babylon movie review the new yorker

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.

• 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
• Justin Hurwitz

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren

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How ‘Babylon’ Roars Through the 1920s

The writer-director Damien Chazelle and the production designer Florencia Martin discuss how they captured the excess of a period when Hollywood was heading for a reckoning.

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By Mekado Murphy

After he turned the streets of Los Angeles into a playground and a dance floor for the musical “La La Land,” you might think the writer and director Damien Chazelle would have little left to mine from the location.

But it’s a big, big city.

His latest film, “Babylon” (out Dec. 23), aims to be even more extravagant in capturing the indulgent, mythical nature of the place where starry dreams are made (and dashed). It follows multiple characters through a period in the 1920s when Hollywood, high on the success of silent films, began experiencing growing pains and significant collateral damage from the transition into the sound era.

But before those problems set in, very little about the period, or the way it is portrayed in this film, is scaled back. Instead, Chazelle and his team want to capture what it might have been like to be swirling around in the excess of those early days, when the movies were silent but the living was not.

To solidify the look, Chazelle worked with the production designer Florencia Martin, whose most recent credits (“Blonde,” “Licorice Pizza”) have also showcased the city and the industry in periods of transformation. Following are images from the movie, with commentary from the two on how these outsize moments were assembled.

Castle in the Desert

Although Los Angeles is now a sprawling metropolis, its urban makeup was much more sparse in the 1920s, something Chazelle wanted to capture in his film. “You still feel the desert when you step outside,” he said in a phone interview. “You still feel the dust and dirt on the streets and big patches of pure rural nothingness. And that’s pockmarked with these insane structures that people, flush with new money, have built.” This party sequence takes place in one such mansion.

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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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by Joshua Rivera

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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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.

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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: margot robbie and brad pitt get blitzed by damien chazelle’s nonstop explosion of jazz-age excess.

Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li and Jovan Adepo also star in this feverish look at Hollywood’s transition from silents to talkies, as depravity was edged out by moralism.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The opening half-hour here, from the sepia-toned vintage Paramount logo to the delayed appearance of the movie’s title, is such a syncopated concentration of hedonistic revelry — including a thinly veiled blow-by-blow of the Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe scandal — it could virtually have fleshed out a full-length feature. Chazelle mashes up bits of historical Tinseltown lore and real-life inspirations with the kind of lurid detail that filled the pages of Kenneth Anger’s once-banned muck-raking compendium, Hollywood Babylon , and there’s no denying the hyper-kinetic energy of the enterprise.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon. The show-offy flashiness behind one elaborately conceived and choreographed sequence after another becomes an impediment to finding a single character worth caring about.

Manny is working on the household staff of producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) when he meets and is instantly intoxicated by wild child Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) at one of the legendary parties at DW’s mansion in the hills, still surrounded by miles of undeveloped land.

While the already wired Nellie helps herself to the copious amounts of cocaine and other substances provided for guests, the two strangers bond over their dream of being on a movie set. Nelly is a New Jersey transplant with no credits and no representation, but she’s a creature of driven self-invention. “I’m already a star,” she proclaims, and when Robbie crowdsurfs the dancefloor with ecstatic moves that make her seem possessed, you don’t doubt it.

That extended opening is Chazelle at his most flamboyant. DP Linus Sandgren’s cameras weave at a breathless pace among a heaving throng of bodies either dripping in bugle beads, sequins and fancy headdresses or nude to varying degrees and indulging in more uninhibited sex and drugs than your average night at Studio 54. Just in case you miss the message, the entertainment includes a dwarf bouncing on a giant penis-shaped pogo stick that shoots confetti.

The chronicler of all things Hollywood is Photoplay columnist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), based on British novelist Elinor Glynn, with a dash of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. There’s also Black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), inspired by bandleader Curtis Mosby; and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who makes a sultry entrance in a lesbian-chic tuxedo, singing “My Girl’s Pussy,” a pointed homage to queer icon Anna May Wong. But aside from Manny, the people of color in the cast are thinly outlined character sketches.

