Review: Babylon

swinging for the fences with a pool noodle

My friend asked me to see the film Babylon last night. I had heard nothing about this movie, since I get my news from Twitter and none of you are talking about it, so I went in blind. He told me it was about 1920s America, because I talk about Great Gatsby sometimes. He did not tell me it was three hours long. 

Babylon has huge ambition. It aspires to be about art, or at least movies. Set in LA at the beginning of the Hollywood era, it chronicles the Hollywood journeys of three primary characters and a variety of side characters. Narrative structure and time period is reminiscent of John Dos Passos' novel Manhattan Transfer, which similarly chronicles the early 20th century for an ensemble cast of characters. I won’t explain the side character plots because this movie is long. The ensemble story is about the power of movies, arguing that some of that power has been lost. And it tries to reclaim that power. 

The central character is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant who grows into a studio executive. At the start of the film, he is working as an assistant operations director to a wealthy man putting on a glamorous party. At this glamorous party, Manny meets Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt, the biggest movie star of the silent film era. Jack is a playboy: his wife is about to divorce him but he flirts with a girl he just met. He’s also kind and leaves the party to talk to his suicidal friend George, a studio executive who helped him make it big. The party is all excess: nude women, jazz musicians, cocaine, opium, women pissing on men’s faces, a real life elephant. The party scene is beautiful and stylized. Manny later meets Nellie LeRoy, who’s trying to sneak in to the party. She claims to be a movie star, and Manny corrects her to call her an aspiring star. She tells him “you can’t become a star, either you are one or you aren’t, and I am”. The two talk about their love of movies. Manny wants to work in the film industry in any way, to make movie magic come alive for someone else. When the night ends Manny tells Nellie that he’s in love with her, after knowing her for a few hours, and she laughs and drives away. 

The party sets in motion every character’s story. By bounces of fate, both Nellie and Manny begin their Hollywood careers the next day. Manny starts as an assistant to Jack Conrad, who takes a liking to him. Jack is the lead in a medieval battle movie in the desert hills outside Los Angeles. The extras, who will play soldiers in the battle, are on strike, which Manny diffuses by running around on a horse shooting a prop gun in the air. Now they can film. Jack is drunk and lazy in his personal tent, barely keeping it together for shoots, while extras literally die, impaled by flagpoles like what would happen in authentic medieval battles. The staged battle rages outside Jack’s tent, until the crew breaks every single camera they have, and everything halts. Manny drives into town for a new camera, steals an ambulance to get through traffic and brings the camera back just before sunset. The crew uses the last rays of light to shoot a scene in which armored Jack Conrad kisses a woman on a hill, with the battle raging below. In an act of movie magic, a real life butterfly happens to land on Jack during the shot. 

Meanwhile, Nellie has her big Hollywood break. Because an actress at the party last night overdosed, Nellie gets a shot as a bit part in a silent movie. She’s shooting a scene for a western in which she plays a whore that dances at the bar and attracts a large crowd of men. Nellie’s talent is raw and unrestrained, but she has something. She cries on command at her dramatic moment, where she sees a more modest woman and realizes the errors of her ways. An adjacent set catches fire but they’re getting so much out of Nellie that they stay for a final take. Nellie rockets towards stardom with this one scene. 

Even by this point, some of the plot doesn’t make sense but I’m still along for the ride. The rest of the film is set over a time period of years. Manny moves up from Jack’s assistant and climbs the studio ladder, and eventually becomes a studio executive because of his hard work and keen sense of what viewers want. The other two characters aren’t as successful. Jack Conrad and Nellie LeRoy both struggle to adapt to the innovation of sound in movies, inspired by Singing in the Rain. Nellie’s voice is shrill, and she isn’t a refined woman capable of sophisticated dialog or maintaining a high culture Hollywood presence. Jack never transitions well to movies with audio despite his talent and efforts. His life is a struggle, marrying and divorcing more women, while attempting to transition into the new era of film. His friend George finally commits suicide which sends Jack into depression. Late in the movie, there’s an extended sequence where a tabloid journalist gives an extended explanation of his fate to the camera and to him. She explains that his failure is a cultural shift, as the world moves to its next interest, and there’s nothing he did wrong and nothing he can do now. Jack comes to terms with that and then kills himself. 

