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• 100 The A.V. Club Tomris Laffly The A.V. Club Tomris Laffly Babylon mostly operates in a structure of set pieces, thoroughly earning its not-a-minute-too-long runtime—a whopping 189 minutes—and it’s packed to the gills with stunning craftsmanship.
• 100 San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle Don’t mistake his movie’s lack of sentimentality for callousness. Babylon is coarse, hard and wild, but its emotion is undeniable. Babylon is what movie love really looks like.
• 91 Consequence Clint Worthington Consequence Clint Worthington Babylon slowly builds up its wackadoo cartoon version of Hollywood to tear it down at its foundation.
• 75 Movie Nation Roger Moore Movie Nation Roger Moore Babylon is gorgeous and grotesque, huge, noisy, and unlike anything else we’ve seen or heard on screen this year.
• 75 IndieWire David Ehrlich IndieWire David Ehrlich It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.
• 75 New York Post Johnny Oleksinski New York Post Johnny Oleksinski 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.
• 60 The Guardian Peter Bradshaw The Guardian Peter Bradshaw Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.
• 42 Entertainment Weekly Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly Leah Greenblatt Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.
• 25 TheWrap Alonso Duralde TheWrap Alonso Duralde It’s a hyped-up cocaine conversation of a movie, throwing out lots of ideas and images and mammoth set pieces without ever amounting to anything.
• 25 Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich [Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.
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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.

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Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

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

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren
• Justin Hurwitz

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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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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 Reviews

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.

DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:

Christmas Day, a popular day to head to the movies. There's a new one out by Damien Chazelle, himself a big champion of showbiz. He's the filmmaker behind Whiplash, centered on a jazz percussionist, and "La La Land," which followed the romance between a musician and an actress. His latest is a film biz comedy called "Babylon." And as critic Bob Mondello explains, it's about scandal-ridden Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We begin in the desert, much as Hollywood did, with a truck driver and client bit that feels like the setup for a Laurel and Hardy movie.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BABYLON")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Put down one horse and your signature right there.

DIEGO CALVA: (As Manny Torres) You said one horse?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah. It's only one, right?

CALVA: (As Manny Torres) No. It's an elephant.

MONDELLO: A misunderstanding, clearly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You mean a really big horse.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Manny Torres) No. I mean an elephant.

MONDELLO: Manny's chaperoning the circus animal to a Hollywood party. And what follows will be Laurel-and-Hardy-esque slapstick in color with, shall we say, colorful language.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Holy s***. Is that a f****** elephant?

MONDELLO: Cut to Manny's car, towing the now-elephant-laden truck up a steep hill when the tow line snaps, the truck rolls backwards and - well, I'll spare you the sound of the elephant relieving itself on its trainer. But let it be said that director Damien Chazelle is being honest up front. This is not going to be Tinseltown cleaned up for public consumption. It's the roar of the Roaring 20s, amplified to full-scale bacchanal, which is, as it happens, the next scene, the Hollywood party in full swing, folks cavorting and snorting and doing things I can't talk about on the radio. Big stars are there, including a Douglas Fairbanks type named Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt.

BRAD PITT: (As Jack Conrad) This table only has one bottle. We're going to need eight.

MONDELLO: And also wanna-bes, including both Manny, played by Diego Calva, and a girl he helped sneak in, Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie.

MARGOT ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) I'm already a star.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What have you been in?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Nothing yet.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Who's your contract with?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Don't have one.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I think you want to become a star.

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Honey, you don't become a star. You either are one or you ain't. I am. Do you know where I can find some drugs?

MONDELLO: By evening's end, they'll both be promised entry to a movie set for the first time. And it's a doozy - back in the desert, maybe a dozen silent films shooting at once. Nellie gets to shine in an idiotic Western as a barroom floozy. Manny attaches himself to the director of Jack's film, a medieval battlefield epic that's shooting with real swords, lots of injuries, and a full orchestra blaring away for atmospherics, observing it all from a nearby hilltop a Hedda Hopper-style reporter played by Jean Smart

JEAN SMART: (As Elinor St. John) Soldiers swarm the fields like flecks of paint from a madman's brush as your humble servant bears witness to the latest of the moving picture's magic tricks. Oh, why do I bother? Look at these idiots. I knew Prust (ph), you know.

