Babylon (2022) review

What do you get when you combine the debauchery of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights with the auteur ambition and disdain for LA found in Southland Tales and Under the Silver Lake, mix it with the sentimentality for Old Hollywood found in Tarantino and Spielberg films, throw it into a blender and release it to general audiences in 2022? You get the weird, epic, bombastic box office flop that is Babylon.

Babylon is as epic as its biblical title suggests. Like movies that clearly were an influence on it, excess oozes out of every frame in the 3 hour and 10 minute runtime. The performances, insane amount of choreography that goes into some of the sequences in here, the fantastic score by Justin Hurwitz, and Damien Chazelle’s directing all comes together to make Babylon the excessive, disgusting spectacle that it is. Needless to say, the cinematography and editing are fantastic, keeping the visuals and pacing constantly engaging throughout. Babylon does a fantastic job of luring the viewer into the absurdity that was Hollywood in the 1920s; chaotic parties, even more chaotic films, all coming together to create an epic pile of chaos and depravity.

When Babylon hits, it hits like a motherfucker. It’s at its best when gleefully reveling in rolling the filth that is Hollywood. Chazelle crafts some truly breathtaking stuff here, epic sequences requiring a metric ton of choreography that go on for sometimes 10-20 minutes at a time. Some of my favorite scenes of the year can be found here:

The opening party scene, complete with elephant shit and golden showers.

Manny and Nellie’s first day working on set, culminating with a desperate attempt to bring crazed Spike Jonze a new camera before they lose daylight.

Eric Roberts and Margot Robbie fighting the snake.

Nellie and the crew’s hilarious first attempt to shoot with sound, leading to their cameraman dying of heat exhaustion.

Manny being led into a hellish labyrinth by a demonic Tobey Maguire.

… all scenes I’m likely never going to forget even if I were to never watch this movie ever again.

However, for as well crafted and insane as it is when it’s at its best, Babylon kind of falls apart for me when it starts getting into the corny “magic of movies” and “importance of Hollywood” and “being immortalized on the silver screen for countless generations yet to be born” Hollywood-jerkin-itself-off nonsense that I was hoping it would avoid.

The film is ultimately trying to balance a nostalgic look at the past while critiquing a time period where the industry treated women and minorities like second class citizens (even worse than it does now). So it’s basically doing this balancing act for 3 hours, and ultimately I think the movie decides to be a nostalgic look at the past and the beauty of the theater, which is a lot less interesting than the latter. We've seen it before. I wish I was wrong, but I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to interpret Manny going to the theater and having a revelation akin to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey where he sees clips from landmark moments in filmmaking, notably Jurassic Park, The Matrix and Avatar, a tear coming to his eye as he sees that he truly was a part of something bigger. Kind of neat, I guess, but it’s a lot more sentimental than the beginning of the movie would have you believe. It’s like if at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort gives a monologue about the importance of the stock market and the glory of capitalism without a shred of irony.

What I was hoping would be a balls-to-the-wall farce and a modern retelling of the Tower of Babylon myth set in 1920s Hollywood ended up devolving into the same old thing we’ve seen before, making it feel like a worse version of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a better version of Blonde. I hate to use so many other movies as reference points for what does and doesn’t work about Babylon, but it’s impossible to watch it and not think about what other films were able to achieve that Babylon fell short with. Despite its shortcomings, I did really like it, and I think I'd recommend it, just maybe don't bring your grandparents like the person in front of me in the theater did.