Manny becomes a studio executive at the studio for which Nellie works. Because of his love for her, he tries to revitalize her career, but fails. Nellie falls into gambling debt for $85,000 to a drug lord, James McKay, played by Toby Maguire. In the most poorly executed plotline in the movie, Manny goes to James’s estate to give him the money, along with a friend from the movie industry who helped him get the cash. Manny finds out while he is there that the friend has given him movie prop money, rather than real money. James insists that they stay for a drink, and tells him about his offputting and undeveloped ideas for movies. James takes them to a dungeon hangar outside of LA, where people “still know how to party”. It’s full of deformed people, gruesome and sexual acts, a live alligator. James takes them to a huge muscular man who eats live rats, quoting Nellie’s line at the beginning “you don’t become a star, you either are or you aren’t, and he is” in an evil inversion. He goes to throw money at the man, but realizes the money Manny gave him is fake. Manny and his friend then murder a James’s bodyguard with an ax and escape through the tunnels while more guards shoot at them. 

Forced on the run from this bizarre tone shift sequence, Manny and Nellie plan to flee to Mexico. But Nellie doesn’t want to go, she can’t give up the drama of Hollywood. She promises that she will marry Manny, then disappears. Manny flees to Mexico and starts a new life there, while Nellie dies. The plot ends with Manny returning to an LA movie theater in the 1950s, and viewing the film Singing In The Rain.

The end sequence of the film is overindulgent, to say the least. It’s hard to remember the exact order of the shots and it doesn’t matter. The camera does closeups on faces of random audience members in the 1950s theater, to show what film means to its viewers. It rolls back a highlight reel of the opening party scene, clearly the best part of the movie. They roll a one-minute highlight reel of all of cinema’s spectacles, from Citizen Kane to Singing In The Rain to Jurassic Park to Avatar. They roll a highlight reel of Nellie and Jack’s moments from that first filming day, Jack kissing in the medieval battle and Nellie crying. They throw seizure-inducing flashing red and blue solid colored screens, because that’s the color of polarized film as it develops. Then they cut back to Manny, who had been crying because of the film’s resemblance to Nellie’s story, who stops crying and smiles. It’s always beautiful when a film ends with someone’s facial expression changing to a smile. They’re swinging for the fences with this ending, but they’re swinging with a pool noodle. 

My first reaction upon leaving the theater was that Babylon was a masturbatory movie. I’m not opposed to masturbatory art about art. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is similar and I liked that. But this movie is overwrought and unsubtle. Brad Pitt’s character stops to monologue about the importance of the cinema to the average man many times, and it’s painful, write a Substack piece like the rest of us man, don’t subject us to this on a big screen.

It’s funny how often modern Hollywood produces these pieces about aging stars, because of the 20th century monoculture remnants grasping for last things to talk about. Brad Pitt’s aging movie star character is similar to DiCaprio’s aging movie star character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both films relish the sequences where it casts them as an older supporting character, lingering on their reactions to being relegated to such a role. But in reality Brad Pitt and DiCaprio are both still getting cast as stars. They haven’t had the experiences that they’re acting like they’ve had. Not that they have to, it’s acting, but part of both movies’ casting of these older marquee actors is a callback to their own Hollywood stardom that has not yet shifted. 

The 20th century monoculture remnants are palpable in the Tobey Maguire scenes, bring back the superhero movie star in an unexpected way. He doesn’t do a bad job with the role but the material he’s working wouldn’t even be notable if he weren’t a famous actor hyped in the film’s marketing. The idea of an evil man who loves the movies is creative and fun, but the dungeon takes the depths of his evil way too far after knowing him for ten minutes of screentime. And it’s again there for indulgence in the movie’s central idea of film as a central piece of culture that compulsively draws everyone, even evil drug lords. 

Despite my criticisms I like that this movie swung for the fences and missed. It was genuinely brave in its failings. So much of culture is safe and boring. The film is correct that something has been lost today. There’s no Marvel or A24 in their compilation of cinema’s greatest hits. I don’t think it finds what was lost; this movie will not be interesting to a normal viewer, with its extreme focus on art and tonal whiplash and three hour runtime. And that is a failure, in a movie that frames cinema as a spectacle for the sake of normal man. This was a spectacle for the sake of someone else, for the sake of directors and executives trying to feel something in a Hollywood world that’s minmaxed towards a viewer that doesn’t care in the same way that they want the viewer to care. Or more accurately, since art is always aspirational, for the Letterboxd users and movie podcast listeners who want to feel like the directors and executives, want to feel like they’re at the higher end of culture watching it fall lower. While they’re wrong about the root and wrong about the solution, it’s interesting to watch someone be passionately wrong.