MONDELLO: Writer-director Chazelle is every bit as smitten as his star-struck newbies. He includes film lore for aficionados, shout-outs to Fatty Arbuckle, to the women directors who were pioneers in what later became a nearly all-male world behind the camera.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Cut. OK. Ice water for two...

MONDELLO: And with the coming of talkies, everything shifts up a notch. This was the moment when Hollywood debauchery prompted talk of a production code. And Chazelle serves up nudity, profanity, murder, rattlesnake rustling, mountains of cocaine and a probing look at the effect of film industry racism towards even black stars like the trumpeter played by Jovan Adepo.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Next to them, Sidney looks white.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Look. He's Black.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) They won't think that in the sound.

MONDELLO: "Babylon" feels over the top and enormous at three-plus hours, reportedly down from a four-hour first cut. It is a crazily overstuffed love letter to the glories of cinema, as characters keep telling us. It is too much and often, especially in call-outs to "Singin' In The Rain," a little on the nose. It is also clearly heartfelt and that counts. I'm Bob Mondello.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.

The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.

Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.

There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed .” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.

Babylon Rated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of an actress. She is Margot Robbie, not Robinet.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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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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Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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Babylon Reviews

Ultimately a condemnation of the Hollywood machine that crushes everyone with equitable cruelty and an ode to the innovative artistry and ineffable magic of the movies, whose siren call continues to lure audiences & filmmakers alike towards its warm glow.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Babylon isn't all bust, or even unwatchable, it is just overlong, overindulgent with nary a care...

Full Review | Jan 25, 2024

Babylon is provocative, but, at the same time, it highlights what almost serves as a thematic watermark in Chazelle's filmography: choosing success often means choosing suffering or torture. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Unsure if my brain will ever fully heal from what Chazelle goes-for-broke with in the extended finale, but one thing is certain: audiences may very well never see anything like it ever again. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to the viewer...

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 30, 2023

Babylon is built on the idea that the primary goal of the film world is to make the viewer feel something even if it is disgust and pity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 8, 2023

All-embracing, all-consuming, and yet wholly intimate, Chazelle’s masterful epic is not only an ode to where film came from but where it will further journey to continue capturing our hearts, minds, and souls.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

An eyeball-searing trip into a version of writer-director Chazelle’s Hollywood.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2023

Babylon’ goes big and refuses to be ignored, even if a much better, much shorter movie exists somewhere inside the messy sprawl.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Movie lovers will take to "Babylon" with a great deal of admiration, while others might struggle to notice how much it resonates within the film industry as part of historical importance.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Damien Chazelle’s Love Letter to Hollywood, Movies, Filmmaking, & its stars. A beautiful, hilarious, insane, ride through the debauchery of Hollywood & the stunning aspects of making a film. Wolf of Wall Street meets Hollywood. I LOVED it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

Chazelle cracks the fantasy facade of the film by breaking down the moving images into a collection of frames and solid colors that make us question how we actually perceive the screen.

Babylon is pure excess, to its own detriment. Chazelle became so lost in frolicking in the playground of the 1920s Hollywood he’s created that he forgot to tie it all together into something meaningful.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Babylon is a visual feast full of committed performances, charting years of the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age with all involved clearly having a riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Chazelle frames it as a tragicomic exercise that underscores power dynamics and the filmmaking process in a golden age of Hollywood cloaked in frenzy, elegance and fading stars on the brink of the abyss. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 4, 2023

Repulsive, wretched excess...

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 4, 2023

A fascinating mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 26, 2023

Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

For all that is great and grand in its use of history, the film is long and you can feel it, a problem when making an epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2023

As it stands, after two movies that started the “White People Freaking Out About Jazz” genre, I don’t have a lot of faith in Chazelle telling these stories and Babylon has shown me that my fears were founded.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

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Babylon review: Baby, it's way too much

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Damien Chazelle's starry, manic reimagining of the time before talkies.

