The Fall of Babylon

The movie Babylon reeked of Damien Chazelle. The man just loves to depict the incredible highs and lows of the entertainment industry. The stories of the celebrity Icarus who achieves the success they had always dreamed of but not without losing themselves and what they love. Hearts are broken, and fates are changed, but the world keeps turning, and people keep going with or without you. He tells these stories by connecting the audience with compelling characters like Mia and Sebastian in La La Land or Andrew in Whiplash, characters who make you fall in love with them, even as you watch them make bad decisions after bad decisions. He presents blurred timelines that pass quickly, mimicking the fast pace of the entertainment industry and forcing the audience to never become too comfortable with the way things are. The casts are star-studded, the music is exquisite, and the visuals are stunning.

Chazelle's new movie Babylon was set up to be nothing short of fantastic, following the same formula as its predecessors. Great cast, including the likes of Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Tobey Maguire, incredible film locations and soundtracks, and an overall plot with promising bones. So how did it end up being a messy fever dream that felt more like an overstimulating cocaine trip than an oscar worthy future classic?

From start to finish, the film overwhelms the viewer's senses. Within the first few minutes of the movie, the audience is thrown to the visual wolves. Including a massive party with loud music, background characters dancing, screaming, and having sex, both humans and animals defecating on each other, drugs, alcohol, and gambling, all while introducing you to a wide variety of 10 to 15 characters, some important to the story and some not, who you are supposed to remember for the rest of the film. This is already asking too much of the audience. There is no easing in. There is no time to rest or process. It is just go go go all of the time. Eventually, the main characters are established to be Jack Conrad, a black and white film star who lives the high life, is constantly drunk off his ass, and goes through women like water. Nellie LaRoy, is the wild child with a thick Jersey accent, an addiction to drugs and gambling, and an unstoppable dream of being Hollywood's next big thing. And finally, Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant, is stuck doing menial odd jobs for the elite with the hopes of eventually working on a movie set. They are all very different people with very different stories, but they are all just looking for the next best thing to put them on top. Throughout the movie, we watch these characters achieve their dreams and goals as time passes on, and Hollywood begins to make the transition from silent films to talkies, all alongside an expandable array of side characters that are cut or killed off with no warning. While this is all fine and dandy, the movie moves too fast for the audience to really care, and the characters we do stick with have zero to no redeeming qualities. The audience gets ample time to watch Nellie grow and burn her career by being an unharnessed manic pixie dream girl with mixed-up priorities and a desperate need for therapy. But all the time spent on that really came at the expense of the why. We get a touch of her fascinating background, three minutes of her visiting her mother in a psych ward, 10 minutes of watching her father embarrass her and take advantage of her fame, and a few sparse speeches of her talking about getting away from her hell-hole hometown, and that is about it. And one may think that is enough, and it would be for a movie of around one and a half to two hours but no. This movie is three hours long, and it barely expended any of its time on character development. In fact, this happens a lot in this film. There is a half-assed romance between Nellie and Mannie that is hardly explored, developed, or explained. Manny is just obsessed with Nellie, and the viewers are expected to root for them. Nellie starts to have a sort of romance with cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu. Jack's best friend is constantly falling for women and being let down. A jazz trumpet player named Sidney has to grapple with racism as he rises in success. It is all incredibly ambitious trying to cover a plethora of topics from race to gender, to sexuality, to mental health, and the difficulties of the passage of time. It is all incredibly ambitious and incredibly mishandled. The movie decides to focus on the boring sides of characters like Jack and Nellie and uses a sliver of its three-hour run time to discuss real issues. Stories like that of Sidney, who was forced to put off makeup to make himself look dark enough, or Fay Zhu, a gay Asian woman trying to break into the film industry, or even Nellie's generation issues with mental health are thrown in for such a short amount of time they feel more like tokens rather than plot elements.

It feels as if there were options for improvement in this movie, it could have been edited more, and the three-hour run time could be shortened to a reasonable two-hour run time that focused on the three main characters it had rather than forcing it to share time with other half baked side plots. Or it could have used all three of those hours to create a story that hasn't been told before. The movie had incredible scenes. But it didn't feel like well-made scenes built into a quality plot, but rather a scattered mess of a plot built around a few good scenes. For every minute that was good, there were five minutes that were unbearable. So what is the takeaway? Really it's the same as the other Chazelle films. The intricacies of getting what you want and being yourself are sometimes too difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish. Things happen. You rise and fall, you crash and burn, but the world keeps going. And that's all great, but for once, this movie could have been more than that. Babylon could have risen, but it fell, and that's the saddest part.