Damien Chazelle is not the first to refer to the world of silent era Hollywood as “Babylon”. Film historian Miriam Hansen used the reference in the early 1990s in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, a likely contender for the inspiration behind the title for Chazelle’s wild and eclectic movie about the end of that era. It’s an apt comparison -what is Babylon, classically, most remembered for? Its’ decadence and its’ fall. The Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties was famously decadent, and more famous was its’ decline once the talking pictures revolution began. That whole world was snuffed away by the mid-1930s, its’ biggest stars definitively yesterdays’ news. There’s something very tragic to that.
And yet Chazelle opens his movie on that world and its’ stars with an extreme journey through debauched excess; a raucous mansion party of an unrestrained, perverse hedonism and comical chaos. It says a lot that one of the more responsible figures in among it all is played by Flea in what has to be the best use of him in a movie: even a crazy punk-rocker is seen to be mild in this context of orgies, mountains of cocaine, and a somewhat tasteless reference to the Fatty Arbuckle manslaughter scandal. The movie goes out of its’ way to showcase the insane personalities, the lurid lifestyles, and the pandemonium structure of the industry and production process -bound by no regulation or common decency standards whatsoever; and yet Babylon is still undeniable in its’ affection for this chapter of movie history, and for these artists working at the dawn of a new medium. How does it reconcile such seemingly oppositional statements?
There is where the movie has had some trouble resonating, several critics finding its’ attitude irreconcilably discombobulated. And Chazelle makes some missteps in tone through the movie that could well exacerbate such an effect. He has to tread carefully these themes, but it’s not the first time he’s played with disparate notions of idealized Hollywood. La La Land was very much about that industry’s dichotomy as romantic dream factory and deceitful, soul-crushing system. Here though the contrasts are much more nakedly severe. A sense of immortal movie magic is evoked in a romantic scene of a couple kissing at sunset, while its’ creation is played as an absurd farce: a madcap race for a production crew behind a director desperate to capture the shot before losing the light, and with a star completely drunk off his ass.
Perhaps the key to empathizing with both this torture and beauty is through the lens of central character Manuel Torres, called “Manny” for much of the movie and played stupendously by Diego Calva. He is one of four (arguably five) characters through which this shifting tides narrative is framed, though his story is the most critical one -beginning in the industry trenches, gradually moving up into the significance of directing and producing, before the bottom inevitably falls out. He is the idealist in spite of everything he witnesses, whose love of the motion picture is his principal drive through an unsteady career. Exhilaration in the product is enough to quell the havoc of the process.
There’s a certain awe with which Chazelle presents the Kinoscope filmmaking ecosystem -here depicted as about a dozen sets constructed in the middle of the desert and being shot on simultaneously films of a wide array of genres in an almost circus-like atmosphere. It is so bombastic and anarchic, so spontaneous and unprofessional that it’s a wonder such evocative art is made from it. These are mad reckless renegades with no clue what they’re doing, and for as much as the movie cynically highlights the wanton ills of this system (at least one person dies shooting a war picture), there is a freewheeling, unrestricted energy at play that has a certain appeal we may not want to admit. And it definitively stands in contrast, this long sequence manically shuffling between different productions, and another lengthy scene later that puts several of the same artists and technicians on the dank interior set of a sound picture, frustratingly, and with an intensity that rivals Whiplash, attempting to shoot in this radically altered format. Their skills, chemistry, and pace mean nothing anymore.
At the centre of both sequences, though in highly divergent moods, is Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, who has close to an arc approximating Manny’s as a newcomer starlet at the start, and is of course pretty immediately the object of his affections -his one other motivator in the business. Nellie’s story follows the well-worn formula of the star succumbing to vice, and is probably the least dramatically interesting chapter of the film, much as Robbie invests in the performance. Nonetheless, Nellie is the movies’ starkest tragedy and opaquely its’ purest Babylonian symbol -an unassailable bohemian avatar the moment, who never has any hope of making it beyond the unique confines of silent era stardom. Much of her story is taken from that of Clara Bow, including her immediate sex symbol status, her thick East Coast accent and controversial off-colour personality, the institutionalized mother, the manager father (Eric Roberts), and of course that inability to adapt to sound. There’s even a sequence where she halts a film production to spite a rival starlet (played by Samara Weaving) that’s adapted almost exactly from an episode involving Bow and Colleen Moore. It is perhaps too easy an analogue, Clara Bow has long been a reductive icon of that era and its’ transience, but Chazelle and Robbie find new potency there, even as Bow’s particular poignancy eludes them.
Alternatively, there’s no trouble identifying the poignant undercurrent to Jack Conrad, a major star in the vein of John Gilbert or even Rudolph Valentino, played by Brad Pitt in his best dirt-bag mid-life crisis mode. It’s no real challenge for Pitt to play either the flamboyant or melancholy sides of this character, and he fits the 1920s glamour quite well. But the way his story plays out, though familiar to most movies that have depicted this era, is unexpectedly affecting. In spite of a cheaply written scene with Jean Smart’s tabloid journalist where she spells out the legacy of silent film actors to him, Pitt conveys with apt resonance a solemn sentiment for the Hollywood that was –imbuing it with sincere reverence.
On the sidelines of Nellie and Jack though are a couple of star arcs that ought to have been more in focus than they were. Much as I appreciate the turns those storylines took, far more interesting are the threads of jazz trumpeter (because Chazelle) Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), rising up as a star in his own right of music pictures –the only character to whom the advent of sound is a boon- until he rubs up against the indignities of racist concessions; and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a lesbian cabaret performer with an attraction to Nellie, who is an amalgam of Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker. Each of their stories is dramatically compelling but muted, in perhaps a less welcome parallel to the ways minorities were treated by early Hollywood. At the same time, I don’t think it’s accidental their resolutions are more self-actualized than the white characters who succumb to the system, or Manny, who becomes to them a tool of white supremacy.
Manny is quite changed by the system, and one of the running commentaries is its’ natural corruptibility. It’s not quite a broad personality overhaul he undergoes, more like a Great Expectations trajectory of class and manner; yet one that comes close to drowning him, particularly around his connection to Nellie as she grows more unstable. The passions that drove his ascension ultimately take him into some dark territory. As much as Babylon is heavily indebted to Singin’ in the Rain (to an absurdly literal way ) and La Dolce Vita, the movie it most resembles is probably Boogie Nights -another parable about an industry on the verge of monumental transition. It adheres to a very similar structure and mood, and becomes most apparent in its’ own variation of the Alfred Molina drug lord scene -likewise an illustration of how deep a character has sunk, albeit played with modes of grotesque horror, quite literally beneath the surface of Los Angeles.
Babylon is fairly blatant in a lot of its’ symbolism, yet Chazelle’s point still seems too contradictory. By the end though, which is rather an astounding swing at immersion in a movie already full of bold risks, it’s pretty upfront: the movies themselves are transcendent, the Hollywood that made them was not. There’s something so rare and special about what was preserved on celluloid from that time given the conditions -and that comes across sweetly here. Chazelle is guilty of indulgence in some of the extremes that he depicts, though no more so than Scorsese on another of his clear influences, The Wolf of Wall Street. The bigness of it all is only in relation to the bigness of the fall of Babylon, and he expects the audience to understand how movies can be a wild, messy, disturbing, transgressive, even guilty art -and be a beautiful, meaningful art nonetheless. Is Babylon a love letter or a smirking sensationalist treatise? It is both. And while Chazelle certainly doesn’t thread the needle on all counts and could stand to be much more original in his creative choices, there’s something worthwhile in acknowledging that complexity at the heart of this form.
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