Hollywood was born in sin: a spangled palm-tree Sodom where pretty young things sell their souls for a role, and vice and venality run free. Or at least that's the myth we've built since silent pictures, and one that director Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey in Babylon , his frantic, antic, and frankly exhausting ode to the birth of the business they call show.

It's also pretty old news to anyone who's read stuff like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon , the seminal scandal bible published nearly 60 years ago (and subsequently banned for a decade) that notoriously exposed — a lot would say exploited — many of the Golden Age stories retold here. That book, proudly operating on the far-out fringes of decency and accountability, never really pretended to be anything but what it was: a wild stew of slander and calamity as delicious as it was questionably true.

Chazelle, who became the youngest Best Director Oscar winner in history at 32 for La La Land , seems equally enamored of the industry's seamiest tales, while also coming at it like a gee-whiz kid; he needs it all to mean something. And he has at his disposal things that underground figures like Anger never did: a pile of money and movie stars, plus the high-gloss veneer of prestige filmmaking. It's still three turgid, clattering hours of nudity, depravity, and mislaid alligators, but also, you know, art.

Margot Robbie 's Nellie LaRoy enters the frontier-town Los Angeles of 1926 like a hurricane, a beautiful would-be starlet with a brassy New Jersey squawk, a gambling problem, and a tendency to turn every room she enters into a bar brawl. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a much-married matinee idol sliding into middle age and ever-deeper vats of alcohol. They're both dazzling to Manuel "Manny" Torres ( Narcos: Mexico' s Diego Calva ), an aspiring producer with a Valentino face and a head full of stardust. All Manny wants is to be part of the magic of movies, whether that means wrangling an incontinent elephant for an unhinged house party or dragging strung-out talent from their beds (or whoever's bed they're in) to set by call time.

Like many of the major players here, he is Chazelle's creation: Most characters fall somewhere between composite and pure fiction, including Jean Smart 's gossip-peddling power player Elinor St. John, a ringer for real-life rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons ; Li Jun Li as a stand-in for Anna May Wong , the first major Chinese-American actress; and Jovan Adepo's gifted Black bandleader Sidney Palmer, whose career path echoes the early arcs of Louis Armstrong and Stepin Fetchit .

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, and sex is universal currency; death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline. In one Tarantino-esque interlude, an inebriated Nelly wrestles a rattlesnake to the death in the desert; in another, she vomits shellfish at a cocktail party in an Exorcist spray. By the time Tobey Maguire arrives in the third act as a giggling, consumptive gangster, huffing a cocktail of brandy and ether, the phrase "Jazz Age Boogie Nights " feels almost too apropos.

But Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real. (A brutal scene about blackface feels both as devastating as it's meant to be and oddly unearned.) There's also a sense that all this willful outrageousness just isn't his lane: The profanity is both relentless and numbing, and even the orgies look too clean. (Were people really waxing their personal bits circa Prohibition?)

It's all part of the film's panting need for provocation, along with its frequent, confounding anachronisms, from the hair and wardrobe down to the everyday slang. Yes, pre-Code Hollywood was a place for iconoclasts and outcasts, and in that sense could serve as a bubble of unlikely equality. But even a full-blown fantasy needs its own internal logic, a thing Babylon rarely gestures to or simply disregards completely. (What kind of unique challenges might a female director like the one Chazelle's real-life wife, Olivia Hamilton, portrays here so breezily have faced back in the day? You'll have to ask the ghost of Lois Weber . Race and class, too, don't seem to mean anything, until suddenly they do.)

The script still finds more than few bravura moments of absurd comedy, and the cast can't be faulted for committing. Pitt brings a boozy, unflappable charm and later, bewildered pathos; Robbie starts at 11 and never dials down. An acerbic Smart, vamping in a series of complicated hats, feels criminally underused, apart from one blistering speech she gives Pitt near the end. Even the cameos read like a red-carpet Rolodex on shuffle: Olivia Wilde , Eric Roberts, Katherine Waterston , Spike Jonze , Flea . Calva is naturally charismatic and lovely to look at, but the movie's supposed co-lead spends most of his time simply bearing witness — one more casualty in the frenzied, preposterous rush of Chazelle's Everything Hollywood All at Once. Grade: C –

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Babylon’ is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood’s heyday

Margot robbie delivers a fearless performance as a cocaine-addled ingenue, but her character is ultimately abandoned by damien chazelle’s mash-up of a story.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Brad Pitt's character is meant to evoke John Garfield. The character of Jack Conrad is loosely based on John Gilbert. The story has been corrected.

