes him. There's something to be said about a film being so robustly unapologetic, but I felt as manipulated and deluded as the outsiders in this film who are eaten up by the Hollywood machine by the time it was over. One might argue that's intentional—a "feel bad" Hollywood movie is rare—but it's the difference between pulling back a curtain and simply rubbing your face in elephant shit.

And that's how "Babylon" opens, introducing us to Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of the silent film era. He's trying to get an elephant to an insane Hollywood party, the kind of drug- and sex-fueled affair that was only whispered about in the gossip rags of the time. Chazelle uses the orgiastic bacchanal to introduce his players, including an aspiring actress perfectly named Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), who catches Manny's eye just as her star is about to rise. We also meet the suave Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star about to leave his third wife and be struck by the fickle finger of fame as talkies come into the picture and the wheel turns to a new era of stars. There's a jazz trumpet player named Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) and the underwritten role of a cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ). Gossip journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ) writes about it all while recognizable faces like Lukas Haas , Olivia Wilde , Spike Jonze , Jeff Garlin , and even Flea flirt on the edges of the story.

It's an undeniably ace ensemble, led by another fearless turn from Robbie and a star-making one from Calva, but Pitt is the stand-out, conveying a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a star for over 30 years—he's seen legends like Jack Conrad come and go, and he imbues his performance with a relatable melancholy that gives the entire film depth that it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle's ambitious tapestry approach focuses on the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less). Even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be. All of them become power players in their own way—Nellie holds the screen in a way that few actresses other than Robbie could convey convincingly; Sidney's musical talent ascends as sound takes over the silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on a set, and that grants him an increasing number of decisions. There's an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this film is more about the love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also loaded with an overwhelming blend of historical detail and urban legends. Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And, once again, it feels like the filmmaker's commitment elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren's fluid cinematography gives the film a lot of its momentum—his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz's score might be the best of the year, finding recurring themes for its characters that gives the entire piece more of a sense of opera—a connection that fits this story's dark tone and tragic endings. The production design straddles that line between feeling genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from the excellent editor Tom Cross , but that's more a product of Chazelle's occasionally unfocused script than anything in the editing room.

About that script. "Babylon" is a test of whether or not a film can be the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of "Babylon" that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes. A film like "Babylon" can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found it hypocritical when it tries to play the "isn't it all worth it" card that everyone knows is coming in the final scenes. Fans of this film seem to be adoring this finale, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle's career.

There's a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don't get " Singin' in the Rain " if lives aren't destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies, and isn't it great that we got that movie ? That's a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking. If he thinks he's pulling back the curtain on a broken industry, he reveals himself to be a part of that warped system in the end. It's like he doesn't want to seriously consider how his beloved art will destroy its dreamers as long as his raging party keeps going.

Available only in theaters on December 23rd. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

• Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren
• Justin Hurwitz

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'babylon'.

Bob Mondello

Director Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" is a comically over-the-top look at scandal-ridden 1920s Hollywood. It's a celebration of an art form in turmoil as silent films give way to talkies.

DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:

Christmas Day, a popular day to head to the movies. There's a new one out by Damien Chazelle, himself a big champion of showbiz. He's the filmmaker behind Whiplash, centered on a jazz percussionist, and "La La Land," which followed the romance between a musician and an actress. His latest is a film biz comedy called "Babylon." And as critic Bob Mondello explains, it's about scandal-ridden Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We begin in the desert, much as Hollywood did, with a truck driver and client bit that feels like the setup for a Laurel and Hardy movie.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BABYLON")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Put down one horse and your signature right there.

DIEGO CALVA: (As Manny Torres) You said one horse?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah. It's only one, right?

CALVA: (As Manny Torres) No. It's an elephant.

MONDELLO: A misunderstanding, clearly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You mean a really big horse.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Manny Torres) No. I mean an elephant.

MONDELLO: Manny's chaperoning the circus animal to a Hollywood party. And what follows will be Laurel-and-Hardy-esque slapstick in color with, shall we say, colorful language.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Holy s***. Is that a f****** elephant?

MONDELLO: Cut to Manny's car, towing the now-elephant-laden truck up a steep hill when the tow line snaps, the truck rolls backwards and - well, I'll spare you the sound of the elephant relieving itself on its trainer. But let it be said that director Damien Chazelle is being honest up front. This is not going to be Tinseltown cleaned up for public consumption. It's the roar of the Roaring 20s, amplified to full-scale bacchanal, which is, as it happens, the next scene, the Hollywood party in full swing, folks cavorting and snorting and doing things I can't talk about on the radio. Big stars are there, including a Douglas Fairbanks type named Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt.

BRAD PITT: (As Jack Conrad) This table only has one bottle. We're going to need eight.

MONDELLO: And also wanna-bes, including both Manny, played by Diego Calva, and a girl he helped sneak in, Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie.

MARGOT ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) I'm already a star.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What have you been in?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Nothing yet.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Who's your contract with?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Don't have one.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I think you want to become a star.

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Honey, you don't become a star. You either are one or you ain't. I am. Do you know where I can find some drugs?

MONDELLO: By evening's end, they'll both be promised entry to a movie set for the first time. And it's a doozy - back in the desert, maybe a dozen silent films shooting at once. Nellie gets to shine in an idiotic Western as a barroom floozy. Manny attaches himself to the director of Jack's film, a medieval battlefield epic that's shooting with real swords, lots of injuries, and a full orchestra blaring away for atmospherics, observing it all from a nearby hilltop a Hedda Hopper-style reporter played by Jean Smart

JEAN SMART: (As Elinor St. John) Soldiers swarm the fields like flecks of paint from a madman's brush as your humble servant bears witness to the latest of the moving picture's magic tricks. Oh, why do I bother? Look at these idiots. I knew Prust (ph), you know.

MONDELLO: Writer-director Chazelle is every bit as smitten as his star-struck newbies. He includes film lore for aficionados, shout-outs to Fatty Arbuckle, to the women directors who were pioneers in what later became a nearly all-male world behind the camera.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Cut. OK. Ice water for two...

MONDELLO: And with the coming of talkies, everything shifts up a notch. This was the moment when Hollywood debauchery prompted talk of a production code. And Chazelle serves up nudity, profanity, murder, rattlesnake rustling, mountains of cocaine and a probing look at the effect of film industry racism towards even black stars like the trumpeter played by Jovan Adepo.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Next to them, Sidney looks white.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Look. He's Black.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) They won't think that in the sound.

MONDELLO: "Babylon" feels over the top and enormous at three-plus hours, reportedly down from a four-hour first cut. It is a crazily overstuffed love letter to the glories of cinema, as characters keep telling us. It is too much and often, especially in call-outs to "Singin' In The Rain," a little on the nose. It is also clearly heartfelt and that counts. I'm Bob Mondello.

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“Babylon,” Reviewed: Damien Chazelle Whips Up a Golden-Hollywood Cream Puff

By Richard Brody

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. His enthusiasts, meanwhile, exult in his way with myths—in his grandiose inflation of characters and their struggles into epic journeys. It’s as if, having felt the power of “Star Wars” through its incarnation of grand-scale myth, Chazelle applies its lessons to realistic quests and turns them into fantasies. He does it again in “Babylon,” which is set in Hollywood, mainly from 1926 to 1932, although it’s a little different from its predecessors. What distinguishes it from Chazelle’s other films, and what it shares with another recent film of swoony movie-love by a filmmaker of sentimental bombast—Steven Spielberg’s “ The Fabelmans ”—is the vigor of its storytelling. I think that the vigor of both films is rooted in the same source: knowledge. Just as Spielberg knows his own past, Chazelle knows Hollywood lore, and doubtless learned much more of it in the planning and the research. It’s the movie’s good anecdotes, rather than any dramatic arc, that make “Babylon” engaging, over the course of most of its three hours and nine minutes. It also takes such lore at face value, befitting the aura of legend that enhances both real-life incidents from classic Hollywood and its tall tales; these stories were born to be chazelled.

“Babylon” and “The Fabelmans,” along with Sam Mendes’s “ Empire of Light ,” make for a magic-of-the-movies trilogy that’s imbued with a halcyon retrospective glow—a nostalgic admiration for Hollywood’s past glories. Spielberg’s film is set in the fifties and early sixties, Mendes’s film in 1980-81, and both see movies of those eras as redemptive. It’s Chazelle’s film that’s, surprisingly, the most ambivalent; it’s noncommittal about Hollywood movies of the more distant era in which it’s set. Oddly enough, he appears to have little to say about them, a scant idea of what they were like and what made some of them great and others not. What the movie exalts, and what Chazelle appears to love, is the personalities—with all their flaws—who made Hollywood synonymous with its visionary boldness and blundering excesses, its blithe vulgarity and cavalier insensitivity, its vast spectrum of opportunity and ferocious maw of self-destruction.

“Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. (Its first scene sets the satirical tone, with a deluge of shit coming from the rear of an elephant being transported to a blowout Hollywood party.) Like Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s 1952 film, which is explicitly and implicitly referenced in Chazelle’s, “Babylon” tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to talking pictures. It’s centered on three characters. The aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is cognate with the earlier film’s domineering, petulant, and voice-challenged silent-film diva Lina Lamont (who, in effect, gets a backstory here). A breezy yet earnest leading man, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), embodies the dark fate that would have awaited Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood if he couldn’t sing and dance. The third protagonist, who is in effect the hyphen between the two, is a producer’s factotum, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), who falls for Nellie the moment he sees her crash her car into a statue. He gets her into his boss’s wild party, where she gets noticed and cast in a small role that launches her. Manuel—or Manny, the nickname that she gives him—has been dreaming of a job on a set; at the party, Manny meets Jack, who takes a shine to him and gets him the desired in.

What’s redemptive about the movies, for Chazelle, isn’t so much the experience of viewing them but the benefits of making them. There’s no young Spielberg here, using a small camera to make Hollywood-inspired magic with whoever’s on hand; rather, there’s Manuel’s rapturous desire to be a part of something “bigger” than himself; there’s Nellie’s furious drive to escape from a hellish family life. (When a director asks Nellie, who’s playing a bit part, how she’s able to cry on cue, Nellie responds, “I just think of home.”) The brassy aspirant uninhibitedly expresses her reason for breaking into movies: “You don’t become a star, you either are one or you ain’t. I am.” As for Jack, he knows that he was a nobody before becoming a star, and he’s greatly devoted to making movies that connect deeply with “real people on the ground”; to do so, Jack wants the movies to be more innovative, audacious, and artistic. He says that he wants films to become as up to date and cutting-edge as twelve-tone music and Bauhaus architecture, “so that tomorrow’s lonely man can say, ‘Eureka, I am not alone.’ ” More plausibly, he likens the arrival of sound in movies to the discovery of perspective in painting.

Chazelle depicts the freewheeling anarchy of silent-film shoots: shouting, jousting, talking trash while the camera rolls, rowdy improvisation, last-minute derring-do. The movies made that way, he suggests, showed people as they really are, in contrast to the clinical, constrained solemnity and theatrical artifice of sound-stage work in the early days of talking pictures. The uninhibited boldness of Nellie’s earthy silent-film début and the sentimental heartiness of Jack’s silent-drama presence make a mockery of the silliness of Jack performing the song “Singin’ in the Rain” with a bouncy choral ensemble or the rigidity with which the untrained Nellie needs to hit her marks and deliver her lines in her first talking picture. (The latter scene, one of Chazelle’s many extended set pieces, borrows many of the elements from the mishaps of sound-filming depicted in “Singin’ in the Rain”—microphones in fixed positions, hidden amid décor, dictating actors’ placement and gestures and hampering their performance.)

