Babylon (2022) Review

A party in a mansion outside Los Angeles in 1926. An elephant is delivered, a man dies, cocaine is everywhere, and a Mexican assistant with no prospects meets a woman who has decided she is already a star.

The 6 is a defense of the film’s ambition and an acknowledgment that it does not work. Damien Chazelle spent eighty million dollars on a three-hour picture about the transition from silent film to sound, and roughly half of it is superb.

Where it fails is tone. The film wants to be a debauched comedy, a tragedy about obsolescence, a technical procedural about early sound recording, and a love letter to cinema, and it cannot hold all four.

Why It Is Not Slop

Everything else on this page was made to hold a right, extend a franchise, or reproduce something that already worked. This was an original three-hour film that a studio should never have financed and did.

The distinction matters because the failures are different in kind. Morbius fails because nobody wanted to make it. This fails because somebody wanted to make four films at once and got the proportions wrong.

That is worth defending even when the result is a mess. A body of work with no failures of this type is a body of work where nobody was allowed to try anything.

It lost a great deal of money, was widely disliked, and has a small and genuine following that keeps growing. That trajectory belongs to interesting failures instead of to bad films.

Heaven’s Gate, One From the Heart and New York New York all did the same thing, and all three are now taken seriously by people who were not alive when they flopped. That is not a prediction about this film, it is an observation about which failures survive.

The Sound Stage Sequence

The best twenty minutes in the film is a technical procedural about shooting a single scene with synchronized sound for the first time.

It is entirely concrete. The camera must be in a soundproof box, the box overheats, the operator is suffocating, an actress cannot hit a mark because a microphone is fixed, somebody coughs, a lamp buzzes, and the take fails repeatedly. Each failure is a specific technical problem with a specific cause.

That is the film Chazelle should have made. A story about a craft changing, told through people who are very good at the old version and have to learn a new one under commercial pressure, with every problem physical and solvable.

The sequence also contains the film’s best joke and its best death, which occur about ninety seconds apart and are the same event.

It is also the only stretch where the film slows down. Everything else is cut fast and scored loudly, and here the camera holds, the takes run, and the audience is asked to wait alongside a crew who are themselves waiting for a lamp to stop buzzing.

Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt

Nellie LaRoy is a woman who can produce genuine emotion on command, cannot read a room, and is destroyed by the arrival of a medium that requires diction. Robbie plays her without asking for any sympathy at all.

The transition is the tragedy the film handles best. Nellie’s talent was physical and instinctive, silent film rewarded exactly that, and sound film requires a trained voice and a controlled body, and she has neither. She is not a bad actress who was exposed. She was a great one at a thing that stopped existing.

Jack Conrad is the other half and Pitt plays him with the right amount of self-awareness. A silent star who understands the industry, sees the change coming, and discovers that understanding it does not help. His last scenes are the film’s most restrained material and the only stretch where it stops shouting.

Diego Calva holds the center and is the weakest of the three, largely because Manny is written as an observer for two hours and a participant for twenty minutes.

Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li have the film’s two most interesting unfinished threads. A Black trumpeter asked to darken his own face so a scene will read correctly to southern audiences, and a Chinese American title writer working in an industry that will shortly have no use for titles, and both get about eight minutes.

The Excess Is the Problem

The opening forty minutes are a party sequence of relentless, escalating vulgarity, and the film returns to that register repeatedly.

The intention is obvious and defensible, which is to establish a pre-code industry with no rules before showing rules arriving. The execution is exhausting, because the film mistakes volume for energy.

The underground sequence in the last act is where it stops working entirely. A descent through increasingly grotesque tableaux, ending in something the film presents as horrifying, and by that point the audience has been shouted at for two and a half hours and has no response left.

What Chazelle is doing technically in those sequences is impressive. Long takes, enormous crowds, camera moves that require real planning, all of it in service of scenes that have no dramatic content.

Justin Hurwitz’s score is doing the same thing at the same volume. It is genuinely good, it is relentless, and there is almost no sequence in three hours where the film trusts silence to carry anything.

The Ending

Manny returns to Los Angeles decades later, walks into a cinema, sees Singin’ in the Rain, and recognizes his own life rendered as a musical comedy.

Then the film delivers a montage of cinema history running from early experiments to digital imagery, intercut with his face, which is either the best or the worst thing in it. It is an enormous swing and it is the moment the film stops arguing and starts asserting.

What the ending is trying to say is that the suffering produced something that outlasted everybody in it, and that is a genuine idea. Delivering it as a supercut is a decision that turns an argument into a feeling and asks the audience to accept it on those terms.

I do not think it works and I would rather watch a film that tries it than one that does not. That is the whole basis of the 6.

The comparison the film invites is Singin’ in the Rain itself, which covers the same transition in a hundred and three minutes, is funnier, is sadder about Lina Lamont than this is about anybody, and does not need to tell the audience what cinema means.

Should you watch Babylon?

Yes, with reservations, and it should not be on this page. Three hours, eighty million dollars, twenty superb minutes about a camera in a soundproof box, two genuinely good performances, and an ambition so far beyond the film’s control that the whole thing comes apart in public.

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