Say this much for Damien Chazelle: He shows his audience exactly what he’s giving them within the first few minutes of “Babylon,” his bruised, black-eyed valentine to Hollywood’s sybaritic heyday. In a whopper of an opening number, Chazelle films the delivery of an elephant to the estate of film producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), a bravura scene of extravagance and excess that ends with not a few bit players covered in pachyderm waste — recalling the famous joke about the guy who cleans up after the circus every day. Asked why he doesn’t quit, he replies with incredulity: “What, and leave show business?”

That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, ultimately ambiguous portrait of American cinema before the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts on a once-glorious tribe of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imagination made movies on the fly, not to send a message but to see how far they could push a medium still in its infancy. Raffish, ungovernable and not a little unhinged, the early settlers of 1920s Hollywoodland were, by Chazelle’s reckoning, a motley crew of wackos and visionaries, prone to self-destruction but also to soaring flights of inspiration and ecstasy.

At least, I think that’s “Babylon’s” point? Quite honestly, by the time this muddled, overcrowded, tiresomely digressive trip finally crashes like so many post-binge hangovers, Chazelle’s point has gotten lost in a self-indulgent, manically erratic shuffle. Once the elephant is delivered, it becomes the centerpiece of a raging party of unfettered drinking, drugging, sex and a near-death. A fetish-y scene of an overweight man and his young date recalls the scandalous life and career of Fatty Arbuckle; the pencil-mustached Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, in a silky, endearingly sensitive turn) is clearly meant to evoke John Gilbert; and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the cocaine-addled ingenue who’s plucked from obscurity to become a star, seems to be based on Mabel Normand.

Cinema nerds will find plenty of similar parlor-game diversions in “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. (Is the director Nellie works with based on Dorothy Arzner? Anita Loos? Alice Guy-Blaché? Discuss!) But for those not keeping score at home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a narrative cracking along at a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young man she befriends at Wallach’s party, gets his own chance to leave elephant detail. Played by newcomer Diego Calva in a performance reminiscent of a youthful Javier Bardem, Manny is the ethical center of a film that whirls, gyre-like, into the outré reaches of depravity and dissolution.

Here are the movies everyone will be talking about this holiday season

Part burlesque, part grotesque, “Babylon” takes its pacey cues and shock effects from earlier, much better films: Chazelle doesn’t tell a story so much as string together sequences that alternately quote “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights,” without being nearly as horrifyingly elegant or cringe-inducingly pleasurable as either. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” which the filmmaker will quote literally in a climax that’s meant to be a moving testament to film’s endurance as an art form, “Babylon” takes place at the cusp of the sound era, when the license and licentiousness of the silents gave way to the rationalized — and fatally sanitized — production practices of the talkies. Manny’s big break comes when he rushes from a remote movie location to Los Angeles to replace a camera; he gets back just before the director is about to lose the light, thereby inadvertently discovering magic hour. In a welcome quiet moment, a Louella-or-is-it-Hedda-like reporter played by Jean Smart schools Jack in the ways of graceful aging in a touching speech about obsolescence and eternity.

Such are the romantic touches that give “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists in a revisionist dream space in which anarchy and art go hand in hand, even as the body count piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie as a creature of insatiable appetites — for fame but most especially cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed energy fuels the entire cockeyed caravan. Lewd, lascivious, libidinous, Nellie is the heroine of a picture that begins to feel hectoring in its admiration for her most outrageous antics (the difference between madcap and mayhem lies only in a few random letters, after all). Let’s put it this way: If you must see one movie this year featuring projectile vomiting as an indictment of the upper classes, make it “ Triangle of Sadness .” Conversely, if you must see one movie this year featuring a pointless and seemingly endless snake-fight scene, “Babylon” is your best bet.

Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists in “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose travails as an African American in a mostly White medium come to an offensively absurdist head when he’s asked to perform in blackface. Although he’s a welcome addition to the proceedings, Sidney’s storyline gets lost in Chazelle’s frantic intercutting, which becomes a case of diminishing returns as “Babylon” reaches its panicky denouement: a scene featuring a ghoulish Tobey Maguire, in which he seems to be channeling “ Boogie Nights ”-era Alfred Molina by way of “ Nightmare Alley .”

By this point, the pleasure seekers decadently partying their way through “Babylon” have looked to pain for their biggest turn-on. The breathless energy begins to feel exponentially more forced (and, frankly, unpleasant) the harder Chazelle works to sustain it. Robbie delivers a fearless portrayal of a woman trying to outrun the forces seeking to domesticate her, but she’s abandoned by a story that amounts to little more than a mash-up of moments that, for all their high aesthetic and production value, feel shallow and not terribly original. Even “Babylon’s” final moments — intended to be Chazelle’s crowning paean to cinema at its most expressive and transporting — can’t bring the hazy stuff-for-stuff’s-sake into focus.

Like so many recent films — “ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ,” “ Belfast ,” “ The Fabelmans ,” “ Empire of Light ” — “Babylon” wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn. Which, in a backhanded way, might make it an accidentally honest portrayal of a medium that has always wanted to have its coke and snort it, too.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong and crude sexual material, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive coarse language. 188 minutes.

‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

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.'

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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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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What Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Saying About Babylon

Some may argue that we are living in an age of the "critic-proof" blockbuster, but with an auteur-driven project like Damien Chazelle's upcoming old Hollywood epic "Babylon," prospective viewers might be particularly attuned to what the film critic crowd has to say about the film.

"Babylon" has an expansive ensemble cast, led by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, and bolstered by such ringers as Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, Olivia Wilde, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist and occasional actor Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, and many more. It has an expansive runtime to go with it, clocking in at three hours and eight minutes – another factor that might have indecisive viewers seeking critical guidance.

So, is "Babylon" another great Hollywood myth about itself in the tradition of "Sunset Blvd," "Singin' in the Rain," or "The Bad and the Beautiful"? Or is it more of a throwback to bloated, out-of-control epics like "Cleopatra" or "Doctor Dolittle"? Here's what film critics who have already filed their takes on the movie, set to open wide on the upcoming holiday weekend, had to say.

The film currently has a respectable Tomatometer score

If you've been looking forward to catching "Babylon" in theaters (three-hour runtime and all), you'll be pleased to know that with 49 reviews and counting on Rotten Tomatoes , critical response to the film is much more positive than negative, with a Tomatometer score of 71 percent as of this writing.

Beth Webb of Empire Online describes the film as "[a] daring, formally audacious yet messy ode to cinema from one of the most enterprising filmmakers working today. Bravura and baffling in equal measure" in her review, which awards the film three out of five stars.

That kind of mixed praise seems to be something of a motif, at least in the reviews of "Babylon" that have made it online so far. Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times is even more ambivalent, admitting "I can't say I truly enjoyed watching 'Babylon,' or that I'd ever want to see it again, but I definitely haven't stopped thinking about it since screening it," an assessment that will either encourage or discourage you from giving the movie a try, depending on what type of moviegoer you are.

But Edward Douglas of The Weekend Warrior is unreservedly enthusiastic in his review. "Damien Chazelle's tribute to Old Hollywood is absolutely nuts in the best possible way," Douglas says.

But of course, when even a movie's positive reviews seem a little exasperated by a movie, you can expect a few pans as well.

Not all critics have been enthusiastic

Interestingly, some of the more negative reviews of "Babylon" seen on Rotten Tomatoes seem to paint a similar picture of the movie. Kristy Puchko of Mashable calls it "a ghastly, sticky, indulgent mess of a movie, slinging shock value in lieu of anything interesting to say," while Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair says "[i]t begins to feel, as 'Babylon' stretches out across three hours and eight minutes, that Chazelle has no clear idea where all of this is going."

At Cup of Soul, Kathia Woods compares "Babylon" to other Hollywood auto-epics, and finds it lacking by comparison: "Many films have been made about the beginnings of the film industry, and the majority of them have been informative and entertaining, but 'Babylon' is not one of them."

