2022 feels awash with the metatextual on the big-screen, whether direct contemplations on the film industry or more general ruminations on art and artists. I begin to worry that this might be a problem. A self-referential approach to art can be illuminating when corralled by a filmmaker with something thoughtful to say. But approaching metatextuality can become an empty exercise if it comes without the skill of introspection. When a film reflexes on itself, without reflecting on itself, the possibility of metatextuality becomes corrupted.
Some of the best films of this year year have found filmmakers successfully looking backwards and inwards. Jordan Peele made his best film yet with “Nope”, a simultaneous celebration and critique of the power of spectacle that feels prescient months later. “Benediction”, Terence Davies’ anti-biopic of gay-poet Siegfried Sassoon comments on both Davies’ queerness and the staidness of the biopic and the limits and power of art. George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” finds sincerity and complexity in its tale about the telling of tales. But when self-reflexivity is empty, few things are as tiresome as a film headily infatuated with itself and devoid of insight. This is the problem with director Damien Chazelle’s latest film, “Babylon” (opening worldwide this week and in local theatres in early January). For three hours and nine minutes Chazelle takes us through years of excessive debauchery, high hopes, and dashed dreams during Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies in the late 1920s. It is flashily and gaudily aestheticised. It is loudly and exuberantly scored. It is cacophonously and excessively mixed. It looks expensive and one imagines that with its 80-million-dollar budget Chazelle was denied nothing that he wanted for the film. It is also an obnoxious and exhausting film. Big and loud and empty.
“Babylon”, from an “original” screenplay by Chazelle, feels like it is in conversation with Kenneth Anger’s lurid gossip bible “Hollywood Babylon”. Anger’s work covers five decades of Hollywood scandals, each more debauched than the other. Chazelle’s “Babylon” has its eyes on the 1920s, as the movie industry transitions to sound films. Hollywood stands on the cusp of many things–talking pictures and cinema as America’s dominant art form. It is a time of possibility. And in “Babylon” those possibilities are all about the excessive. A few minutes into the film, there is a close-up of an elephant’s anus as it emits a stream of waste on an innocent bystander. A few moments later a budding starlet unloads a different stream of waste on a willing participant. Soon there will be scenes of excited coke snorting. Later in the film we have a scene of projectile vomiting. It is clear: Damien Chazelle is back, and he wants you to know that he can try to be as raunchy and tawdry as the best of them. What is less clear is how the onscreen debauchery offers anything to the film itself.
Chazelle paints a picture of debauched excess in the background, but the main performers are often (though not always) at a remove from this excess, even if they are no saints themselves. First, we meet Diego Calva as Manny. He is a Mexican-American granted the responsibility of getting an elephant up a hill to a Hollywood producer’s house. At a party there Manny will fall in love with Nellie LaRoy (Margo Robbie), a young would-be actress who confuses her temerity for star quality. He will also meet Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a suave leading man whose days may be numbered. He is also concerned about a society journalist (gossip monger) Elinor St John (Jean Smart), is mesmerised by the lesbian cabaret performer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) and briefly interacts with a talented Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo). These are the six main characters. Six is not a lot. Chazelle’s inability, six times over, to achieve a thoughtful character arc for his main characters is an important sign that the three-hour excess of “Babylon” has painfully little to communicate to his audience.
Do not be misled by the overtures of the party which dominates the better part of the first hour of “Babylon”, where Chazelle and his creative team throw everything at the wall. Bodies in throes of passion, and more (although, curiously, save for one moment the main characters are alarmingly chaste). Naked bodies and their fluids. Bodies costumed in fabrics, each more ornate than the last but each costume providing little window on character. Each giddy frame should feel heady and exuberant. But each tonal moment feels empty and tedious. “Babylon” contemplates the dual excess and possibility of pre-code Hollywood production, but offers no insight into movies then, or what movies would be soon after or what movies have become now. Instead, “Babylon” does not only nod to “Hollywood Babylon” but entire swathes of it are engaged in an intertextual struggle with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s “Singin’ in the Rain”, the 1952 musical that satirised the transition from silence to sound in cinema. “Babylon” imagines itself as something of a prelude to “Singin’ in the Rain”, with a coda I shall not spoil (its ludicrousness must be seen to be believed). But for it to be a prelude to that film it would need to have something to say about film in some meaningful way and it does not. “Babylon” feels like a solipsistic Criterion solipsistic essay for a rerelease of “Singin’ in the Rain”. If only Chazelle had left it on the page.