Chazelle maps the rise and fall of these players in the evolving Hollywood ecosystem as they are chewed up and spat out by the moral decay that eventually was rejected by the American public. That narrative already proved bloated and shrill in John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust . Clearly feeling the urge to cement his status as a visionary, Chazelle pumps it up into something louder, longer, gaudier and more extravagant, but seldom more interesting.

Manny and Nellie achieve their dream of getting on a movie set faster than they imagined. Jack takes a shine to Manny, commandeering him as an assistant, and he swiftly makes himself indispensable during production on a battle scene in a sword-and-sandal epic. A couple of rickety shooting setups away on the Kinoscope lot in the desert, Nellie steps in for the unfortunate starlet who overdosed while cavorting with Fatty Arbuckle — here named “Piggy” — and her exhibitionistic abandon makes her a natural.

Soon Manny is shimmying up the production chain while Nellie is catapulted to stardom before anyone figures out that her partying, gambling and generally trashy behavior might cause problems. The script takes a lazy stab at injecting some poignancy into their connection by showing that both are alone in terms of family, even if Nellie’s opportunistic father (Eric Roberts) turns up to get in on her earnings. But there’s not enough meat on the bones of either character to help them compete with the movie’s hyperactive focus.

The most out-there sequence is a sweaty detour into a criminal underworld so decadent it makes Babylon ’s version of Hollywood seem sanitized. This occurs when selfless Manny, having offered to cover Nellie’s gambling debts, pays a visit to James McKay, a mob boss so seedy he basically exists so that Tobey Maguire can attempt to out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined. McKay leads Manny through an underground maze of freakdom where the gangster can hardly contain his excitement over a rat-eating muscleman. The fact that we’ve seen more imaginative variations on this theme as recently as Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley might make it easier for you to contain yours.

Despite all its meticulous craftsmanship — particularly Florencia Martin’s elaborate production design and eye-catching costumes by Mary Zophres that reference the period with distinct contemporary flourishes, a duality notable also in the women’s hairstyles — much of Babylon feels like overworked pastiche.

Chazelle’s intentions seem serious enough in attempting to shine a light on the non-white and queer people generally given minimal visibility in vintage Tinseltown narratives. But the storylines are so flimsy they seem no more real than the fanciful camp of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood .

Aside from Nellie’s giddy spiral as the free spirit who won’t be tamed, which Robbie plays with unstinting commitment even when the frantic more-is-more of it becomes abrasive, the only story Chazelle really seems to want to tell is Jack’s.

Babylon follows his fortunes from being the highest paid star in Hollywood to getting unceremoniously dumped by Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella) after failing to make the transition to talkies and having his career decline cruelly chronicled in Photoplay . That yields the movie’s best dramatic scene, in which Jack confronts Elinor with guns blazing and the tough-as-nails columnist coolly douses his fire with some hard truths about the ephemeral nature of stardom. Only the movies endure, she tells him, which is not exactly true given that no one gave a thought to film preservation back then. But Pitt and Smart both seize on the rare breathable moment to find welcome dimension in their characters, even if the outcome that follows for Jack is drearily predictable.

A 1952 coda has Manny wandering into a movie theater to see Singin’ in the Rain and that film’s parallels to his experience in the ’30s trigger a magic-of-cinema reverie that dives back into the past and soars into the future. Some folks will eat this up, with Chazelle informing us that great art will always be bigger than the fucked-up, self-absorbed people making it. Or something like that. But it’s hard to imagine the overstuffed yet insubstantial Babylon finding its way into many screen-classic montages.

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Babylon film review — Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in ambitious ode to Hollywood

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The Dizzying Debauchery of Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s new film is an extravaganza of caustic misery and overflowing movie magic.

For a lavish and expensive epic about 1920s Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s new film, Babylon , introduces itself about as scatologically as possible. In its first sequence, a harried gofer named Manny Torres (played by Diego Calva) tries to transport an elephant into the Hollywood Hills for a big-shot producer’s party, a farcical task that ends with the elephant pooping on the camera lens—in a way, on the viewers themselves. We then cut to a giggling movie star getting urinated on as part of some private sexcapade while the party ensues on the floors below—a sweaty, drug-fueled orgy that Chazelle presents in a bravura unbroken take.