It appears that the one word everyone can agree on to describe "Babylon" would likely be "polarizing," and it will be interesting to see how its Tomatometer score holds up as more and more reviews come in. And its audience score, which will probably start racking up votes in the near future, will be interesting to watch as well.

You'll be able to make your own decision about the film's artistic value when "Babylon" opens wide in the US on December 23, 2022.

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Babylon review: the magic and misery of the movies

“Damien Chazelle's Babylon is a sprawling portrait of late 1920s Hollywood that just so happens to be one of the boldest and best movies you'll see this year.”

• Damien Chazelle's bravura visual style
• Linus Sandgren's gorgeous, versatile cinematography
• Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Li Jun Li's scene-stealing performances
• Several storylines feel slighter than others
• A sound mix that's a bit too jarring at times
• A bold finale that doesn't totally land

Much like the pissed-off elephant that rampages through its opening party sequence, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a wild beast of a movie. Over the course of its 188-minute runtime, the film maintains its cocaine-fueled, frenzied pace even as it dives headfirst into moments of wild beauty, old-school melodrama, bitter rage, and — perhaps most surprising of all — Lynchian horror. As an exploration of Hollywood’s debaucherous origins , the film has earned plenty of inevitable comparisons to American epics like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights , which similarly charts the sex-crazed rise and fall of one sector of the entertainment industry.

Chazelle, for his part, often invites those comparisons. Babylon ’s elaborate camera movements and anxiety-ridden editing feel strikingly similar to the bravura visual style on display in its 1997 predecessor. Even one scene involving a yellow-toothed Tobey Maguire feels like a direct riff on the iconic drug deal-gone-wrong set piece that caps off Boogie Nights ’ second half. However, beyond its structural and visual similarities, there’s very little that connects Babylon to Boogie Nights or Casino or any of the other American epics it has been compared to in recent weeks.

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That’s because Babylon has more in common with Magnolia , Paul Thomas Anderson’s unwieldy 1999 follow-up to Boogie Nights , than it does any other film. Both movies are not only three-hour epics that feature multiple intersecting storylines, but they’re also attempts on the part of their writer-directors to understand how ugliness and beauty can exist simultaneously within the world and within each of us. In the case of Babylon , Chazelle has created an orgiastic, multi-layered film that, in the end, asks one simple question: Is it possible to love movies and yet hate the industry that produces them at the same time?

Chazelle explores that conflict through all of the film’s characters, including Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent film star who is the unofficial King of Hollywood when Babylon begins in the late 1920s. A womanizing drunk whose belief in the power of cinema alternately comes across as arrogant and childlike, Jack is invested in nothing more than pushing the boundaries of the silent film form. He is, in other words, totally unprepared for the grand shift that will reshape Hollywood once sound enters the picture.

Jack isn’t the only one who’s unprepared for what lies ahead, though. There’s also Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an aspiring actress from the east coast who arrives in Hollywood with little to her name except for her own confidence and self-professed “star power.” Nellie quickly earns the undying devotion of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who dreams of becoming a Hollywood big wig. Manny crosses paths with Nellie during Babylon ’s sickeningly indulgent opening party sequence and the two quickly bond over their shared ambitions. As Manny, Calva turns in a deep, soulful performance, and his role as Babylon ’s audience surrogate only makes his eventual moral and romantic dissolution that much more affecting.

Nellie doesn’t just catch Manny’s attention when she crashes Babylon ’s raucous opening party, which is full of so many naked bodies, mountains of drugs, champagne bottles, and sex that it’s impossible not to be reminded of other, similarly excess-focused films like The Wolf of Wall Street . Nellie’s wild, attention-grabbing dance across the party’s main hall earns her a bit part in a film, where her undeniable screen presence and ability to cry on cue pave the way for her to become silent cinema’s next breakout star.

Hollywood’s inevitable transition out of its silent era quickly turns everyone’s world upside down. Nellie’s belief that she’d finally escaped the kind of judgment that had defined her early life, for instance, is shattered once her voice and east coast demeanor become points of debate among Hollywood’s elites. Jack’s untouchable presence similarly begins to disintegrate, while Manny is forced to comply with a number of soul-killing demands if he hopes to stay in the same Hollywood sphere that he fought so long to break into.