The nasal-voiced, Joisey-accented Nellie apparently does little to develop (or even seek) the dose of theatrical skill needed to make the transition to sound; she’s too busy indulging in various forms of self-destructive frivolity. Manny rises quickly from unquestioningly intrepid assistant (breaking a strike, stealing an ambulance) to producer, but his devotion to the studio pushes him a step too far, as he betrays his principles and his friendships and comes to grief the melodramatic way, through moony swoony love. These unhinged personalities are just a few among many: the unprincipled yet discerning gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart); the unlucky-in-love producer George Munn (Lukas Haas); the gifted, hard-edged female director Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton); the intertitle writer and lesbian artiste Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li); the Black jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whom Manny propels to stardom; the temperamental German director Otto von Strassberger (Spike Jonze); the drug dealer and aspiring actor called the Count (Rory Scovel); and the real-life “boy genius” producer Irving Thalberg himself (Max Minghella); plus a vast crew of hangers-on, acolytes, fixers, dreamers, and manipulators. They all form a wonderland, a magic kingdom that spews forth fictions that, however contrived or implausible, embody the realities of the passions, the risks, the devastations, the carnal pleasures, the obscene material splendors, and the ferocious drive to obtain them (along with at least a few drops, however diluted or adulterated, of sincere artistic ambition).

Chazelle’s vision of the myth-mad vitality and built-in tragedy of classic-era Hollywood comes at the price of its substance. The movie offers no politics, no history—1929 comes and goes with no stock-market crash (which in real life hit Hollywood and its players hard), no Depression, no electoral campaigns. There’s little sense of the corporate side of Hollywood, the hard-nosed boardroom management, the studios’ industrial organization (which is already on display in King Vidor’s inside-Hollywood comedy “ Show People ,” from 1928). These absences are more than merely factual; they set a tone for the movie that turns the tragedy superficial and the comedy decorative. Supernumeraries get killed and stories get silenced (except when they don’t), but there’s neither a sense of the mutual back-scratching or the power behind the suppression of news, no sense of the law at the studio gates, whether in threatened prosecutions or looming censorship—no Hays Code. Chazelle whips the story into cream-puff whorls of myths upon myths. He delivers a movie that’s neither unified nor disparate but homogenized, its elements of reality and hyperbole alike assimilated to the same creamy glow of rueful wonder. (The Coen brothers’ “ Hail, Caesar! ” has twice as much substance and vastly more humor—and compassion—at just over half the duration.)

Chazelle also puts forth a view of the magic of the movies in a phrase that strikes me as appallingly oblivious and unthinking, when Jack, facing newly hostile audiences, asks Elinor why he’s losing his appeal and she answers, “There is no why.” It’s approximately the line that Primo Levi relates regarding his internment in Auschwitz: he responded to a guard’s cruelty by asking why, and the guard responded, “Here there is no why.” I almost fell out of my seat.

“Singin’ in the Rain” offered a triumphalist point of view, asserting that the styles of the new, postwar Hollywood were indeed advances on the artifice and extreme stylization of silent movies and the primitive techniques of earlier talking pictures. It came amid a time of actual rapid artistic and cultural change in Hollywood: “Singin’ ” premièred just eleven years after “Citizen Kane,” four years after the court decision that helped to break up studio dominance and opened the door to independent producers, and during the rise of television, which thrust Hollywood into economic crisis. The self-satisfaction of “Singin’ in the Rain” had some aesthetic justification, but it also had a major thread of Hollywood self-advertising. “Babylon” is something of a work of salesmanship, too, offering a pitch for freestanding movies seen on the big screen at yet another moment when movie studios and theatres are facing economic disaster. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times; it bends inevitably toward Chazelle. Artistically, what “Babylon” adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark. ♦

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‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.

The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.

Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.

There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed .” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.

Babylon Rated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of an actress. She is Margot Robbie, not Robinet.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Babylon is absolute fire — and everyone in it is burning

Whiplash director Damien Chazelle offers a Hollywood opus defined by passion and destruction

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The first widely available film stock in America was made with a nitrate base. Highly flammable and barely stable, this nitrate film — used from the earliest days of filmmaking until the introduction of safer acetate film stock in the 1940s and ’50s — became more dangerous with age if it wasn’t cared for properly: It released flammable gas as it decomposed into goo, then dust. In the final stages of its breakdown, it was capable of spontaneous combustion, setting history ablaze if it got hot enough on a summer day.

Countless films were lost in this way. There were fires in a Fox film vault in 1937, in MGM’s in 1965, in the National Archives in 1978 . In the silent-film era, projection-booth fires were commonplace, as the heat from projectors was often enough to ignite the nitrate film running through them.

As for the nitrate film stock from that era that survives? Much of it has fallen into decay. In Bill Morrison’s 2002 avant-garde film Decasia , scenes from silent-era films are presented in collage in their eroding state, as images that once depicted great emotion or intrigue are overtaken by the rot of time.

And yet the movie stars that once drew people to these films dreamed of immortality.

Immortality is what everyone wants in Babylon , the divisive new film from Damien Chazelle, acclaimed writer-director of Whiplash , La La Land , and First Man . It starts at the top: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the biggest movie star in Hollywood at the peak of the silent-film era, surveying his kingdom with pride, knowing he’s fueling the dreams of the common folk and has built something that will last. Nellie LaRoy ( perennial Harley Quinn Margot Robbie ) has nothing but a self-selected name and the conviction that she deserves to be as big a star as Conrad. And Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a waiter to the rich who dreams of making something that lasts, like a movie.

Babylon follows the fates and fortunes of these three and others around them as they diverge and intersect over the course of years. It starts with an extended party, a raucous bacchanal all three of them attend — Jack as a guest of honor, Manny as the help, and Nellie as a party-crasher. Their story is the same one Hollywood continually tells about itself and the people that sustain it: a story about big dreams and the grand life that might follow for a few people who are crazy enough to believe they might come true.

Across Babylon ’s 188-minute run time, Nellie and Manny see their stocks rise. The former becomes the star she always believed she was, and the latter becomes a studio executive, all through a lot of grit and a bit of right-place, right-time fortune. Meanwhile, change is on the horizon, as the 1927 premiere of The Jazz Singer throws showbiz off its axis, and Jack Conrad’s world begins to fall apart. Then everyone’s world follows, because fame is fickle and fleeting, and no one gets to be on top forever.

This is a song most movie-lovers can sing by heart, and one Chazelle has been singing in some form or another since Whiplash , his breakout film. His stories are about extraordinary people who dare to dream, who drag themselves from the wreckage — literally, in some cases — to realize that dream and be lionized for it, even if it costs them everything else in their lives. In Chazelle’s cinematic vision, art is more vital and beautiful than life itself, and the people who would set themselves ablaze for art, whether in Earth’s orbit or behind a drum kit, are the noblest of souls.

A message like this — pursuing fame is an act of hubris, and artists are transcendent in their foolish vainglory — is highly dependent on its messenger, and Babylon dances on a razor’s edge from its first frame. Yet Chazelle, alongside his longtime editor Tom Cross and composer Justin Hurwitz, are among the most accomplished dance partners making movies right now.

There’s a musicality to Chazelle’s films as he, Hurwitz, and Cross use the visual medium of film with the improvisational vigor of jazz musicians, and Babylon is their showstopper. The cuts are syncopated to get the audience moving. The color palette is bold and brassy, blurring the line between the images on screen and the horns that fuel them. The camera lingers on performers and performances: a showstopping, manic dance from Nellie LaRoy in the film’s opening bash/orgy, a drunken climb up a hill by Jack Conrad, utterly wasted, right before he miraculously pulls himself together to deliver a perfect take. The tightening of Manny’s brow and lips as he assumes the role of an executive, and does whatever it takes to convince the movers and shakers that he belongs in the room with them.

Yet for all of Babylon ’s glorying in art and artists, in Hollywood and dreams, it would all be in vain without a compelling reason why . This is where the film is most volatile. Its title deliberately evokes Hollywood Babylon , Kenneth Anger’s notorious (and largely fabricated) 1959 tell-all about the golden age of Tinseltown, a book that helped cement in the public consciousness the idea that the glitz and glamour of show business came part and parcel with a seedy underbelly of sex, drugs, and violence — often at the cost of women and queer people caught under its sensational gaze, and the tabloids that preceded or followed the book’s publication.

Babylon leans into this sensationalism, first with its title, then with its opening party, an orgy that climaxes with an elephant parading through a mansion in order to distract from the body of a girl who overdosed after a sexual rendezvous. As Nellie’s and Manny’s fortunes rise, staying in the game forces them both to make compromises that chip away at their humanity. Nellie burns bright and hot, turning to drugs and gambling. Others, like the burlesque singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), lose their livelihoods to her wanton appetites. Manny’s naked ambition causes him to treat other marginalized people as stepping stones, going as far as to ask Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) to perform in blackface in order to appease markets in the South, keep a shoot on schedule, and save his bosses’ money.

The beautiful collision between Nellie and Manny at the start of Babylon signals the start of their respective rises. As the film builds toward its conclusion, it tangles them together again in freefall. Their rapid descent reaches its nadir as Manny embarks on a trip to Hollywood’s version of hell, hosted by loan shark and lurid thrillseeker James McKay (Tobey Maguire, one of Babylon ’s producers, playing wonderfully against type). In his hands, the salacious orgy of the film’s opening meets its horrific opposite.

Babylon is long enough that it can cause viewers to wonder — multiple times! — whether sensationalism and navel-gazing are the film’s only tricks. The movie echoes the sensational shock and awe of the star machine, inviting the audience to marvel and recoil at the wonder and horror it has wrought. But Chazelle is deft enough to suggest, more than once, that he’s playing at something deeper and more challenging.

In the broadest reading, Babylon is a profane paean to film as a uniquely communal medium, gathering the collective hopes and dreams of everyone who experiences them. The film celebrates cinema as the ultimate end goal, a worthy reason for these messy, broken people to immolate themselves in the act of creation. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jack Conrad confronts entertainment journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) over a negative profile she wrote. In response, Elinor tells him the truth of things: Neither of them matter. The movies do. There will be other stars and other journalists, but they are all in the service of what the beam of light projects on the silver screen.

This story, however, has been told. We’ve seen it in bona fide classics like Singin’ in the Rain , and in more recent works like the 2011 Best Picture winner The Artist . Both those films are concerned with similar ideas, and set in the exact same era. Chazelle has even already delivered a loving homage to Hollywood in La La Land , his musical about an aspiring actress who sings about the fools who dream. Babylon , in all of its sound and fury, is redundant. And then Chazelle makes one final audacious pivot: He acknowledges this in the text.

In an astonishing finale, Babylon marries bombast and tragedy in one fell swoop, embracing Chazelle’s hubris as an artist by letting him insert himself into the cinematic canon, while he’s endeavoring to earn his place there at the same time. In its final moments, he isn’t content to just tell another story about the rarefied few who dreamed, and built an empire where countless others could dream along with them. Instead, he weeps over what was destroyed to keep that dream alive, and what’s been forgotten so others can hope to be remembered.

Babylon ’s most significant moments don’t come during the big events in Nellie, Jack, or Manny’s stories. They’re the quieter scenes, tracking what happens in the wake of their flaming parabolic arcs. They’re about the people who are forced out of the business or choose to walk away — the queer people forced into hiding to bolster studios’ public image, the marginalized forced to bear indignities so white actors can chase immortality.