The scene, filled with wondrous and horrifying sights, massively overstays its welcome. And that sets the tone perfectly for Chazelle’s ensuing poison-pen letter to Hollywood’s silent era, a three-hour-plus extravaganza of debauchery, general misery, and overflowing movie magic that sets the industry aflame and invites the audience to dance around the bonfire. It’s a daring thing for a major studio to put out these days, when big budgets tend to be lavished on superheroes, and Babylon ’s caustic indulgence will likely put many theatergoers off. But Chazelle is trying to make a point with all the excess: that the joy of cinema has always gone hand in hand with exploitation, abuse, and off-screen villainy.

On its face, Babylon would seem to be the flip-side narrative to La La Land , the director’s Oscar-winning musical about filmmaking, which took a much gauzier approach. In it, people sang winsome ballads saluting “the fools who dream,” and stardom was granted to those who strived hard enough for it, though it came at the cost of love. But La La Land was a film with a bittersweet edge ; Chazelle seemed to be critiquing his own nostalgia while still letting it play out on-screen to delight viewers. In Babylon , his affection for the fame-seeking business he works in has only curdled further, but his passion for film as a medium hasn’t diminished in the slightest. The subsequent raging contrast between these two notions is fascinating to watch.

Read: La La Land ’s double-edged nostalgia

A huge ensemble piece, Babylon focuses on three main characters. There’s Manny, a Mexican American assistant who rises through the ranks of a fictional studio to become a film executive right as movies begin their transition to “talkies.” At the frenzied party in the film’s opening act, he meets two actors: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a newcomer looking to break into the biz, and Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established superstar who can’t get out of bed before downing a few cocktails. Babylon follows each person’s rise and fall as their arcs intertwine and come apart, but it also delves into other tales of an industry stumbling toward a veneer of respectability during one of its most volatile eras.

Hollywood in the 1920s was, Chazelle insistently tells us, absolutely anarchic. Bankrolled by shady figures, filmmakers were still inventing basic storytelling concepts on the fly, and codes for on-screen decency and morality were a few years off. At one point, Chazelle virtuosically shoots a series of gigantic film productions all taking place simultaneously in the same California hills, a conceit that was feasible when movies didn’t have to worry about capturing sound. While one director wrangles thousands of extras for a colossal medieval-combat scene (somewhat reminiscent of the famed 1916 epic Intolerance ), other productions play out on intimate sets that have been knocked together. Chazelle’s camera roams from location to location, drinking in the wild glory of it all.

It might be the best sequence Chazelle has ever put together, and he’s staged quite a few dazzling set pieces in his short career. He wants the viewer to consider the sheer audacity of early moviemaking, particularly delighting in the contrast between the immense battle being orchestrated for one movie and an emotional barroom scene being produced for another, in which Nellie, a last-minute replacement, proves herself the saucy new star the studio’s been looking for. By the time the sequence ended, I was ready to proclaim Babylon a masterpiece, except that the film wasn’t even halfway done.

What follows is a dizzying series of concentric spirals for the ensemble that start feeling almost nauseating. Nellie’s initial triumphant success begins to falter because of her scandalous off-screen behavior; Jack’s image begins to fade with age, alcoholism, and changing trends; Manny’s desire to rise to the top compels him to make a set of morally compromising decisions. There are other characters with narratives rooted in film history that are equally fascinating, though they sadly get shorter shrift in Chazelle’s screenplay. Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, a cabaret singer and an actress with a gift for painting silent-film title cards, and Jovan Adepo plays a trumpeter named Sidney Palmer who briefly enjoys fame during the early years of films with sound.

Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women

Almost all of these figures have historical analogues, with many of them blending classic bits of Hollywood lore—Nellie is obviously inspired by the flapper queen Clara Bow , Jack is the tragic silent star John Gilbert , Fay Zhu is much indebted to Anna May Wong , and so on. But Chazelle turns up the volume with each portrayal, mixing fact and fiction and giving his dialogue more contemporary snap and crackle to underline the ways the industry hasn’t changed after almost 100 years. Although I was moved and agitated by the cavalcades of failure Babylon depicts, the film almost deliberately becomes a drag, wringing out every last golden drop of nostalgia until everyone, on-screen and off, is miserable and exhausted.