After establishing herself as a multi-talented performer and intertitle writer, Lady Fay Zhu (a scene-stealing Li Jun Li) finds herself being slowly ousted from the Hollywood system over “concerns” about her sexual relationships with women. Elsewhere, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a masterful trumpet player whose musicianship briefly makes him a Hollywood star, eventually finds himself facing the kind of racist practices that were long used to marginalize or keep people of color out of the filmmaking industry for decades.

For their parts, both Adepo and Li turn in potentially star-making performances in roles that, despite Babylon ’s impressive runtime, still feel like they were trimmed down during the editing process. Among the film’s supporting players, Jean Smart also handily steals a few scenes as Elinor St. John, a tabloid journalist who takes it upon herself in one of Babylon ’s best moments to give Pitt’s Jack a frank lesson in how Hollywood can both guarantee a person immortality and see them as utterly disposable at the same time.

After operating in a steadily light mood for much of Babylon ’s first half, Pitt begins to shine once Jack’s identity crisis kicks in. Very few films have ever used Pitt’s clear blue eyes as well as Babylon , which gives the actor a chance to turn in some of his most observational, quietly heartbreaking work to date. Margot Robbie, conversely, never dials down her energy in Babylon , which means that Nellie’s confident, fiery spirit in the film’s first half eventually transforms into a kind of raw, manic, puffy-cheeked desperation.

Behind the camera, Chazelle is as visually commanding as he’s ever been. Reuniting with La La Land cinematographer Linus Sandgren, Chazelle fills Babylon with some of the most elaborate camera movements and crane shots of his career, including one last-minute sweep through a crowded movie theater that is so technically impressive it’s impossible not to be astonished by it. The film’s heavy emphasis on blues, whites, and light reds also fills it with a visual energy that matches its high-strung, screwball pace. Editor Tom Cross, meanwhile, frequently cross-cuts and overlaps multiple scenes together, injecting Babylon with a breakneck pace that makes its immense runtime fly by surprisingly quickly.

The film’s visual and geographical relationship with La La Land , Chazelle’s previous treatise on the power of movies, is also literalized at points by composer Justin Hurwitz’s fittingly loud and free-wheeling jazz score. Together, Hurwitz and Chazelle literally reuse certain themes and motifs from La La Land , which only makes the dirty, rough-edged nature of Babylon feel even more like a full-throated response to the more polished, sanitized exploration of Hollywood that Chazelle delivered back in 2016. All of the film’s thoughts on Hollywood and filmmaking then culminate in a finale that is so brazen and operatic that it’s practically impossible not to be taken aback by Chazelle’s, well, gumption.

The fact that Babylon ’s finale doesn’t totally work is beside the point. What’s more important is the reckless, French New Wave-inspired energy that courses through the film’s final moments, which not only calls to mind the work of filmmakers like Godard and Truffaut but also Paul Thomas Anderson, who chose back in 1999 to conclude his most ambitious Los Angeles odyssey by having frogs literally fall from the sky. While Babylon ’s finale isn’t quite as fantastic or surreal as that, it does pulse with a similar kind of fearlessness. For better or worse, it’s hard to imagine Chazelle ending Babylon in any other way than he does.

Across the film’s massive and yet paradoxically too-short three-hour runtime, Chazelle expresses his all-consuming reverence and distaste for the movies. The true brilliance of Babylon ‘s finale, however, lies in how it so clearly sees that any attempt to understand how someone can both love and hate the movies at the same time will ultimately fail. Films are, after all, as unexplainable as the people who watch them.

Considering the conditions under which they are made, no movie should work, and yet so many do. In Babylon , Damien Chazelle attempts to ask why — only to give up when he realizes, much to his horror and amazement, that there is no answer to that question. There is only the silver screen and you sitting there, looking up at it, crying even when your better self knows that you shouldn’t. Behold! The magic of the movies.

Babylon is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, ​the ​La La Land​ director’s ​overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

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