“An R-rated movie that plays like three PGs stacked on top of each other inside the trench coat of an NC-17 … Babylon feels about as dangerous as a Broadway musical,” says Indiewire’s David Ehrlich. Whether a straight-A student like Chazelle, who grew up near the campus of one Ivy League university and graduated from another, has an eye for debauchery is an open question. In the words of Stephanie Zacharek, “We’re invited to party with them and look down on them at the same time - the best of both worlds.”
12 MINUTES ENDINGS FULL
Babylon’s silent-film professionals may be fools who dream, but they do it while lying hungover in a gutter full of elephant diarrhea. And like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 drama, it’s a tribute to a golden age of hedonistic creativity pitched at the moment right before the music stops. Like the 1952 musical, it’s a retelling of the seismic shock of sound pictures in the world of 1920s Hollywood told through a trio of archetypes occupying disparate rungs of the industry hierarchy: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established star Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a go-go-go newcomer and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a gofer who yearns to enter the biz. The second is that its plot is essentially Singin’ in the Rain by way of Boogie Nights. The first is that Babylon is a movie all too aware that it may be the last of its kind, a no-expense-spared period epic intended for grown-ups with little connection to any preexisting IP beyond its glancing allusions to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. To get a sense of the three hours leading up to this moment, it helps to understand two things. The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang calls it “an explosion of cinema” that’s “simultaneously dazzling and depressing.” At Slant magazine, Keith Uhlich calls it “jaw-droppingly wrongheaded … a flourishy final summation that should inspire as many death stares as eyerolls.” And ’s Brian Tallerico dubs it “the falsest material in Chazelle’s career.” How could a single sequence cause such consternation? Babylon has received a mixed critical reception, and its version of this now nearly obligatory scene has functioned as a Rorschach test for audience sentiment: If you admire Chazelle’s go-for-broke ambition, you likely appreciated the big swing he makes in the film’s final minutes if you think the whole thing’s totally fraudulent, this was probably the moment that made you grab your coat and start heading toward the exit. But while the characters onscreen may applaud the spectacle, many reviewers have been far less kind. Like its counterparts, Chazelle’s Jazz Age fever dream sets its emotional climax in an old-fashioned movie house. (India’s official Oscar entry, The Last Film Show, reportedly includes a similar scene, but as of this moment it is unseen by me.)Īnd then there’s Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. Results of this trend have been mixed: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans has been widely acclaimed, while Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light landed with a thud. When Nicole Kidman strode into that AMC Theatre to record her now-iconic pre-roll, did she have any idea she’d be anticipating the most popular scene of the 2022 awards season?Īt a moment when the theatrical experience feels imperiled, Oscar-winning directors have treated us to shot after shot of characters gazing beatifically up at the silver screen, transported out of their ordinary, humdrum lives through the wondrous power of cinema.
Warning: This post spoils the end of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
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