Whose story is this? Chazelle seems to argue that it might be Manny’s, and the insipid final sequences emphasises this reading. The many close-ups of Calva also suggest it. Except, Chazelle directs him to stand open-mouthed with his bright eyes hollow and empty offering little in the way of personality for the better part of the film. Early on, Manny pleads to be part of a movie set, it is a dream of his. But nothing that happens in “Babylon” tells us why. Manny exists to buttress other characters and their fledgling arcs. Someone must be the sounding board for Nellie’ tumultuous personal life and for the reveal that her mother is mentally unstable, so Manny turns up so she can monologue to him. Someone must be there to introduce Jack as charming but also sad, so Manny takes him home after a night of partying to witness his hopeful monologue. Someone must be the recipient of Tobey Maguire’s final act appearance (the closest thing to a good performance in the film) so a ridiculous chain of events requires Manny land himself in trouble. The setting of the film is rich with so many possible ideas but “Babylon” goes nowhere with any of its potential. It is a film set in the midst of Hollywood creators exploring ways of creativity but seems to understand little about creation or talent. Perhaps this too is a meta-commentary.
Even though music is integral to the era Chazelle does not trust pre-existing work, instead reteaming with composer Justin Hurwitz for an ambitious score. The films excessive scope provides Hurwitz a wide range of potential creations. Yet, the music itself here seems devoid of personal style. Hurwitz’s work is compelling enough and offers a sustained jolt of energy in moments that require something ebullient, but it feels unrelated to the actual film in a way that makes it feel impersonal for something so big and loud and excessive. This might be apropos since “Babylon” seems to have no sense of its own self. Hurwitz’s music is not the only victim of this. Each stylised shot seems focused on its own aesthetics rather than working towards communicating anything of substance. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren moves his camera with dexterity or skill, but for all the bacchanals of excess how many distinct and meaningful images can we extract? Few, if any.
There is some semblance of a love story between Nellie and Manny that is dull and uncompelling. Robbie gives into her worst instincts under Chazelle’s guidance. She is shrill, overly emotive and seems to have no sense of the film’s world. “Babylon” wants to convince us that Nellie’s electricity could change an industry, but Robbie is unconvincing. Calva is unemotive to the point of absence; the camera loves his face, but his performance is an energy vacuum. Pitt’s casting offers some metatextual energy within the larger meta film as Jack struggles retain his stardom as the industry shifts. He, too, feels lost here in a performance that feels trapped in a haze of automation. Even the dependable Jean Smart, forced into a truly abysmal monologue near the end, is felled by this. What of Adepo and Li? Chazelle may argue he is commenting on the limitations of the era by isolating the two characters. But the film has nothing for them to do, and their performances are stuck in stasis. Lady Fay has an affair with Nellie off-screen that is only included to contextualise Nellie’s downfall. Sidney is compelled to darken his skin, but the moment is included to contextualise Manny’s descent. But even the more “substantial” characters feel scantly developed. They are merely concepts for Chazelle to cudgel us with before he attempts to distract us with some set-piece spectacle. He fails.
If “Babylon” is both Chazelle’s love-letter and middle finger to the movies, I feel concerned that he feels so unable to articulate anything cogent about how integral talent is to movies. We watch Nellie doing a scene over and over and over (and over) but who is making these movies? The directors we meet (Olivia Hamilton and Spike Jonze) are focused on the precision of what their respective films need, but “Babylon” offers little in the way of explaining what drives to their work. Nellie begins her career not because of talent but because she is in the wrong place at the right time. When the director of the film she is in is impressed with her ability to cry on demand (not act but feign a tear) her artificial reason for why she has the gift (“I think of home”) is too inane to take seriously. By its end you can hear Chazelle amidst the bacchanal of “Babylon”: these people are awful, but they sure could make movie magic. The thesis is discernible, but this essay has no body, and this movie has no magic. “Babylon” lurches from moment to moment and is full of half-ideas, but is sorely lacking in the imagination to do much with it.
Too much of “Babylon” feigns spontaneity and jocularity (Nellie and Manny fall in love surrounded by mounds of cocaine) while feeling unspontaneous and unnatural in its convulsions, too studied and tedious to excite. Every puerile act is laced with smugness, expecting us to be struck by its mere existence. It is like a vaporous puff that leaves nothing but the energy of something unpleasant but with nothing to hold on to. How upsetting that a movie in celebration of the movies feels so hapless. I had to remind myself that even if this earnest “love-letter” to the movies was bad, it did not mean that the movies as a concept – or the many films that are the subject of Chazelle’s allusions – are as equally bad. But I will admit, in one moment as a character railed about the power of movies to a nonplussed Broadway star, I briefly wondered if maybe movies were a mistake. (But only for a moment.)
Movies, as a concept, are wonderful. “Babylon”, as a movie, is not. It is execrable, empty, dull, and insubstantial. Chazelle dizzies the senses with the busyness but his attempts at sensory overload do not really feel like an ambitious celebration of excess. They feel like ineptitude.