This is the Babylon of the film’s title: The burnished image left behind after the people who built it are gone. It is easy to get caught up in the magic of movies and only see Jack Conrad, or Damien Chazelle — and if that’s all you see in Babylon , revulsion may come naturally. But Babylon is also concerned with what happens in the periphery of Hollywood’s white heroes. Chazelle shoots his stars with a lens wide enough that it’s not hard to see who lingers in the periphery, and the parts they have to play. Keep an eye on those people as they come and go, and Babylon becomes a cacophonous dirge for them, weeping for their anonymity in all the beauty that came at their expense. Their nitrate went up in flames and left us with lovely little lies of living forever.

Babylon premieres in theaters on Dec. 23.

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There’s History in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon , But Where’s the Thrill?

All great directors are perverts. This is not a knock but a compliment meant to evoke the great, subterranean forces that power the medium. Film inherently taps into the rapture of looking — the voyeuristic thrill that comes with exploring worlds and peoples sometimes far from your own. It isn’t exactly escape so much as reflection, warped by the pleasure principle. In writing and directing Babylon — the three-hour-and-eight-minute tragicomedy that charts the hothouse machinations of the silent era and the fallout that happened when Hollywood moved into sound — Damien Chazelle of La La Land fame reveals himself to be anything but a pervert. He’s far too interested in the logistics of moviemaking to capture the emotional surge or exceptionable eroticism that defined not just Hollywood’s incandescent silent era but films at their most powerful.

Beginning in 1926 and ending in 1952, Babylon opens by introducing one of the narrative’s crucial leads, Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva), a sweet-hearted Mexican fixer who dreams of leaving his mark on the world through film, which he considers bigger than life itself. For now, he’s transporting an elephant to a party hosted by the mogul he works for. Chazelle quickly plunges us into a world of excess and the people who inhabit it with a hedonistic soirée. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren — who has worked with Chazelle consistently, as well as lent his skills to films like No Time to Die — lets his camera swoon, skitter, and saunter through the carefully coordinated proceedings, lingering on a Fatty Arbuckle type getting pissed on by a young dame before expanding to explore the full breadth of the occasion. (The dame later goes so hard she looks damn near dead and needs to be carried out with the elephant as a distraction.) As a Black jazz outfit, led by trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), blares Justin Hurwitz’s bombastic score into existence, we are thrust into pure delectation.

Bodies in fine outfits, or entirely nude, sweat and gyrate within a warm amber glow. Nellie LaRoy (a vivacious Margot Robbie decked in poppy red, whose character echoes the likes of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford) crashes into a statue: “You don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t,” she remarks. Nellie is a star in the making, voracious in her approach to everything, who will prove to be at the right place at the right time (eventually nabbing an opportunity that was meant for the girl led out unconsciously via elephant). But Jack Conrad is a star at the peak of his fame and power, played with undeniable brio by Brad Pitt, fully leaning into his charisma and the complications he brings when he lights up a screen. Isn’t that a requirement for a matinee idol? He rolls up to the party, top down, arguing with his wife (Olivia Wilde). He’s stumbling over his words, speaking Italian as she’s pouring her heart out, angry and pleading to be seen and heard. When she announces they’re getting a divorce, Jack is barely fazed. He’ll go in and out of marriages throughout the film’s meaty run time. There’s always more women.

More women. More drugs. More alcohol. More pleasure. Desires can never be met, only endlessly fed. So, when Manny and Nellie connect, they’re not just snorting lines of cocaine but sitting in front of mounds of it. With a dancerly cadence, Jack orders not just one drink but enough to get a decent-size dinner party drunk. “We’re also going to need two Gin Rickeys, an Orange Blossom with brandy, three French 75s, and can you do a Corpse Reviver? Gin, lemon, Kina Lillet, with a dash of absinthe. Two of those,” Jack says. Pitt draws out the word “dash” and leans into the server, who moments earlier yearned to catch his eye by putting her tits in his face. There are other moments of quietude amid the feverish pace of the film. Chazelle delights in such contrasts — the chaotic and the still, the virulent and the divine. Which is part of the problem: He’s more interested in how he’s looking than what he’s looking at, more compelled by the possibilities of a camera’s gaze rather than what the camera is pointed at: people with bodies as well as lives that are far less neat in trajectory than the film suggests.

The closest Chazelle’s work comes to capturing a truly heated extravagance is when Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is onscreen. She exists in a liminal space in the industry — known but not wholly respected or honored for her talent. She often writes titles for the films she fails to land auditions for. She gives the money she earns to her parents. But at the party, she’s something more. She’s a star as soon as her heels click against hardwood. Her gloved hand holds a cigarette to her lips and smoke dances along the shadows of her exquisite profile. Dressed in a way that nods to the gender-bending transgressions and silken glamour of Marlene Dietrich, Lady Fay is a sight as she sings about her love for her “girlfriend’s pussy.” Li Jun Li is marvelous in the role — tricksy and yearning — but she’s underserved by Chazelle’s impulses, which tend toward broad strokes rather than delightful details that lead characters to be more than amalgamations of archetypes pulled together from considerable research into an era clearly revered. (The film suggests a relationship between Nellie and Lady Fay, but the details of how their love affair develops are never explained beyond a newspaper spread.) Babylon ’s characters are at different stages of living and dying within the shores of Hollywood, but they are all bound to and by their cravings — for stardom, for power, for control. Chazelle is most intrigued by the vice that unspools from these desires and how they fuel Hollywood’s filmmaking on the most mechanical of levels, rather than the way it charges the people that populate these films.

Sure, there are characters fucking in a variety of positions, sometimes wearing a fake donkey head. (Notably, we don’t see any of the main characters having sex. That’s for extras.) The party scene, which clocks in at about 20 minutes, builds to a variety of drug-fueled moments meant to titillate, including one involving a man getting a Champagne bottle shoved up his ass. His face doesn’t speak to delight so much as the rush of anxiety that comes with being lost in a party of this sort. It is anxiety that fuels the film itself. Babylon is a stunning example of how sensuality isn’t simply born from having people in various states of undress. It must have a propulsion of its own, drawn from a curiosity about the figure as much as the mind and world around it.

Consider an early sequence in Babylon involving Spike Jonze as an intense German director, Otto. He’s screaming and pushing people around over the fact that the homeless extras from Skid Row are threatening to strike if not allowed to renegotiate their pay (a problem Manny figures out on horseback with a gun). More production upheavals announce themselves during the silent’s epic shoot, as titles on the screen note the time of day. Jack manipulates Gloria Swanson into taking a lower rate while knocking back enough alcohol to pickle a man in a single sitting. Manny fights the dying of the light to get a new camera across town for the movie’s most important shot. Meanwhile, Nellie gets her debut on another set, taking the place of the woman who overdosed. Nellie proves to have a preternatural skill for understanding the camera and demonstrating what Chazelle can’t: a palpable gratification from watching or being watched. She doesn’t just cry when asked — she can hold her tears for two beats before letting them drop, or summon a single one for maximum emotional pull. But back on Otto’s set, those mistakes abound. Jack is a stumbling drunk by the time Manny secures a camera — though once Otto calls “action,” it’s as if he’s instantly sober. Cast against the rose-golden sunset, he and his leading lady kiss as smoke plumes the air and the sounds of battle are drowned out by an orchestra. As if fated, a butterfly dances in the air before delicately landing on Jack’s shoulder. “We got it,” Otto says, at almost a whisper. The set roars with satisfaction. Babylon wants to engender awe for film, while only mildly critiquing the political and social mores upon which Hollywood was built. It’s as if Chazelle wants to push against our expectations of his industry’s history but is also deeply afraid he’ll lose the ability to make a movie like this again.

Babylon can be transfixing, before a feeling that the film is too polished, too neat, takes hold. The cinematography balances warmth and cloying darkness, communicating the delights and horrors in which characters are mired. The music carries itself with hard-won panache. The actors are game. The costuming, makeup, and hair design playfully experiment with the visual traits of the eras they traipse through to mixed but eye-catching results. The editing is elegant as it weaves together a cornucopia of needs, and is often a source of the film’s greatest humorous moments, cutting against expectation to place the audience further into the barely organized chaos of this ragged industry. Where it ultimately stumbles and falls is in its characterization — those particulars of humanity that the classic films Chazelle so loves excelled at portraying.

As the film marches deeper into the sound era, the lives of its main characters take bitter turns. Manny has moved up in the industry as a sound director and is newly identifying as a Spaniard, bowing to the racial strictures of the moviemaking system he so loves. Solidarity is traded in for a perch on the ledge of power, which comes to a head when Manny asks Sidney to use cork, dressing himself in blackface to put him in better balance with the darker-skinned musicians flanking him. (It’s a surface-level exploration of the cost of being a part of Hollywood then as a Black man.) Nellie’s brassy speech, classed New Jersey accent, and wild-child nature fall out of fashion for women, and she’s forced to adapt or let go of the stardom she was just starting to relish. Take after take of Nellie’s first foray into sound are marred by minor issues born of the sensitive, cumbersome equipment now required to make movies, culminating with an assistant director (P.J. Byrne) reaching volcanic levels of expletive-laden outbursts: “If anyone stops this scene again, I will shit on you. I will shit in your mouth!” Jack, on the other hand, is fighting against the inevitable: his own irrelevance. Chazelle is able to capture the general rhythms of this era but not quite the debauchery of the specifics that made rising and falling careerists tick. What he remembers most of all is the freedom all of these artists had, something he feels is slipping into nonexistence today.

America is a country built on forgetting its own sins, and Hollywood has inherited that forgetfulness. This is never more apparent than when Hollywood is playing itself. In a scene between Jack and Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist with haughty air, Jean Smart plays an idea of a person turned into a joke — a journalist who is as performative as the actors she chooses to chide in her column. As Jack’s professional reputation continues to slide, Elinor writes a blistering column questioning if his time in the spotlight has ended. “Your time has run out. […] It’s over. It’s been over for a while,” she says to him from behind her typewriter, with a lamenting splendor that matches the tenor of the score. Smart rises before the seated Jack and launches into an arch, self-conscious monologue that mirrors issues with Chazelle’s writing elsewhere:

“I know it hurts. No one asks to be left behind. But in a hundred years when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again. You see what that means? A child born in 50 years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like a friend, even though you breathed your last before he breathed his first. You’ve been given a gift. Be grateful. You’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”

But this scene worked for me, tapping into a somber quality that is wistful and nostalgic. Within the folds of this scene — Smart’s melancholic approach to the monologue and Pitt’s crystalline blue eyes brimming with sorrow — is the director’s conflict. He wants to print the legend of the silent era and what was lost when Hollywood found sound, and critique its mores at the same time. He’s torn between loving film and having to defend its existence, amounting to a movie fueled not by that scintillating thrill that powers the works he’s nodding to, but a deep fear about the extinction of his own kind. Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

Margot Robbie plays an ingénue, Brad Pitt a silent film star and Diego Calva a dreamer in this exuberantly messy look at La La Land's early days — an acid spin on 'Singin' in the Rain.'

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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With brash and bawdy “ Babylon ,” director Damien Chazelle blows something between a poisoned kiss and a big fat raspberry at the same town he so swoonily depicted in “La La Land.” Separated by nine decades and nearly an ocean of cynicism, the two Tinseltown-set films seem unlikely to have sprung from the same head; we might never suspect they had, were it not for musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz’s busy, hyper-jazzinated score. Here, Chazelle rewinds the clock to Hollywood’s raucous early days — specifically, the transition from silent filmmaking to talkies, when the industry was still fresh and figuring out what it could be.