But before ushering ticket buyers out the door, Chazelle presents a coda that is so absurd and daring, so simultaneously cornball and avant-garde, that I wasn’t sure whether to doff my cap or throw fruit at the screen. I shan’t describe it entirely, but it includes a montage that exists to underscore Chazelle’s core message about the world he’s working in. Yes, he seems to be saying, Hollywood is a fetid pit of exploitation that has sucked many souls dry over the decades, but it is all in service of the best entertainment money can buy. I’m not sure if I agree or if I was simply beaten into submission after more than three hours, but Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

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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.'

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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 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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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.

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9 reasons babylon divided both critics & audiences so much.

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How critics responded to the the release of Babylon was drastically different from how audiences responded to the film. The epic three-hour period drama from visionary director Damien Chazelle wasn't received as the prestige movie that the studio expected, with critics and audiences adopting contrasting opinions of the film. Featuring a star-studded cast, Babylon follows the lives of Hollywood actors during the silent film era in the 1920s and chronicles their struggles as the industry evolved with the introduction of the talkies.

Chazelle also reunited with frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz, who composes another magnificent jazz score. Unfortunately, while the movie's score was universally praised, it was the only thing about Babylon that audiences could agree on. Despite a visionary director at the helm, two of Hollywood's greatest actors working today, a fascinating concept, and a huge budget, the movie divided audiences and critics. Though audiences and critics don't often see eye to eye, Babylon was greeted with a mixed reception with a "rotten" 56% on Rotten Tomatoes and an even worse audience score of 52%. Here's why Babylon is regarded as a love-it-or-hate-it movie and what led to its mixed reception.

RELATED: Babylon's Shocking Jane Thornton Story Is Inspired By A Real 100-Year-Old Hollywood Scandal (Which Was Way Worse)

9 Babylon's Black Humor & Hollywood Satire Divided Audiences

Babylon is a pitch-black look at Hollywood through a satirical lens, which didn't sit well with many audiences. IGN noted, " Babylon wants to make you believe elaborate satire and profound introspection justifies the 3-hour experience — but its promised layers are thin and translucent. " The Hollywood satire is unintentionally uncomfortable, such as Nellie, who considers herself an outcast, covering herself in luxury foods at a classy party. However, in a more positive review, Richard Brody suggested, " Babylon is Singin’ in the Rain as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy " (via The New Yorker ).

8 Babylon Was (Arguably) A Massive Step Down From Chazelle's Previous Movies

Given how divisive Babylon is, some viewers believe it's a masterpiece and an extremely clever period movie about the Golden Age of Hollywood. However, given that it comes from Damien Chazelle, who quickly became something of a wunderkind in the movie industry following the success of Whiplash , some critics believe Babylon was a step down and that it lacked what made La La Land special. City AM mentioned, " Judged against Chazelle’s previous work, Babylon lacks the edge of Whiplash, the heart of La La Land, and the focus of First Man. Such a well-versed student of cinema should know better than to fall into self-indulgence ."

7 Babylon Didn't Necessarily Earn Its Three-Hour Runtime

Audiences couldn't disagree more when it comes to Babylon's huge three-hour runtime, as InSession Film noted, " It may have been a box office failure, but all three hours are utilized perfectly and never goes flat ." On the other hand, Jim Schembri argued, " The film feels like a terrific two-hour film crammed into three hours, the first of which is full of fits and starts. " It's been argued that the three-hour runtime really is excessive since so many of the scenes are drawn out. If the movie had 30 minutes shaved off its runtime, Babylon being a box office bomb could have possibly been avoided.

6 Babylon's Extreme Scenes Were Accused Of Being Too Gratuitous

Given that Babylon is an unforgiving pitch-black satirical comedy that's R-rated and comes from a director who had total creative freedom, the movie doesn't hold back when it comes to attempting to shock audiences. Q Network argued, " Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery. " Whether it's a close-up of an elephant's anus as it defecates in the very opening scene, or any one of the Wolf Of Wall Street -like over-the-top sex parties, it doesn't come as a surprise that Damien Chazelle thinks movies should be more divisive .

