Review: Babylon is a tower of narcissism
I’ve always enjoyed a complicated relationship with the work of Damien Chazelle.
This relationship began when I saw the writer-director’s breakout film, Whiplash (‘14), during my second year in college. Even as a sophomore, I saw through the sophomoric flashiness that obscured Chazelle’s feeble and unenlightened fable about the perils — and, as the film would have you believe, ultimate glory — of a student drummer’s (Miles Teller) clinically antisocial obsession with his craft. Never mind its paper-thin characters and keenly immoral “ends-justify-the-means” philosophy toward artistic pursuits, audiences fell for the movie’s hip, jazzy ambiance and J.K. Simmons’ explosive turn as a Stockholm syndrome-inducing band teacher.
The success of this project enabled Mr. Chazelle to produce La La Land (‘16), a gentle tribute to classic movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age that pales in the mind if one has ever seen the work of Gene Kelly. He then did First Man (‘18) — his first real movie, a fascinating character study that positioned Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an emotionally inept family man who turns to outer space as a means of deferring the more complicated needs of his loved ones (including those of his wife, played with wiry, twangy ferocity by Claire Foy).
In between these efforts, Chazelle became the youngest person to win the Oscar for directing, which only made him a more challenging figure in the eyes of yours truly. As a filmmaker myself, there is a part of me that is always ready to pounce whenever I encounter any mention of the man, out of both jealousy for his success and protest that someone of his, as I see it, hackneyed imagination should receive anywhere near the attention that he has.
All the same, I confess that I had ideas for movies very much like Whiplash and La La Land when I was a teenager. Watching Mr. Chazelle make these movies, so I don’t have to, is something of a relief — especially given the fact that, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-seven, I figured out that many of those ideas just weren’t very good.
Thank you, I find myself wanting to tell him, for getting that off both our chests.
As result of all this, I have to be very conscious about giving old Damien the benefit of the doubt, and not writing off his new work before I’ve even seen it. Such was the jungle of inner preconceptions I found myself traversing when I went to see Babylon earlier this week. Based upon what I’d seen in its trailer, I was prepared to find the movie annoying, distasteful, obvious, and trite; I was also prepared to be surprised, to let myself have a good time.
Nothing could’ve prepared me for the onslaught that followed.
Babylon is a glistening tower of narcissism, a toxic expenditure of financial and cultural resources that should be classified as air pollution by the EPA. It is the most self-indulgent, hostile demonstration of low-balled conservative Hollywood pessimism that I have ever seen.
Or, then again, I could simply be biased.
Beginning in 1926, the movie chronicles the colorful — and decades-long — misadventures of a group of people aspiring to some sort of fame or success in silent era Hollywood. We have Manny (played by the beautiful and hauntingly vulnerable Diego Calva), an ambitious Mexican-American film assistant with enough scrappy resourcefulness to run an entire studio; Nellie (Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn — take twelve) an aspiring starlet from Jersey with the uncanny ability to cry on cue; Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a trumpeter whose sonic perfectionism stands at odds with the orgiastic focus of the gigs he’s hired to play; and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a cabaret performer who could be the next Marlene Dietrich, if Marlene Dietrich were even a thing yet.
All these people, plus hundreds of others, work and writhe towards some distant chalice, some unholy grail that flickers like a projector above an auditorium of teeming, desperate onlookers. As the years pass and dreams are either realized, with caveats, or totally lost, the movies — an oasis of Dionysian liberty, a promiscuous pledge of limitless self-expression — become increasingly ensconced in institutions of wholesomeness, respectability, and prejudice (i.e., whitness). Over the course of this saga’s three hours and eight minutes, Manny goes from being a wide-eyed kid to a weary wastrel, from Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin — just another witness to the inexhaustible yet fruitless death march that is cinema.
And, at the very end, we get a cute little montage of that death march. Literally — from Georges Méliès to James Cameron. You don’t even have to go see Avatar: The Way of Water, you’ll get a taste of it here. (A good rule of thumb: don’t use your own movie to advertise a better movie, especially when it’s playing in a theater down the hall.)
Vast and sinister, Babylon is an epic demonstration of abused creative potential. With this film, Mr. Chazelle abandons the quiet, compelling humanity of First Man and quadruples down on the small-minded, adolescent thinking that kept La La Land and especially Whiplash from being insightful works of art. He is breathtakingly unaware of himself, devoted to obsession both in theme and in practice, to the point where he assumes a pedantic authority over his audience that is wholly unwelcome.
This assumed authority extends to his contemporaries, too: perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Babylon is how Chazelle frames the silent era as a time of racially- and gender-diverse collaboration — emphasizing the existence of or potential for Black and Asian American movie stars (represented by Adepo and Li), as well as women directors (played by Olivia Hamilton, Chazelle’s wife) — while also relegating this vision of a woke, on-set utopia to the past.
The ending of Babylon insists that there is nowhere else to go in filmmaking, that the art form is dead. So determined is Chazelle to make a grand “final” gesture for the entire medium that he implicitly undercuts any pending efforts from new generations of filmmakers — a gesture that’s all the more insulting given Hollywood'’s dawning investment in non-white, non-straight, non-male creators.
I’m sure that Mr. Chazelle made this implication unwittingly, but that doesn’t change the morally reckless and ideologically irresponsible nature of his movie. Babylon yearns for inclusion, just as it yearns for the past, entirely on its own terms.
The most interesting figure in this tawdry tapestry is Jack Conrad, a fading star of the silent era, played by Brad Pitt. Devoted to movies and determined to “revolutionize the form,” Conrad is tragically hindered by both his lack of imagination and the industry’s readiness to forget him. Ironically, offscreen, Pitt represents the future of film in a way that Chazelle is all the more appalling for failing to notice; over the last decade, the megastar has been pulling a side hustle as one of the most discerning, meaningful producers in the business today — responsible for ushering forward projects like 12 Years a Slave (‘12), Selma (‘14), Moonlight (‘16), Minari (‘20), and Women Talking (‘22).
How eloquent of Pitt to take this role, to simultaneously nod his head at the old world that he embodies while quietly inviting us to recognize the only way forward. “We shouldn’t stand in the way of progress,” Conrad muses. Jarring, isn’t it, to realize that Mr. Chazelle wrote that sentence?
It’s difficult for me to emphasize the degree of horror I felt while watching this movie — the anger, the shock, the dismay that consumed me. I’m writing this essay days after seeing it, and I still can’t get over how destructive Babylon is, how much harm it has inflicted on the medium that it purports to celebrate. There is a profoundly blimpish soul here lurking behind all the cheery homages to classic cinema; do we love old movies because of how good they are, or because of the fact that they are old and, therefore, safe? What does it say about the most venerated young American filmmaker working today that he cannot pull his head out of the California sand that has lodged itself up his anachronistic ass?
It is impossible to imagine where Chazelle can go from here. He doesn’t get to make another movie. He’s decided for the rest of us that cinema is dead — so what more could he possibly have to say?