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Chazelle lets us know right out of the gate the kind of picture he has in store when a rented elephant empties its bowels on an unlucky animal wrangler (and, given where the camera is placed, on our heads as well). That outrageous spectacle is instantly topped by a kinky scene in what could be Fatty Arbuckle’s bedroom, as a corpulent silent comic giddily awaits his golden shower. Later that night, the starlet who indulged him will be dead of a drug overdose, forcing a desperate studio fixer (Flea) to tap Mexican employee Manny Torres (Calva) to get creative in disposing of the body. Characters major and minor alike are constantly dying in “Babylon” — no fewer than eight over the course of the film, plus two more name-checked in Variety obits at the end — but the tone is pitched at such a satirical extreme, not a one registers emotionally. Not even you-know-who’s.

Chazelle has essentially orchestrated a loud, vulgar live-action cartoon of a film, and while it’s exhilarating at times to witness the sheer virtuosity of his staging, the performances are all over the place. “Babylon” sorely lacks a point of view. Manny’s the closest thing the movie offers to an audience proxy, starting out as a wide-eyed outsider to the opening fete and working his way up to a studio executive position. But when asked by force-of-nature party crasher Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) why he wants to be in showbiz, the best Manny can muster is “I just want to be part of something bigger, I guess.”

Nearly all the main characters get a why-movies-matter monologue. Nearly all are shabbily written. “All the c—s in Lafayette called me the ugliest mutt in the neighborhood. Well, let them see me now!” Nellie shouts after her dancing at the party gets her discovered. The way she sashays is out of period, but that’s one of Chazelle’s incongruous rules for the movie: He spent 15 years researching the era, tapped production designer Florencia Martin and costume pro Mary Zophres to get every little detail right, then banished anything (like the Charleston) that he thought might take audiences out of the experience. Later, movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt, mugging it up as a John Gilbert-like romantic lead) will question, “The man who puts gasoline in your tank goes to your movies — why? … Because he feels less alone there.”

Witnessing it all is a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who dictates her dispatches from the sidelines. She’s a curious character, an ahead-of-her-time Hedda Hopper, though she’s by far the most eloquent. Her “why they laughed” speech — “It’s those of us in the dark, those who just watch, who survive” — is the best scene in a movie full of far showier set pieces. Elinor will later be hired by the studio as a kind of manners coach for Nellie, which makes no sense, but then, neither does the idea that a scene-stealing bisexual woman named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), loosely inspired by Anna May Wong, serves as a cabaret singer by night but pays her bills painting intertitles.

The middle hour of the film, which finds Jack and Nellie adapting to the advent of sound, owes a huge debt to “Singin’ in the Rain.” Chazelle stacks one big set piece after another — a string-of-pearls structure, with bawdy comedy more than music being the focus of each — then smash-cuts to the next scene, often to a blaring burst of jazz, or else the melancholy plunk of Hurwitz’s broken-player-piano score. You could argue that Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is also one of the film’s main characters, although he gets a far more anemic share of the plot and could have been cut out completely without much changing the film’s chemistry. Whereas all the other principals get overwritten introductions, Sidney makes his entrance onstage, playing his trumpet. Chazelle is obsessed with jazz, so maybe that solo takes the place of a monologue. Or maybe editor Tom Cross is confronted with too many threads.

There are myriad other flamboyant characters in a whirling ensemble that borrows more than is reasonable from other directors. That big opening party, for example, appears to be Chazelle’s way of one-upping “New York, New York,” though it lacks Scorsese’s instinct for privileging character over camera moves. 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.”

In his book “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger spills the secrets of the Golden Age stars. “Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers,” he writes. “The legend overlooks one fact — fear. That ever present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.” Chazelle borrows both his title and that kernel of wisdom from Anger’s trashy tell-all, focusing on an alarming phenomenon from the late 1920s and early ’30s — before anyone dared to label such entertainment “art” — in which so many industry types took their own lives.

Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Marc Platt, Wild Chickens, Organism Pictures production. Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Tobey Maguire, Wyck Godfrey, Helen Estabrook, Adam Siegel.
• Crew: Director, writer: Damien Chazelle. Camera: Linus Sandgren. Editor: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.
• With: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.

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Babylon Reviews

Ultimately a condemnation of the Hollywood machine that crushes everyone with equitable cruelty and an ode to the innovative artistry and ineffable magic of the movies, whose siren call continues to lure audiences & filmmakers alike towards its warm glow.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Babylon isn't all bust, or even unwatchable, it is just overlong, overindulgent with nary a care...

Full Review | Jan 25, 2024

Babylon is provocative, but, at the same time, it highlights what almost serves as a thematic watermark in Chazelle's filmography: choosing success often means choosing suffering or torture. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Unsure if my brain will ever fully heal from what Chazelle goes-for-broke with in the extended finale, but one thing is certain: audiences may very well never see anything like it ever again. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to the viewer...

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 30, 2023

Babylon is built on the idea that the primary goal of the film world is to make the viewer feel something even if it is disgust and pity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 8, 2023

All-embracing, all-consuming, and yet wholly intimate, Chazelle’s masterful epic is not only an ode to where film came from but where it will further journey to continue capturing our hearts, minds, and souls.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

An eyeball-searing trip into a version of writer-director Chazelle’s Hollywood.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2023

Babylon’ goes big and refuses to be ignored, even if a much better, much shorter movie exists somewhere inside the messy sprawl.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Movie lovers will take to "Babylon" with a great deal of admiration, while others might struggle to notice how much it resonates within the film industry as part of historical importance.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Damien Chazelle’s Love Letter to Hollywood, Movies, Filmmaking, & its stars. A beautiful, hilarious, insane, ride through the debauchery of Hollywood & the stunning aspects of making a film. Wolf of Wall Street meets Hollywood. I LOVED it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

Chazelle cracks the fantasy facade of the film by breaking down the moving images into a collection of frames and solid colors that make us question how we actually perceive the screen.

Babylon is pure excess, to its own detriment. Chazelle became so lost in frolicking in the playground of the 1920s Hollywood he’s created that he forgot to tie it all together into something meaningful.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Babylon is a visual feast full of committed performances, charting years of the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age with all involved clearly having a riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Chazelle frames it as a tragicomic exercise that underscores power dynamics and the filmmaking process in a golden age of Hollywood cloaked in frenzy, elegance and fading stars on the brink of the abyss. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 4, 2023

Repulsive, wretched excess...

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 4, 2023

A fascinating mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 26, 2023

Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

For all that is great and grand in its use of history, the film is long and you can feel it, a problem when making an epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2023

As it stands, after two movies that started the “White People Freaking Out About Jazz” genre, I don’t have a lot of faith in Chazelle telling these stories and Babylon has shown me that my fears were founded.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Babylon’ is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood’s heyday

Margot robbie delivers a fearless performance as a cocaine-addled ingenue, but her character is ultimately abandoned by damien chazelle’s mash-up of a story.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Brad Pitt's character is meant to evoke John Garfield. The character of Jack Conrad is loosely based on John Gilbert. The story has been corrected.

Say this much for Damien Chazelle: He shows his audience exactly what he’s giving them within the first few minutes of “Babylon,” his bruised, black-eyed valentine to Hollywood’s sybaritic heyday. In a whopper of an opening number, Chazelle films the delivery of an elephant to the estate of film producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), a bravura scene of extravagance and excess that ends with not a few bit players covered in pachyderm waste — recalling the famous joke about the guy who cleans up after the circus every day. Asked why he doesn’t quit, he replies with incredulity: “What, and leave show business?”

That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, ultimately ambiguous portrait of American cinema before the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts on a once-glorious tribe of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imagination made movies on the fly, not to send a message but to see how far they could push a medium still in its infancy. Raffish, ungovernable and not a little unhinged, the early settlers of 1920s Hollywoodland were, by Chazelle’s reckoning, a motley crew of wackos and visionaries, prone to self-destruction but also to soaring flights of inspiration and ecstasy.

At least, I think that’s “Babylon’s” point? Quite honestly, by the time this muddled, overcrowded, tiresomely digressive trip finally crashes like so many post-binge hangovers, Chazelle’s point has gotten lost in a self-indulgent, manically erratic shuffle. Once the elephant is delivered, it becomes the centerpiece of a raging party of unfettered drinking, drugging, sex and a near-death. A fetish-y scene of an overweight man and his young date recalls the scandalous life and career of Fatty Arbuckle; the pencil-mustached Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, in a silky, endearingly sensitive turn) is clearly meant to evoke John Gilbert; and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the cocaine-addled ingenue who’s plucked from obscurity to become a star, seems to be based on Mabel Normand.

Cinema nerds will find plenty of similar parlor-game diversions in “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. (Is the director Nellie works with based on Dorothy Arzner? Anita Loos? Alice Guy-Blaché? Discuss!) But for those not keeping score at home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a narrative cracking along at a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young man she befriends at Wallach’s party, gets his own chance to leave elephant detail. Played by newcomer Diego Calva in a performance reminiscent of a youthful Javier Bardem, Manny is the ethical center of a film that whirls, gyre-like, into the outré reaches of depravity and dissolution.

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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. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” which the filmmaker will quote literally in a climax that’s meant to be a moving testament to film’s endurance as an art form, “Babylon” takes place at the cusp of the sound era, when the license and licentiousness of the silents gave way to the rationalized — and fatally sanitized — production practices of the talkies. Manny’s big break comes when he rushes from a remote movie location to Los Angeles to replace a camera; he gets back just before the director is about to lose the light, thereby inadvertently discovering magic hour. In a welcome quiet moment, a Louella-or-is-it-Hedda-like reporter played by Jean Smart schools Jack in the ways of graceful aging in a touching speech about obsolescence and eternity.

Such are the romantic touches that give “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists in a revisionist dream space in which anarchy and art go hand in hand, even as the body count piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie as a creature of insatiable appetites — for fame but most especially cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed energy fuels the entire cockeyed caravan. Lewd, lascivious, libidinous, Nellie is the heroine of a picture that begins to feel hectoring in its admiration for her most outrageous antics (the difference between madcap and mayhem lies only in a few random letters, after all). Let’s put it this way: If you must see one movie this year featuring projectile vomiting as an indictment of the upper classes, make it “ Triangle of Sadness .” Conversely, if you must see one movie this year featuring a pointless and seemingly endless snake-fight scene, “Babylon” is your best bet.

Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists in “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose travails as an African American in a mostly White medium come to an offensively absurdist head when he’s asked to perform in blackface. Although he’s a welcome addition to the proceedings, Sidney’s storyline gets lost in Chazelle’s frantic intercutting, which becomes a case of diminishing returns as “Babylon” reaches its panicky denouement: a scene featuring a ghoulish Tobey Maguire, in which he seems to be channeling “ Boogie Nights ”-era Alfred Molina by way of “ Nightmare Alley .”

By this point, the pleasure seekers decadently partying their way through “Babylon” have looked to pain for their biggest turn-on. The breathless energy begins to feel exponentially more forced (and, frankly, unpleasant) the harder Chazelle works to sustain it. Robbie delivers a fearless portrayal of a woman trying to outrun the forces seeking to domesticate her, but she’s abandoned by a story that amounts to little more than a mash-up of moments that, for all their high aesthetic and production value, feel shallow and not terribly original. Even “Babylon’s” final moments — intended to be Chazelle’s crowning paean to cinema at its most expressive and transporting — can’t bring the hazy stuff-for-stuff’s-sake into focus.