5 Some Critics Thought Babylon Was Derivative Of Other Movies

While Chazelle has often paid homage to other movies, such as references to Rebel Without a Cause in La La Land , but some critics believed those allusions crossed a line in Babylon . Chazelle has been accused of being derivative of movies such as Boogie Nights, Singin' in the Rain , and the films of Frederico Fellini. The Australian noted, " Attempts to out-Fellini Fellini are regrettable and for much of its length Babylon is an unsubtle and indigestible mess so that despite all the talent involved and the fascinating subject matter, it must be seen as something of a disaster ."

4 Tobey Maguire's Role In Babylon Proved Divisive

The third act of Babylon is almost like an entirely different movie from the first two acts, as it almost becomes a body horror when Tobey Maguire's drug lord character James McKay is introduced. Maguire isn't known for playing villains, but he totally hams it up as a creepy, intimidating drug dealer with the worst teeth imaginable, especially when his kinks are revealed in the depraved underground gathering. Cinema Blend argued that the character actually fit into the movie's themes perfectly, noting, " The man is another lost soul duped into the magic of the movies, much like Nellie ." Conversely, Daily Maverick called his character arc an " unnecessary detour ."

3 Babylon's Love-It-Or-Hate-It Final Five Minutes

There's no doubt that Babylon's ending is divisive , as the movie flashes forward to the present day with an explosive montage of several modern classic movies, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Avatar . Independent called the ending a " visual assault of a sequence " and the " most sickening in film history ." With the montage, Babylon suddenly becomes a celebration of cinema and an argument for why movies are important. However, the previous 175 minutes of the movie were seemingly an argument for exactly the opposite, depicting how Hollywood is a cesspool of lost hopes and dreams, and that movies bring out the worst in people.

2 Babylon Treads A Line Between Cinematic Bravery & Filmmaking Hubris

If there's one word to describe Babylon, it's " excessive ," and Chazelle was clearly given no notes from the studio and full creative freedom. While some of the movie can be commended for its bravery, such as casting a critical eye on an industry that's only ever put on a pedestal, it's also extremely self-indulgent, according to a number of critics. That's summed up by a comment from the Irish Times that both praises and criticizes the movie's hubris: " Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as it indulges in a bit of its own. This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting. "

1 Critics Couldn't Agree On Margot Robbie & Brad Pitt's Performances

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are arguably two of the popular and talented actors working today. However, critics couldn't agree on their performances in Babylon . Some felt that Babylon made excellent use of their acting talents, whereas others shared a completely different view. Sioux City Journal noted, " Pitt and Robbie are good actors. They’re not miracle workers. Calva tries, but when you’re stuck behind an elephant, the results aren’t always good." Making matters worse, Brad Pitt's Babylon character was considered extremely unlikable, so being played by one of Hollywood's most charming actors did little to help viewers become invested in Pitt's performance.

Sources: Sioux City Journal , Irish Times , Independent , Daily Maverick , Cinema Blend , The Australian , Q Network , The New Yorker , IGN

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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‘babylon’ review: brad pitt and margot robbie dazzle in familiar showbiz tale.

At its best, director Damien Chazelle’s latest movie, “Babylon,” is a starry and seductive “Great Gatsby”-esque tale of decadent excess and personal destruction — just swap the Hamptons for Hollywood.

What dogs the mostly enjoyable movie, though, is that it is yet another ode to Tinseltown, and can bear a striking resemblance to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” Sometimes it’s dazzling, sometimes it’s derivative.

Running time: 189 minutes. Rated R (strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.) In theaters Dec. 23.

Still, there are worse people to spend three hours with than Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.

“Babylon” begins in the early 1920s, before “The Jazz Singer” revolutionized the movie business with the “talkies” in 1927. It’s set during the happy-go-lucky Pre-Code era ahead of censorship and morality rules sapping free-wheeling fun and laissez-faire acceptance from Hollywood.

