Damien Chanelle returns to the silver screen with Babylon, an audacious voyage into the dark, flamboyant underbelly of a 1920s Hollywood you almost certainly will have never seen on the screen before. Teaming with an all-star cast, including Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, Chazelle's Babylon operates as both a love letter to cinema and a suicide note to the actual filmmaking process.
Playing out during the transition from silent films to talkies during 1920s and 1930s, various rising and established stars of the era tried to reclaim their space in an evolving Hollywood in between the orgies of extravagance that almost galvanises the craft entirely. Starring Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva and Jean Smart, Babylon is a wholly divisive piece - and perhaps one of the last big epics of this scope and nature the industry will ever produce for us.
From opening frame to closing reel, Babylon launches a total assault of the senses, each of its 189 minutes almost as wildly chaotic and gleefully overindulgent as the last in its documentation of one of the most formative periods in Hollywood. Like The Wolf of Wall Street meets Boogie Nights, with the musical whimsy of Chazelle's own La La Land but recalibrated through far more cynical eyes, Babylon is a film of complete excess and exhaustion - but one you will not be able to shake for some time.
As we begin this monumental odyssey, the film begins with an explosion of decadence and debauchery that suitably sets the tone. While it takes a second or two to adjust, Chazelle’s dizzying directorial instincts, matched with the effervescent cinematography of Linus Sandgren and Justin Hurwitz’s sensational score, make for a frenzied whirlwind that becomes so easy to be swept up in. Jaw-dropping and audacious, it proudly announces itself as an almost anti-La La Land, but one that will command your attention with an almost similar enrapturing sense of movie magic. From the electric opening party (Margot Robbie absolutely captivates here) to the film set, Babylon’s first hour is mesmeric, as ridiculously excessive as possible.
Into the second hour, Babylon’s weakness becomes slightly more apparent, but the film’s adrenaline-fuelled exhibition remains compelling. As the transition from silent to talkies takes place and character trajectories emerge, there is some genuinely thoughtful musings as the theme work begins to develop: Manny’s (this is a fantastic introduction to Diego Calva) assimilation into Hollywood culture in order to start and maintain a career is fascinating, while the smothering of Lady Fay Zhu's (an evocative, wonderful Li Jun Li) sexuality and Sidney Palmer's (an impressive Jovan Adepo) blackness is where the film's parallels with today are strongest. Somehow remaining perfectly frothy and enjoyable, it lands some of the biggest laughs of a film released in the past year, including the "hello college!" sequence, which is one of the most exquisitely timed, edited and directed scenes in recent memory. It's all going so, so, so well for Babylon.
However, Babylon’s third act threatens to derail the entire picture. Not only does the film’s narrative begin to feel somewhat stale and the onslaught of chaos exhausting, the film then takes an underground detour which feels so out of place and degrading to the overall picture: not only is speaking thematically on an incredibly basic level the film before it avoids largely well, it is a tonal, emotional and narrative diversion that interrupts the emotional and rhythmic flow. Worse, it wasn't entirely unnecessary - the same threat, message and notion could have been achieved in a number of other ways that didn't feel so costly to the rest of the film. Truthfully, Babylon never truly recovers from its downtown digression (beyond a beautiful moment between Jean Smart and Brad Pitt).
But at least the finale, in all its celebratory, devastating, fortifying, discerning glory takes the film out on a higher note. It isn't difficult to see why some may reject the outsourcing of this pivotal moment but, in reality, Babylon's finale is entirely encapsulating what the film wishes to say: that sweat, tears and often blood goes into the films we treat as escapist enjoyment, that the industry's history is dirty and fickle with a painful, violent history, and that the very act of putting your heart into something can take away your soul too. Yet, new worlds we never knew existed can be presented before our very eyes, and you can leave feeling electrified by emotions that you have rarely felt before, and that we can connect in ways that very little else can or will allow us to, experience memories we never knew could be ours in a way that connects us to past, present and future generations. That we're leaving a legacy. That the movies will never truly die.
An adrenaline-fuelled journey into the lives and legacy-driven ascent and descent of recognisable figures in this transformative period in the industry, Babylon busies itself at all times, ricocheting between the intersecting stories that paint a perfectly incomplete, graphic, wistful tapestry on the art of filmmaking. So incredibly beautifully staged, stunningly rendered and well-performed by all involved, and valiantly steered by Damien Chazelle, Babylon will almost certainly be one of the very last of its kind - yet, if it must, I cannot think of a film more suited to pulling the curtain down on an era of Hollywood fading in front of our very eyes - in all its imperfect, bloated, elegiac, obscene glory.