Like so many recent films — “ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ,” “ Belfast ,” “ The Fabelmans ,” “ Empire of Light ” — “Babylon” wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn. Which, in a backhanded way, might make it an accidentally honest portrayal of a medium that has always wanted to have its coke and snort it, too.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong and crude sexual material, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive coarse language. 188 minutes.

Review: ‘Babylon’ douses you with sex, drugs, vomit and elephant diarrhea. You … might like it?

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Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” begins in a dusty stretch of Southern California desert in the 1920s, with the delivery of an elephant that will serve as one of the more quixotic performers at an exclusive Hollywood house party. While being carted uphill to the venue where various movers and shakers will soon descend — and where great quantities of cocaine will be inhaled amid an orgiastic swirl of dancing, rutting, mostly naked bodies — the poor pachyderm, either sensing disaster or experiencing some early stage fright, violently evacuates its bowels in the direction of the camera.

The movie concludes, some three hours and roughly three decades later, with something no less messily eruptive. Let’s be tactful and call it an explosion of cinema, a simultaneously dazzling and depressing survey of a motion-picture medium whose formative years we have just, in some measure, witnessed. These two sequences might sound at first like incongruous bookends. But after enduring — and I must say, enjoying much of — this wild and pungent cinematic bacchanal, I’m of the mind that they actually form a logical progression.

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The point seems to be that Hollywood, dreamily identified here as “the most magical place in the world,” has in fact always been a seething cauldron of iniquity, vulgarity and vice. The vast, underdeveloped sprawl of Los Angeles, seen here in its pre-metropolitan infancy, is both a literal Wild West and a freewheeling filmmaking bazaar, populated by gangsters, con artists, imbeciles and madmen, and as yet ungoverned by any semblance of a Production Code. Movie stars — like the ones played here by a crisply tuxedoed Brad Pitt and a wildly vampy Margot Robbie — are indulged but also manipulated, exploited and treated like high-priced chattel. Bit players, musicians, sound guys and various other expendables have it significantly worse.

What this ragtag empire produces, against considerable odds, is entertainment: emotion, wonderment and, on occasion, art, to be lapped up by an eager and easily enchanted moviegoing public. But if we were to glimpse what actually transpired in the belly of the beast, to see everything the system chewed up and spat out — well, that elephant’s fecal shower might start to feel pleasant by comparison.

These are hardly new ideas, as the movie’s title — with its glancing nod to Kenneth Anger’s scandal-choked “Hollywood Babylon” books — duly acknowledges. But there is some novelty in its sourness, coming as it does from the writer-director of the enchantingly sweet and sunny “La La Land.” (Several collaborators on that picture are reunited on this one, including cinematographer Linus Sandgren, editor Tom Cross and, most recognizably, composer Justin Hurwitz.) Then again, the soul-crushing struggles and dashed dreams of working artists have long been grist for Chazelle’s creative mill, and in some ways the corrosive showbiz cynicism of “Babylon” feels less like a reversal than a strategic reframing.

You could think of this movie as “La La Land’s” manic, mean-spirited cousin, spinning like a tornado through the Hollywood hothouse of the 1920s and ’30s, and spraying booze, excrement, vomit, gunfire and blood in all directions. At some point — maybe when Robbie tussles with a rattlesnake, or when someone ingests a live rat — you may well wonder: Is this movie a bloated, ghastly wreck, or merely a credible depiction of a bloated, ghastly wreck? That may be a distinction without a difference. In any event, I’ll admit that I found much of “Babylon” mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

Its most attention-grabbing headliner is Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a temptress in red who’s a star already in the making and unmaking. Recently arrived in L.A. from New Jersey, she’s first seen gate-crashing that epic party and tearing it up like a demon on the dance floor, high on cocaine and her own confidence. But Nellie’s is just one of a few loosely intertwined stories this movie has to tell. The camera, sweeping gracefully through the party crowd (as though borne aloft by the few sober revelers in attendance), briefly zeroes in on Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a gifted trumpet player in the band, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a singer who’s basically Anna May Wong by way of Marlene Dietrich. Taking the stage in a tuxedo and top hat, she naughtily teases the crowd with a double-entendre overload of a song — a performance calculated to remind or reveal to you that silent-era Hollywood wasn’t as straight, white or male as you thought.

Mostly, though, the camera gravitates toward a droll A-lister named Jack Conrad (Pitt), first seen surveying the festivities from a balcony; several hours later, he’ll take a drunken tumble from his own. Is the sight of him floating face down in his own swimming pool meant to evoke Jay Gatsby or Joe Gillis ? At any rate, he survives with his ego, his dreams of screen immortality and his sky-high ambitions for the medium intact: “We got to innovate. We got to inspire. What happens on that screen means something,” he tells Manny Torres (a fine Diego Calva), the elephant transporter and eager jack-of-all-trades whose wide-eyed gaze ties most of these stories together.

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. One sequence in particular strongly evokes — did I say evokes? I meant it blatantly, gleefully rips off Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” an allusion that’s nothing if not instructive. Hollywood moviemaking and San Fernando Valley smut peddling may have their differences — here, an actor’s visibly tented crotch counts as a blooper rather than a highlight — but they are united by the same antic, anything-goes energy and improvisational spirit.

The most electrifying sequences in “Babylon” fully embrace that spirit. The first-act highlight surveys a typically frenzied day in the life of a Hollywood shoot, during which everything must go unthinkably wrong before it can go improbably right. It’s here that Manny, scrambling to find a replacement camera on a lavish medieval epic, makes his initial mark behind the scenes, while Nellie, starring in a tawdry barroom melodrama, shows off her acting chops, especially when it comes to turning on the waterworks. (Having a smart director, played by a terrific Olivia Hamilton, surely helps.)

This is the glory of moviemaking in the silent era: big, gestural performances, lavish outdoor shoots and a nonstop background cacophony that the cameras will never register. The talkie revolution, by contrast, will demand silence on the set — an irony not lost on Chazelle, who proceeds to orchestrate a riotous comedy of errors, cycling through take after aborted take on an unbearably hot soundstage. The demand for new heights of actorly precision takes its toll on Nellie, the unlucky Lina Lamont in this cruel mash note to “Singin’ in the Rain.” It also will weigh heavily on Jack, whose career end is soon prophesied by the Hollywood gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart, sharply channeling Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper).

Pitt, who often does his best work by deflecting his own A-lister aura, is believable enough as an actor who’s beginning to doubt his own stardom, and who suspects that he may have been a second-rate talent all along. Robbie, finding notes of emotional nuance in between blasts of pure Hollywood-diva id, wrings a few entertaining variations on past roles: Again she gets a kick out of watching herself in a movie, as she did in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and again she is dismissed as too unrefined for a mercilessly fickle industry, as she was in “I, Tonya.” Pitt and Robbie are both well cast in roles that don’t ultimately deserve them, that never take on an indelible, specific life of their own. They’re not playing characters so much as ideas of characters; they’re walking, talking demonstrations of just how ephemeral and exploitative Hollywood stardom can be.

Jack and Nellie are at least afforded significant screen time, as is Manny, who falls hopelessly in love with the movies and Nellie at the same time and is doomed to be let down by both. But speaking of letdowns: Sidney and Lady Fay, perhaps the two most interesting (and talented) artists onscreen, are given woefully short shrift. That’s a shame, considering they’re meant to represent the hardworking entertainers who hustled and hauled ass in the margins and achieved the prominence they deserved in a profoundly racist industry. (And a profoundly homophobic one, as we see once Lady Fay and Nellie start to generate potentially career-destroying headlines.) But Chazelle’s writing of these characters feels much too hesitant and insubstantial, and he gives Adepo and Li far too little to chew on. In his eagerness to honor undersung performers, he winds up marginalizing them all over again.

There’s something instructive in that failure, and it speaks to the raging confusion, verging on incoherence, at the heart of “Babylon” — namely, its insistence on being both a poison-pen letter and a valentine, a decadent celebration and a politically conscious corrective. It’s not that a movie about the evils of blackface couldn’t also be a movie about, say, the evils of Tobey Maguire doing his scariest Alfred Molina impression. It’s that Chazelle, a director of impressive chops and a writer of often hasty, ill-formed ideas, isn’t strong enough to make those movies breathe as one. He would have to be either much more in control or much less in control of his instincts to do so.

Maybe that’s why “Babylon” ends, either spectacularly or with spectacular foolishness, with what feels like an aesthetic breakdown. As we watch by the light of the projector beam, the Dream Factory careens into nightmare territory, and the forces of nostalgia and nihilism duke it out to a draw. Is Chazelle composing a letter of good riddance to the criminally toxic industry of yesteryear, or directing an Old Hollywood version of a “movies, now more than ever” PSA? Maybe he’s doing both, in an attempt to acknowledge the complicated legacy and the lasting, contradictory power of the movies. And why not? Somehow, elephant dung feels good in a place like this .

Rated: R, for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive language Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 23 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, ​the ​La La Land​ director’s ​overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

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To Love and Hate in L.A.: ‘Babylon’ Must Be Seen to Be Believed

Damien Chazelle’s rambunctious new feature is either a celebration of Old Hollywood or an ode to the death of the entire industry—but above all else, it seems deliberately designed to kill his own career

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Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not a movie that lacks moments of potential self-critique, from the fire hose–like spray of pachyderm shit that douses the characters in its first scene—a nod as much to the elephant-sized proportions of this $80 million period piece as to its scatological attitude—to a gut-churning atrocity-exhibition climax located, per one character’s unforgettable description, in “the asshole of Los Angeles.” You don’t write a line like that in a movie that imagines silent-era Hollywood as the ninth circle of hell if you don’t want critics to single it out as your rhetorical equivalent of “Rosebud.”

There is, however, a quieter exchange midway through Babylon that gets closer to the gooey, arrhythmic heart of Chazelle’s project. Sharing a cab on a rainy day in New York, newly minted starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and studio gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) have a gentle, mutually affectionate heart-to-heart. She’s in town to duck the paparazzi who’ve made her into America’s new it girl, a “wild child” known for her lascivious performing style. He’s there to scope out the preview of The Jazz Singer , a new “talking” picture that threatens to completely rewrite the industry rule book. What these two foundlings turned insiders end up talking about, though, is ice cream, and what they like to put on it. Nellie’s favorite topping is all of them—as good a metaphor as any for a nauseous, high-calorie sugar rush of a movie that not only wants to have its cake and eat it too, but also to puke it up, smear it around, and cram it in the viewer’s face.

“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. There are scenes of raging, quasi-surrealist degradation here that Adam McKay would kill to direct, and bits so dour and pretentious and sentimental that they may even justify Oscar nominations. This wildly erratic, at times shockingly unpleasant concoction arrives just under the wire as the most surprising and potentially polarizing American movie of the year—a parable of artistic license and ends-justify-the-means ambition that’s as ethically inscrutable as Tár and as awash in alienation effects as Blonde , with an even deeper love-letter-to-the-movies subtext than Empire of Light or The Fabelmans . It even somehow boasts a direct connection to Avatar that, like a half dozen other tricks it has crammed up its sleeves, has to be seen to be believed.