Pitt, exuding the relaxed star power he always does, is a famous-but-fading silent film star named Jack Conrad, who is debonair but daft, wooden and a bit of a cad. Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, a New Jersey rebel with a harsh accent, who wants to make it big in the pictures. She seizes her opportunity at a raucous showbiz party thrown in a mansion at the film’s start. 

The bash is straight outta “Moulin Rouge,” only there are mountains of cocaine and this movie’s elephant is actually alive.

Chazelle clearly loves filming these complex, maze-like sequences packed with extras flooding in and out of lavishly appointed rooms, bawdily dancing and engaging in various family-unfriendly activities. Much of the movie is as frenzied and zippy as his Los Angeles freeway opening in “La La Land” ( the director’s other ode to Hollywood ). As in that musical, the music by Justin Hurwitz is once again percussion and brass heavy, and sometimes the beat is so pulsing you can’t hear the actors over it.

A similarly rousing scene occurs in a vast field where silent films are being shot. Nellie gets her big break dancing in on a saloon set, where she reveals she can cry on command. And Jack drags his drunken self into an epic battle in a period war film. The mania as multiple movies are being filmed before the sun goes down captures the Scotch tape-and-rubber-bands, no-HR, boozy scrappiness of the early days. 

That’s also when Manny (Diego Calva), a hanger-on of Jack’s, gets the attention of producers when he frantically goes on the hunt for a replacement camera.

We then watch Manny, who is madly in love with Nellie, rise through the ranks of the studio system to eventually become a powerful producer. Nellie’s star simultaneously explodes as depressed and aging Jack’s disintegrates. 

When the talkies arrive, Nellie tries out elocution lessons to sound proper and respectable (a nod to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which plays a big part in “Babylon,” but also Kaufman and Hart’s “Once in a Lifetime,” among other plays and movies). 

The film’s best scene by a mile shows Nellie on the set of her first movie with sound, trying to say lines while walking around. The crew just can’t get a good take in the can. Gaffers sneeze, doors slam, Nellie can’t find her mark under the mike. The vulgar screaming of an assistant director (P.J. Byrne) is unbelievably funny. The humor throughout is especially well-written by Chazelle.

Robbie is at her most addicting and outrageous in spitfire parts like Nellie. Here, she’s something of a Harley Quinn supplanted to sunny California, saying whatever she wants and acting in any way she pleases. A supernova.

Calva’s great skill, not to be underestimated, is his ability to look awestruck in the distance. Manny is our guide through this gluttonous world that teeters on the edge of a cliff and he reminds us of the moments of pure magic Hollywood has been responsible for.  

Jean Smart also shows up playing a Hedda Hopper-like gossip columnist named Elinore St. John. She delivers a poignant speech to Jack about how stars come and go, but live on forever on celluloid. Still the role, with a wonky accent that’s neither British nor mid-Atlantic doesn’t quite fit her.

Three-quarters of the way through, “Babylon” his a snag.

Chazelle becomes so obsessed with depicting the seedy underbelly of Hollywood in this satire that he goes over-the-top when Manny is forced into a desert, multi-level S&M sex dungeon by an overly creepy Tobey Maguire, complete with an alligator and sideshow performers. It’s a scene that could’ve been ripped from any trashy “American Horror Story” season. 

That blip leads into a sweet moment at the end, now in 1952, when we are confronted with the role that movies and cinematic innovation has played in our lives. It’s a lovely idea in a veritable ocean of too many ideas. The movie is a good 40 minutes too long and momentum ceases to build a while before it finally ends.

Still, when the director’s party is raging, you’ll wish you had an invite.

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One of these movies is a triumph - the other a train wreck

Tar is a study of the corruptions of fame and power, the world of classical music and the rise of cancel culture. Babylon is an embarrassment on a grand scale.

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Last week I thought Michelle Williams ( The Fablemans ) was unbeatable for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars, but after watching Tár , it’s hard to see Cate Blanchett coming second .

Todd Field’s film about a musical genius who falls for the seductions of fame and power, is a classic Faustian tale. Blanchett’s Lydia Tár doesn’t exactly sell her soul to the devil, but she shows us that talent is one thing, morality another.

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The Ghoulishly Retro Pleasures of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”

Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” (1988) derived its title, by way of a phonetically useful misspelling, from the name of Betelgeuse, a centuries-old demon who delighted in pranking the living and the dead alike. Played by a marvellously repugnant Michael Keaton, with a barf-smeared face, a sex pest’s leer, a charlatan’s patter, and a voice of boozy gravel, Betelgeuse was a figure of malevolent play—a puckish parasite of the afterlife. Dare to summon him, by saying his name three times in quick succession, and you were in for a hell of a headache. But you were also in for some fabulously macabre spectacle, realized with special effects that, seen today, are all the more captivating for their old-fashioned, handcrafted inventiveness. At Burton and Betelgeuse’s command, inanimate objects sprang to vicious life, staircase bannisters coiling into lethal serpents, and a jauntily stylized blue-green underworld—full of shrunken heads, plucked eyeballs, and other grisly evidence of violent death—beckoned to us from beyond.

If Betelgeuse was the movie’s not-so-secret weapon, he was also something of a red herring. A little of the guy went a long way, and Burton knew that maximizing Keaton’s impact required limiting his exposure. “Beetlejuice” may have been a netherworld burlesque, but it was also a stirring tragicomedy about the conjoined fates of the living and the departed, firm in its belief that death, a realm of tediously long lines and uncertain ends, ultimately offered its sufferers no more relief or resolution than life. At its heart, and in its playfully jaundiced soul, “Beetlejuice” was also a movie about the burdens and blessings of family—and, specifically, about the comedy, horror, and surprising resilience of marriage.

You had to laugh at the goofily mismatched Charles and Delia Deetz (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara)—a boring suburban aspirant and a neurotic, self-aggrandizing sculptress—as they abandoned their idle-rich New York existence for an old farmhouse in Connecticut. Rather more functional as a couple were the home’s previous occupants, the recently deceased Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), who ill-advisedly hired Betelgeuse to scare the new occupants out of their digs. By the end, even Betelgeuse couldn’t escape the tug of matrimony; in exchange for supernatural services rendered, he tried—and failed—to tie the knot with Lydia Deetz, Charles’s teen-age daughter. She was played, in a star-making early role, by Winona Ryder, with a tremulous goth-girl resplendence that has never fully abandoned her.

Now, more than three decades later, Burton has brought Lydia, Delia, and Betelgeuse together again for a pleasurably flyweight sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Lydia has become a self-styled paranormal investigator with her own occult-themed talk show; she and her stepmother, Delia, always at each other’s throat in the first film, have long since buried the hatchet. But Lydia has found fresh estrangement: from her own teen-age daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a science-minded skeptic who can’t abide her mom’s “supernatural bullshit.” As for the benevolent ghosts of Adam and Barbara, they have permanently moved on, and their disappearance is, by some distance, the most haunting thing in the movie. Lydia explains the Maitlands’ departure by way of “a loophole”—a technicality in the dreary bureaucracy of the afterlife.

Few sequels, especially those as belated as this one, come into being without arranging a few narrative loopholes of their own: expedient twists and contrivances that can explain a shift in dramatic focus or the conspicuous absence of key past collaborators. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” makes use of one particularly gutsy one: mere minutes in, Charles Deetz meets with an untimely offscreen demise, and under circumstances grisly enough to rule out either an open casket or a return appearance by the actor who played him. (Jones has had few screen roles since 2003, when he pleaded no contest to charges of hiring a minor to pose for sexually explicit photographs.)