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Make no mistake: All of this discombobulation is very much on purpose, as if Chazelle—whose biggest hits, Whiplash and La La Land , were, in their way, crowd pleasers—were trying to recast himself as a black sheep in an industry that’s already embraced him as a precocious prodigy. A case can be made that Chazelle’s first movie, the charming, black-and-white hipster romance Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), is still his best; certainly, it’s the one in which his love of musicals and preoccupation with the balancing act between creativity and personal stability rings truest, with the best ratio of invention to self-indulgence. The bigger his movies got, though, the more they felt imbued with show-offy style and a bizarre masochism about art. Whiplash was basically Full Metal Jacket for jazz majors, minus Kubrick’s satirical (and political) subtext, while First Man sacrificed the exhilaration and uplift of other astronaut biopics for a sweaty, white-knuckled anxiety that stalled at the box office.

Well-made, conspicuously expensive, and emotionally remote, First Man was the sort of movie you make when you have an Oscar in your back pocket and you’re cashing in your chips. Babylon is something else entirely—like a guy who’s already all in tossing his watch, car keys, and wedding ring into the pot. Hollywood history is littered with titles whose directors had reason to fear that they might never work in this town again, but Babylon is on the short list of movies that seem almost deliberately designed as career killers. It is, on some level, an affront to its subject matter and its audience, yet the mix of exuberance, insolence, and white-hot melancholic guilt at its core makes it just as hard to hate as to love. Gold-plated, fur-lined, and spattered with precious bodily fluids of every kind, Chazelle’s film somehow aims high while also going low. It’s a hymn to its own filthy ambivalence.

The use of the Mexican-born Manny—a cipher with no obvious historical corollary in a narrative where fictional and real-life celebrities rub shoulders (and body parts)—is fascinating and telling. One of the principal criticisms of La La Land was of its weirdly deracinated view of Los Angeles, the way that the multicultural chorus singing and dancing their way through the traffic-jam-set opener “Another Day of Sun” more or less fell away in order to keep the focus on Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s lily-white strivers. The only major character of color was John Legend’s gregarious Top 40–oriented sellout; otherwise, Black people existed in the movie to implicitly authenticate Gosling’s love of jazz, whether by serving as backing musicians or smiling politely while he twirled them around at the end of a pier. Relitigating the racial politics of a six-year-old movie is nobody’s idea of a good time, but Chazelle seems determined to evoke the problematic aspects of his Oscar-winning triumph, whether as penance, confessional, or rationalization. Manny’s steady rise from below-the-line factotum and assistant to Brad Pitt’s vainglorious matinee idol, Jack Conrad, to hard-boiled studio executive provides the film with its strongest through line, and he’s just one of several characters meant to embody (and challenge) the erasure of nonwhite figures in romanticized accounts of Hollywood’s history. Others include Jovan Adepo ’s ace Black trumpet player, Sidney Palmer, and Li Jun Li ’s lesbian cabaret-singer-slash-intertitle-writer, Lady Fay Zhu, both of whom get plot arcs that testify to their artistic and cultural innovations—and unrealized star potential—while gesturing toward the larger factors in their marginalization.

The politically correct thrust of these subplots is theoretically meant to balance out—or at least provide ballast to—the bacchanalian madness of Babylon as a whole, which kicks off with a 30-minute pre-credit prologue set at an isolated, free-for-all orgy in the upper reaches of the Hollywood Hills. If Singin’ in the Rain is Babylon ’s spirit guide, then Boogie Nights —and the big-dick aesthetic of Paul Thomas Anderson in general—is its how-to manual. The movie isn’t five minutes old before a scantily clad party guest ODs in a back room after urinating on a corpulent man’s face, her convulsions registered in glancing fashion in the midst of an endlessly whirling, look-ma-no-hands tracking shot. In fact, the swift, relentless virtuosity of the filmmaking is probably the only thing standing between Babylon and an NC-17 rating, since the nudity and debauchery get abstracted into one gigantic, writhing, fleshy blur. (If you played the opening sequence at half speed you’d have Eyes Wide Shut .)

It’s into this unhinged milieu that Robbie makes her entrance, cheerfully smashing her car into one of the mansion’s statues. Nellie is an uninvited but ultimately very welcome guest who’s barely made it past the front door before she’s knee-deep in cocaine, a substance that has the same basic effect on her as spinach did on Popeye. In synthesizing the look and attributes of various pre-code stars, including the notoriously hard-living Clara Bow, Robbie has the showiest role in Babylon and makes the most of it, oscillating between feral, strung-out exhibitionism, crackerjack physical comedy, and endearing rag-doll fragility without breaking a sweat. Her triumph comes not so much in spite of her character’s archetypal dimensions as through them; when she reveals that her ability to cry on command—a priceless asset in the silent era, with its vocabulary of rapturous, wordless close-ups—is as simple as thinking about her miserable backwater home, it’s a laughably simplistic bit of character psychology given bravura shading. Like Emma Stone in La La Land , Robbie is basically playing ambition personified, except that she’s obliged to go to darker and more daring places along the way. By the time a wasted, half-naked Nellie is taunting a roomful of alpha-male admirers to fight a cobra on her behalf—and resolving that she’s going to have to do it herself—the only reasonable response to the performance is a kind of stunned admiration.

Nellie’s indomitable spirit and tarnished-angel innocence are irresistible to Manny, who’s otherwise pragmatic about an industry whose many illusions fail to fool him. For instance, he’s sympathetic to Pitt’s fading superstar but he also sees right through him. (Pitt’s acting here verges on laziness; Jack’s rumpled, deflated handsomeness is just right, but he lacks the self-deprecating specificity of Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .) It’s Manny who recognizes the paradigm-shifting potential of The Jazz Singer , and who labors to keep his own studio on the cutting edge, a process that’s depicted in line with Chazelle’s usual themes of art as a form of self-annihilation. Except that this time out, instead of psychological torture à la Whiplash , we actually get filmmaking as a matter of life and death—over and over again. In one bravura set piece synced to a ticking-clock conceit, Jack’s crew (which includes a Germanic director played in a perfect cameo by [ redacted ]) needs to get a shot before the end of Magic Hour; over the course of one afternoon, the production of a biblical epic devolves into clumsy, life-threatening slapstick, with underpaid extras corralled at the barrel of a gun and one unfortunate day player impaled by a spear. Cut to a few years later and the production of an innocuous talkie comedy set on a college campus results in another on-set casualty—the morbid, inevitable punch line to a breathlessly acted and edited set piece that takes the behind-the-scenes confusion of Lina Lamont’s squawky dialogue recording in Singin’ in the Rain and weaponizes it.

To say that the historical veracity of these scenes—and their suggestion of Old Hollywood as a sort of haphazard abattoir populated by lunatics—is up for debate is an understatement. There’s evidence here of deep research, but also of a filmmaker who isn’t all that interested in how early production actually worked—not when it’s more effective to cultivate total chaos. But even if one accepts the manic stylization of the filmmaking scenes in Babylon , it’s genuinely hard to tell how the movie feels about the period—whether the overarching attitude is one of nostalgia or horror. This ambivalence is, in and of itself, a point of interest, since most movies made at Babylon ’s budget level are afraid to put any onus of interpretation on the audience. But it’s also risky. Viewers in search of tonal or ideological coherence—or who know anything about the period being depicted—are likely to be frustrated, or even outraged. In Time, Stephanie Zacharek, who has often written passionately and perceptively about the cinema of the early 20th century, unloaded on Chazelle for his callow, opportunistic treatment of the past, writing that “he treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.”

I actually found Babylon less condescending than La La Land , which, to borrow a withering phrase from Film Comment’ s Michael Koresky , seemed to be trying to Make Movies Great Again—to escape into an idealized past without actually turning back the clock. Babylon ’s return to the primal scene is about something more unsettling and complicated: the idea that mass entertainment depends on smoothing out—and often denying—the contradictions that go into its creation. On the one hand, Chazelle’s array of characters and their various frustrations verges on caricature: the hard-working immigrant bedazzled (and derailed) by a hapless blond; the ingenue hypnotized by her own charisma; the old hand staring down his own personal and professional obsolescence. At the same time, Babylon is clear-eyed about the blurry relationship between supply and demand that has always been at the center of the movie business: that the utopian fantasies on the screen exist in an impossible space between the flawed and all too human constituencies that both build and receive them.

Late in the film, in yet another moment that feels engineered to give critics something to chew over, a Hollywood gossip columnist played by Jean Smart delivers a monologue to Pitt’s character about the strange immortality conferred by motion pictures. She tells him that long after he’s dead, his image will serve to comfort, inspire, and entertain. Posterity is obviously important to Chazelle, and it may be that he’s made Babylon in kamikaze mode because he suspects it’s one way to keep it from being forgotten in the long run—that the same manic, unsettling intensity that will likely make it a flop in real time could help to sustain it as a cult item. But there’s also a deeper anxiety in play here. In a moment when the earth dies streaming and everything from Marvel to micro-budget indies is distributed and received as content, what Chazelle may be sweating is the death of cinema itself—a perspective that recontextualizes the film’s bonkers closing montage of the medium’s greatest hits not as a celebration, but a long goodbye. If that’s the case, then one way to look at Babylon is as a wake—loud and cathartic, raucous and bleary-eyed, embarrassing and heartfelt. But another would be as the cinematic equivalent of Tim Robinson wearing that hot dog suit in I Think You Should Leave , finding culprits for an art form’s untimely demise by looking everywhere except in the mirror.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Babylon Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About Damian Chazelle’s Hollywood Epic

Audiences are in for a wild ride.

After providing audiences with Academy Award winners like Whiplash , La La Land and First Man , Damien Chazelle is back to fill our holiday season with another wild story that’s likely to be in contention for next year’s biggest awards . Babylon is a movie about movies, as audiences will follow five main characters through the era when Hollywood was transitioning from silent film to talkies. First reactions to Babylon were mixed, with people calling it everything from “a love letter to cinema” to “a flaming hot mess.” Now the reviews are here to help us decide if we’ll be taking a trip to the theater for Christmas.

Babylon ’s impressive ensemble is one reason to be excited about the movie , as it stars Margot Robbie , Brad Pitt , Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li, whose characters jump through time, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows of their careers. Let’s see what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Babylon . Eric Eisenberg rates the film 3 stars out of 5, saying that while the first half is one of the best movies of the year, it’s destined to be divisive, yet still worth the watch. His take:

At its best, Babylon is exciting, hilarious, and a blast… but those adjectives are mostly reserved for describing approximately the first 90 minutes. The back half of the film, while it does have its highlights, demonstrates an inability for the movie to fully carry its own weight, and the multi-faceted narrative descends into tropes and some groan-worthy material before the end credits start to roll.

Leah Greenblatt of EW grades the film a C-, saying Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey  the depravity of Hollywood, for “three turgid, clattering hours,” and the result is frankly exhausting. She says in the review:  

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt; sex is universal currency, and death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline.

Tomris Laffly of AV Club , however, calls Babylon “masterful,” grading the “deliciously decadent” movie an A and saying it’s not a minute too long. The critic says despite what’s going on on-screen, this is the writer/director’s most clear-headed film: 

With an electric score by Justin Hurwitz (that occasionally resembles the chords in Chazelle’s La La Land too audibly), it’s all pure, eye-gouging debauchery for 30 or so minutes. Before the suggestive title Babylon appears, there will be plenty of orgies, mountains of drugs, sexual fetishes, naughty performance bits, projectile vomiting, and more sweaty bare bodies than one can count.