And so the story kicks off with a funeral, and surely the only funeral ever to feature a choral rendition of “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” in a warm callback to the first film’s cracked calypso showstopper. (Not least among the spirits hovering over the sequel is Harry Belafonte.) But Charles is scarcely in the ground before we hear a peal of wedding bells: Lydia’s boyfriend and manager, Rory (Justin Theroux), an insufferable font of New Age therapy-speak, actually pops the question at the wake, and, if you think that’s in bad taste, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is just getting warmed up. Before long, Betelgeuse (now spelled Beetlejuice in the credits, but whatever) has reared his green-haired head, and characters are hurtling through otherworldly portals, propelled, at every turn, by the hectoring spirits of love and commitment. Lydia must contend with duelling proposals from Rory and Betelgeuse; Delia weeps and wails for her lost hubby; even Astrid is bewitched, for a spell, by a youthful crush. No wonder it all builds to a hellish wedding, complete with goo-slathered cake, and with multiple brides and grooms in play.

Skulking alongside the main action, meanwhile, is Delores, Betelgeuse’s long-lost, long-dead spouse; in a better Hades, she would have been known as the Afterwife. Hellbent on reclaiming Betelgeuse as her husband, Delores gets one of the movie’s deftest bits of slapstick grotesquerie, a body-horror tour de force that could double as a staple-gun ad. She’s the latest of Burton’s corpse brides, and one so murderous that even infernal denizens steer clear of her. Naturally—or, rather, supernaturally—she is played by none other than Monica Bellucci, Burton’s offscreen partner.

Nearly every movie sequel is an act of creative reanimation, an attempt to bring a shock of artistic life back to that which has already come to a logical end. Even so, given Burton’s career-long interest in disturbing the dead, he has directed remarkably few sequels before this one; his “Batman Returns” (1992) was a welcome exception. Like most successful American filmmakers, Burton has sometimes caved to the imperatives of an industry that increasingly insists on unnecessary remakes and questionable franchises. Crucially, though, he has always sought to tuck art into the margins, to inscribe even a moribund effort such as “Dark Shadows” (2012) with something resembling a personal signature. It’s worth noting that his last picture before “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” was one of his most subversive: a wildly eccentric live-action remake of Disney’s “Dumbo” that all but repudiated the Hollywood machinery that spawned it.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” for its part, evinces a certain skepticism about artists, entertainers, and the moneyed industries that keep them afloat. Delia, who opts to mine the family’s bereavement for her next big multimedia project, is held up for some lighthearted art-world satire. So is Lydia’s talk show, which, though rooted in real-life paranormal activity, is not immune to charges of ghoulish exploitation. One of the movie’s funnier new characters is a ghost detective, played by Willem Dafoe, who used to be an actor and now can’t stop playing to nonexistent cameras. He’s trapped not just in the afterlife but in the non-stop theatre of his own mind.

If “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” looks mildly askance at Hollywood, it nonetheless qualifies as something of a corrective among recent studio sequels. The movie is hardly its predecessor’s equal in conceptual richness or comic inspiration, which is fine, because it knows that duplicating the experience was never the task to begin with. The script, by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, has its share of bum lines and misfired jokes, but placed alongside, say, the dutiful fan service of “Alien: Romulus,” or the smarmy meta-shenanigans of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the writing is practically a model of originality, and of relentless forward momentum. Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy. The sequel’s visual design, too, is deeper and subtler than the original’s, and Burton’s panoply of visual tricks has grown in tandem with his sense of mischief. In the first film, Betelgeuse spun his head like Regan MacNeil; now he can cheerfully disembowel himself and, with exuberant nastiness, send his lower digestive tract spilling out onto the floor.

Keaton is as splendidly, mangily disreputable as ever, even though, as before, Betelgeuse remains faintly peripheral, more impish sideshow attraction than main event. That’s as it should be. There is something slyly poignant about the fact that, while Betelgeuse hasn’t changed much—how much can one change after centuries in the afterlife?—the two older Deetz women very much have. Delia has grown warmer, wackier, and less supercilious; O’Hara, a genius of comedy, gives her a faint dash of Moira Rose dottiness. Lydia, in Ryder’s touching, jittery performance, has sacrificed her youthful self-possession for full-blown grownup anxieties, with perhaps a side order of her stepmother’s neuroses. It falls to Ortega’s Astrid, the designated breath of fresh air in this determinedly musty crypt of a movie, to diagnose their condition. When someone notes that death is hard, she offers the only sensible reply: “Yeah, sometimes I think life is harder.” ♦

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