Babylon shows yet again that Damien Chazelle isn’t afraid to swing for the fences or go too far, according to Travis Hopson of Punch Drunk Critics , making him a filmmaker always worth checking out. However, only the lead trio get the proper amount of attention, and themes of race and homophobia would likely have been better off omitted since they’re not properly explored, the critic argues, rating the film 3 out of 5 stars:  

Like the blitzed-out-of-its-mind lovechild of Boogie Nights and The Wolf of Wall Street, Damien Chazelle’s exciting, exhausting, and sloppy ode to jazz age Hollywood, Babylon, features elephant shit and golden showers in the first ten minutes. It also features a Los Angeles as you’ve rarely seen it…tranquil. For a moment, anyway. The city is in the midst of an epic transition, not just from silent movies into ‘talkies’, but the city as a whole from quiet desert to sprawling show business epicenter. They say that Hollywood will chew people up and spit them out, but this has always been true. Never moreso than the tragic, hopeful, and thrilling era that Chazelle lovingly, maddeningly depicts.

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast calls Babylon “an orgy of every worst idea in Hollywood” and a story about the roaring ‘20s in which  no one looks, acts, or talks like they’re from that decade. The critic says the movie steals from every great director before collapsing in on itself. More from Schager:

Chockablock with profanity, nudity, and all manner of demented degradation, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to First Man is a three-hour work of grand and grotesque excess that strives to celebrate the wondrous power of the movies. All it does, however, is crassly steal the magic of its superior ancestors, right up to a finale that parasitically pinches yesteryear’s classics for the pathos it can’t conjure on its own.

Love it or hate it, people are definitely going to be talking about Damien Chazelle’s latest offering, especially in regards to awards. If you want to be in the conversation, you’ll be able to see this one for yourself in theaters starting Friday, December 23. Be sure to also check out what’s headed to the big screen in the new year with our 2023 Movie Release Schedule .

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Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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What Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Saying About Babylon

Some may argue that we are living in an age of the "critic-proof" blockbuster, but with an auteur-driven project like Damien Chazelle's upcoming old Hollywood epic "Babylon," prospective viewers might be particularly attuned to what the film critic crowd has to say about the film.

"Babylon" has an expansive ensemble cast, led by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, and bolstered by such ringers as Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, Olivia Wilde, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist and occasional actor Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, and many more. It has an expansive runtime to go with it, clocking in at three hours and eight minutes – another factor that might have indecisive viewers seeking critical guidance.

So, is "Babylon" another great Hollywood myth about itself in the tradition of "Sunset Blvd," "Singin' in the Rain," or "The Bad and the Beautiful"? Or is it more of a throwback to bloated, out-of-control epics like "Cleopatra" or "Doctor Dolittle"? Here's what film critics who have already filed their takes on the movie, set to open wide on the upcoming holiday weekend, had to say.

The film currently has a respectable Tomatometer score

If you've been looking forward to catching "Babylon" in theaters (three-hour runtime and all), you'll be pleased to know that with 49 reviews and counting on Rotten Tomatoes , critical response to the film is much more positive than negative, with a Tomatometer score of 71 percent as of this writing.

Beth Webb of Empire Online describes the film as "[a] daring, formally audacious yet messy ode to cinema from one of the most enterprising filmmakers working today. Bravura and baffling in equal measure" in her review, which awards the film three out of five stars.

That kind of mixed praise seems to be something of a motif, at least in the reviews of "Babylon" that have made it online so far. Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times is even more ambivalent, admitting "I can't say I truly enjoyed watching 'Babylon,' or that I'd ever want to see it again, but I definitely haven't stopped thinking about it since screening it," an assessment that will either encourage or discourage you from giving the movie a try, depending on what type of moviegoer you are.

But Edward Douglas of The Weekend Warrior is unreservedly enthusiastic in his review. "Damien Chazelle's tribute to Old Hollywood is absolutely nuts in the best possible way," Douglas says.

But of course, when even a movie's positive reviews seem a little exasperated by a movie, you can expect a few pans as well.

Not all critics have been enthusiastic

Interestingly, some of the more negative reviews of "Babylon" seen on Rotten Tomatoes seem to paint a similar picture of the movie. Kristy Puchko of Mashable calls it "a ghastly, sticky, indulgent mess of a movie, slinging shock value in lieu of anything interesting to say," while Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair says "[i]t begins to feel, as 'Babylon' stretches out across three hours and eight minutes, that Chazelle has no clear idea where all of this is going."

At Cup of Soul, Kathia Woods compares "Babylon" to other Hollywood auto-epics, and finds it lacking by comparison: "Many films have been made about the beginnings of the film industry, and the majority of them have been informative and entertaining, but 'Babylon' is not one of them."

It appears that the one word everyone can agree on to describe "Babylon" would likely be "polarizing," and it will be interesting to see how its Tomatometer score holds up as more and more reviews come in. And its audience score, which will probably start racking up votes in the near future, will be interesting to watch as well.

You'll be able to make your own decision about the film's artistic value when "Babylon" opens wide in the US on December 23, 2022.

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Babylon First Reactions: Ambitious and Extravagant but Messy and Excessive

Social media reactions to damien chazelle's latest have been wildly diverse, ranging from effusive praise to gross disappointment..

TAGGED AS: movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Babylon :

Is Babylon a grandiose success?

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a dazzling, dizzying cacophony of demented depravity. A rebellious, outrageous portrait of golden-era hedonistic Hollywood. –  Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Extravagant, decadent and all together delightfully delicious. –  Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Damien Chazelle pulls out all the stops, works without a filter, and takes a mighty big swing on Babylon . It’s bold, audacious, wild filmmaking. –  Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

Babylon is A LOT of movie – a purposeful mess. –  Yolanda Machado, Entertainment Weekly

Or is Babylon a bold failure?

Babylon is an ambitious mess of a film. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Babylon is a flaming hot mess… Easily Damien Chazelle’s worst film. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Chaotic, opulent, and a bloated mess. – Matt Donato, Paste Magazine

(Photo by ©Paramount Pictures)

Is it a stunning sensation?

Babylon is a daring Hollywood epic that utterly shocks the senses. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

My eyes were never bored; my brain is still catching up. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Or is it just gross debauchery?

Truly monstrous in its thudding insistence on shoving the viewer’s face in the muck and claiming it’s something novel or moving. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

Babylon feels like if someone read Damien Chazelle the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and then he said, “Hold my beer!” – Clayton Davis, Variety

Is there still some great work from Damien Chazelle?

Babylon is phenomenal filmmaking. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Damien Chazelle incorporates his signature musicality and movement throughout. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Chazelle might be the most confident director in Hollywood today; of course, he’s also got some of the worst instincts out there. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

Damien Chazelle brings buckets of energy to Babylon , but it’s never not pounding and obvious and, finally, uninsightful. – Joshua Rothkopf, Entertainment Weekly

How are the visuals?

Cinematically, it is super grand, some insane, incredibly ambitious tracking shots that are so impressive and choreographed. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Stellar production values and costume design. – Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

Awe-inducing costume and production design. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

What about the performances?

Margot Robbie and Diego Calva give huge performances. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Margot Robbie is a live wire. Diego Calva is sensational. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Margot Robbie’s best performance to date. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Pitt and Jovan Adepo give the best performances in the movie. Robbie gives it her all but the character is so one note. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

Margot Robbie tries but the script fails her. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Is the soundtrack worth checking out?

Justin Hurwitz’s score is phenomenal from top to bottom! – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

The score is outstanding. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Justin Hurwitz’s score is one hell of a wall of sound. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Justin Hurwitz ripping off his La La Land score is sending me. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

The music!!! Oomph, the music and visuals are 100!!! – Yolanda Machado, Entertainment Weekly

Is it also a love letter to the movies?

This is Damien Chazelle’s love letter to movie-making. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

A love letter to cinema that made me hate cinema. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Does it ultimately lack focus?

Babylon has some incredibly strong sequences but overall lacked focus and couldn’t support so many key characters. – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

The tone is all over the place. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

A tonal disaster. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Is it reminiscent of any other films or filmmakers?

Babylon is like a raucous, wild mix of Singin’ in the Rain and Boogie Nights . – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Early PTA meets Baz Luhrmann vis-à-vis unchecked excess. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Everything about it is borrowed — even down to Tobey Maguire stealing the film as its Alfred Molina. A Scorsese coke film by a squeaky-clean director. – Daniel Howat, Next Best Picture

Does at least some of it work?

First half is great… – Clayton Davis, Variety

It’s wild, over-the-top bravura entertains for two hours. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Babylon throttles forward with excessive momentum to start, the first hour(ish) easily engages. – Matt Donato, Paste Magazine

But is it too long?

At three hours and eight minutes, it’s a lotta movie. – Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

It’s A LOT of movie packed into that time but I was never bored and it flew by for me. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Babylon is 3 hours long and the last hour, the fall of old Hollywood is purposefully dire, but enervating and draining, sucking some of the loopy whippet whirling dervish helium energy out of the picture. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Is the ending any good?

It has the best ending of the year, one of the all-time hat tips to the cinema. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Special shame must go to the ending, a shameless play for illogical importance and somehow an even more insulting tribute to Godard than Hazanavicius. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

The very last scene, “the power of cinema” borders on (crosses for many) grand eye-rolling pretension that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Not a great way to end a movie you mighta admired. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Any final assessments?

Loved! – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Didn’t love it. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

Babylon is one of the worst films of 2022. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Babylon opens in theaters everywhere on December 23, 2022.

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Latest Is an Orgy of Excess — and That’s Why It Rocks

Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva star in this truly absurd and engrossing story of early Hollywood.

Damien Chazelle always likes to start his movies with a bang, whether through an intense drum solo in Whiplash , a Jacques Demy -inspired dance number in La La Land , or a harrowing plane crash piloted by Neil Armstrong in his last film, First Man . But his newest film, Babylon , puts all these explosive openings to shame. Within the opening of Babylon , there are rooms entirely dedicated to the storage of any type of drugs imaginable, naked bodies writhing around a raucous party, a man getting absolutely covered in elephant shit coming straight from the source, and a sexual encounter that includes a pile of cocaine and piss. And that's just the first five minutes.

With Babylon , an over-the-top story of old Hollywood and the shift from silent films to talkies, Chazelle has created an orgy—both literal and metaphorical—of madness that can't help but remind of the wild adventures of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights . Chazelle’s three-hours-and-change epic is frequently ridiculous, manic, and constantly heightened in a way that certainly isn't period accurate. Yet Chazelle’s absurdist take on this integral period in film history is less about the details and more about going along for this ride, excess to the extreme that leads to one of the best and most singular experiences in film all year.

But inside this party atmosphere is primarily the story of three players and their love of film. Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) is an aspiring actress who just happens to be at the right place (this insane party) at the right time and gets cast in a movie. At the party, she meets Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican-American who also longs to be in the movies, and after showing some initiative at the party becomes the assistant to Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star. Among the insanity is also the entertainment journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), the jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer ( Jovan Adepo ), and Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ), who writes the words on the cue cards and tends to have more sense than anyone else in Hollywood.

RELATED: First 'Babylon' Reactions Call It a Cocaine-Cooked Mess With Manic Visuals and Dazzling Debauchery

While there’s certainly some historical basis around Babylon , as the transition to sound pictures did shake up film in a major way, and we do meet characters that existed in Hollywood at the time—such as Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg or Samara Weaving as Colleen Moore , hilarious cast as a rival to Robbie’s Nellie—this is all just a way for Chazelle to have fun in this playground. For example, Chazelle shows Nellie and Manny’s first day on set as a frenzy of activity, drugs, sex, and death, where multiple films shoot mere feet from each other and everyone is racing to finish their projects before the sun sets. It’s truly the Wild West, an untamed land ready for expansion. But again, within the lunacy and barely controlled chaos, Chazelle—who also wrote the script—shows just how exciting this time must’ve been, and how beautiful and improvisation the experience of this type of filmmaking could be. When the sun sets at just the right time, or an unexpected moment of beauty that couldn’t be planned occurs, or a performance that comes along and knocks you off your feet, it’s easy to see the magic inherent in early filmmaking.

Chazelle has just as much fun showing the rigidity of filming with sound and the restrictions of the early days as everyone attempted to figure out this new technology. By showing the filming of just one scene, Chazelle makes it clear how one major advance in the form could upend lives, ruin careers, and completely alter what people wanted from a film. Chazelle is teaching us the broad strokes of film history, yet in a way that is outrageous and always entertaining.

This mayhem is enough to make Babylon work, but Chazelle has filled this story with characters that show the fragility of life in the spotlight, and how easily it is for people to move forward and leave certain stars behind. Robbie is excellent as Nellie LaRoy, whose star shines bright and fast, but then struggles with the public image of it all. When Robbie is on the screen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her, even when she’s dancing in a packed mansion. But it's that innate star power that makes this role so perfect for her. We especially see how great Robbie is when she’s on the set, giving us slight variations of the same scene, yet her ability to make each take different simply by her mannerisms and her choices in the scene. From the moment we see Nellie act, we know she's a star, and we once again get another great role where Robbie can show how tremendous she can be.

Pitt is also wonderful in an understated role, as the star who is shaken by the shift to sound, worries about the next generation that's coming up from behind, and the industry that might be leaving him in the dust. Even with the frequent substance abuse and tossing off of new wives, this is a quiet performance for Pitt, and it works best when he’s left to reckon with his legacy. In one scene late in the film, Jack Conrad and Elinor St. John discuss the status of his career, and a quiet “thank you” stated by Jack is utterly heartbreaking in the context of the scene.

Yet the true standout here is Calva, as we watch him rise in the ranks of Hollywood, and see just how this era was a land of opportunity for those ambitious enough. Calva is the glue that ties this whole story together, and his evolution throughout Babylon is fascinating, whether when he’s torn over his love for Nellie, or his realization of what the movie industry has cost him throughout the film. It’s a star-making role for Calva, and the best performance in a film packed with big names.

However, it’s Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li who get discarded far too easily in this madcap story, as they get moments to show their greatness in their industry, yet the story itself spends far too little time on them. Maybe this is Chazelle’s commentary on how poorly non-white performers were treated in this era, or maybe it's just that Chazelle's interests lay more with his key three stars, but it’s a shame they don't get more screen time. But Babylon is packed to the gills with incredible cameos as well, with Spike Jonze as an unhinged silent director, and Tobey Maguire ’s psychotic appearance that might be the film’s most bonkers addition.

Like all of Chazelle’s films, Babylon is gorgeously presented, with stunning cinematography from his frequent collaborator Linus Sandgren . Even though Babylon shows just how uncaring Hollywood at this time can be, it’s the soft moments of beauty scattered throughout that show why these people stayed put and didn’t give up their dreams. After the party that begins the film, Nellie and Manny leave as the sun rises, and the purple hue of the sky brings comfort that was lacking indoors. And when the magic hour hits, it’s almost as if a hush falls over the cast and crew, even when they're not recording for sound. In Babylon , Hollywood can be a dark, callous place, but the beauty that punctuates the coldness almost makes it all worthwhile. Throw in Justin Hurtwitz ’s stupendous and thumping score and it’s hard to not get lost in the magic of the movies too.

As with so many other films this year, Babylon is a celebration of the magic of film, yet it’s also a criticism of the industry itself and the disposability of those in front of and behind the camera. No one gets out of the spotlight unscathed. But even though the people who made these images might fade away, their memories will last forever on celluloid. That’s the give and take of the movies: the movies will take all they can, yet the legacy is unceasing. But Chazelle isn't content with just focusing on the beauty of movies from this time, he also in one outstanding montage near the end, presents the entirety of cinema history, the shifts in its eras, and the power of the moving image over the course of a little over a century. Again, Chazelle shows us just ow powerful these films are, and while the creators of these films are little more than ghosts, the images they left behind are eternal.

Babylon is certainly self-indulgent and excessive, almost as if Chazelle is trying to show after some fairly restrained work that he can let loose and go nuts, but that indulgence into the hysteria works beautifully as Chazelle explores the history of film, the loneliness of stardom, and how the movies can make us feel less alone. For a film that is largely about the craziness of the movie industry, Babylon has a very real emotional core at the center of his film that delves into the humanity, loves and pains beneath us all. Babylon is often pure mayhem, but it’s the beauty of life and film itself underneath that makes this one of the best movies about movies this year, and one of the best films of 2022.

Babylon comes to theaters on December 23.

Review: ‘Babylon’

Damien Chazelle established himself as a passionate admirer of jazz long ago with Whiplash , La La Land , and Netflix’s underseen series The Eddy . He goes the extra mile with Babylon , his latest feature which concludes an unofficial cinematic trilogy centered on devoted but complicated artists. From start to finish, Babylon is an excessive, indulgent, and utterly chaotic vision of 1920s Hollywood. It is simultaneously an anti-love letter and bittersweet ode to cinema, the Golden Age in particular, and filmmaking.

In the lead-up to an extravagant Hollywood party, we meet Manny Torres (newcomer Diego Calva), a Spanish immigrant who is hired to transport an elephant to the host mansion and takes advantage of the opportunity to get his foot in the door of the film industry. Once we’re taken to the lavish, drug-fueled fever dream of an evening, we are introduced to the rest of the film’s main characters: movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt); Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an aspiring actress who eventually gets her big break after being spotted at the party; trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo); and the Anna May Wong-inspired Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). 

Babylon charts the brutal transitional period from silent-era cinema to the rise of synchronized sound films. The demands of an ever-changing Hollywood landscape are difficult to grapple with as actors and filmmakers are forced to keep up with the additional requirements that come with making talkies, like standing directly on mark and not speaking too loudly or quietly into the microphone, and Babylon examines the effects through an opulent lens. Skyrocketed into superstardom after captivating everyone with her ability to cry on cue, Rhode Island-raised Nellie is unable to fully adapt to the atmosphere as she struggles with memorizing her lines and the refinement level expected in social settings. Jack is an actor in his prime who struggles to maintain his place as an in-demand Hollywood darling in this new era. Meanwhile, Manny’s aspirations become a reality after he gets the opportunity to be an assistant on film productions and quickly works his way up the ladder. Manny learns to adapt to the rapidly developing industry, but people like Nellie are easily disposable due to her inability to live up to industry standards. 

The supporting ensemble is full of familiar faces, with a scene-stealing Jean Smart as a gossip columnist, Spike Jonze as an exasperated German director, Samara Weaving as an actress who feels threatened by Nellie’s magnetic presence, and Katherine Waterston and Olivia Wilde making appearances as two of Jack’s ex-wives. But in a film full of flashy performances, Calva steals the show as someone who serves as the audience’s surrogate and excellently portrays his ambitiousness and love for the pictures. 

Robbie, while spellbinding in her energetic performance as Nellie, can’t escape how underwritten and one-dimensional the character is. It’s an issue that plagues Babylon , which is frequently more concerned with maximalism than actual character arcs. Nellie is a damaged woman who often gets referred to as a “wild child” and, like the majority of the women in the film, exists in service of or is defined by the men in her orbit. Despite being three hours in length, Babylon manages to gloss over some of its most interesting characters and narratives, such as Sidney Palmer and Lady Fay Zhu, who are sidelined and used to further other storylines. 

Babylon is at its strongest when diving into how films were made during the silent era, large-scale sets and all, but falls flat when pivoting to narratives that end up being cliché-ridden. Everything from the over-the-top production design to the costumes and mesmerizing cinematography is masterful. Chazelle’s frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz continues to stun with an incredible score that samples from and expands upon his work on La La Land and perfectly underscores the unhinged events that unfold. 

Despite a handful of issues, including an underdeveloped romance between Manny and Nellie that spirals in the final act, Babylon is undeniably a thrilling epic that works best when focusing on the inner workings of a turbulent period in Hollywood. Chazelle clearly has a reverence for the story he is telling, and while it may fall flat at some points in its three-hour length, he manages to pull together the web of threads within the film. 

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Hideo kojima reviews godzilla x kong, calls latest monsterverse entry "impressive" & "very touching.

Acclaimed video game developer Hideo Kojima shares his thoughts on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, celebrating the latest Monsterverse entry.

• Hideo Kojima praises Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire for its action and drama, highlighting the unexpected bond between the titular creatures.
• The Monsterverse franchise shows strength in balancing human drama and kaiju spectacle, proving its appeal to audiences.
• The success of Godzilla x Kong and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters points to a bright future for the Monsterverse, endorsed by Kojima.

Acclaimed video game developer Hideo Kojima shares his thoughts on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in a brief review. Directed by Adam Wingard, the latest Monsterverse chapter sees Godzilla and Kong become unlikely allies when threats from beneath the surface of the Earth threaten to disrupt the balance of the planet. Despite mixed reviews, Godzilla x Kong is still a financial hit , becoming the second highest-grossing movie at the global box office in 2024 so far with $519 million.

With Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire solidifying itself as one of 2024's strongest movies, Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid developer Kojima has shared his thoughts on the latest Monsterverse chapter through his personal Twitter account.

Reminded of his own childhood experiences with kaiju movies, Kojima praised the movie's action and drama between the titular creatures, highlighting how it manages to explore an unexpected budding bond between Godzilla and Kong. Kojima was also keen to praise the movie for how it characterized each Titan through smaller moments within the narrative.

How 2024 Is Allowing The Monsterverse To Prove Itself

Godzilla x kong and monarch lean into the franchise's strengths.

While a mixed critical reception and comparisons to Toho-made Godzilla productions stirred plenty of discussions surrounding Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and other Monsterverse entries, it is clear 2024 has shown the franchise's strengths can still help it stand on its own. While audiences were gripped by Godzilla Minus One 's rich human drama and strong commentary in the fall of 2023, leading to a surprising Oscar win, it is clear they are also keen to see the sheer spectacle battling kaiju can offer. 2024 has shown that the Monsterverse is capable of both.

First airing in November 2023 and running until January 2024, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters brought the Monsterverse's action to the small screen on Apple TV+ across ten episodes. Exploring a multi-generational tale about the rise of the Monarch organization and their post- Godzilla dealings, the series turns the franchise's lens to the humans living with emerging Titans. As such, Legacy of Monsters gave the franchise an opportunity to prove it can handle not only the spectacle of kaiju, but address how their very existence can reshape society.

With Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 's box office success and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ' season 2 renewal , the Monsterverse's future seems incredibly bright. Despite debate surrounding how it handles the monsters, the franchise clearly has enough of an appeal that audiences are invested in what happens next. Furthermore, with Kojima giving his seal of approval, those who missed out on the movie may be convinced to give the feature a chance.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is currently playing in theaters.

Source: @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN /Twitter

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

After nearly destroying each other in 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong, the giant Titans are back to face a new dangerous threat, but this time, they are on the same side. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the fifth film in Warner Bros.' growing Monsterverse franchise and will be directed by Adam Wingard.

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