Babylon (2022) Review
6/10
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’s already a star.
The 6 is a defense of the film’s ambition and an acknowledgment that it doesn’t 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 can’t hold all four.
Babylon exhausts me, and I still want more films like it. In the sound stage sequence I think Chazelle is working at the top of his game, and elsewhere he’s shouting through a megaphone for forty minutes at a stretch. It leaves me worn out and oddly grateful, and that mix is exactly what a 6 feels like to me.
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’s 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 real 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 weren’t alive when they flopped. That says nothing certain about this film’s future. It does tell you which failures tend to survive, and I’d be glad to see Babylon among them.
There are two kinds of failure and only one of them is instructive. A work that had nothing behind it teaches you about incentives, and a work that overreached teaches you about structure. Study the second kind, because you’ll make that mistake yourself.
Ambition without control is a better problem than control without ambition, and it’s still a problem. The film shows enormous skill here and doesn’t point it anywhere.
When a work is reaching for four things, ask which one the ending requires. That’s the subject and the other three are decoration.
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’s entirely concrete. The camera must be in a soundproof box, the box overheats, the operator is suffocating, an actress can’t 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’s 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’s 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.
This sequence is what keeps my rating from sinking lower. I could watch that suffocating camera operator in his box for another hour. It’s funny, tense and specific, and it proves Chazelle knew exactly what his best film looked like.
Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt
Nellie LaRoy is a woman who can produce real emotion on command and can’t read a room, and the arrival of a medium that requires diction destroys her. Robbie plays her without asking for any sympathy at all.
The transition is the tragedy the film handles best, and it’s the part that hurts. 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 was a great actress at a thing that stopped existing, and Robbie makes me feel every inch of that loss.
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 doesn’t 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. Those two threads annoy me more than anything else in the picture, because they’re the best ideas in it and they get crumbs. I’d have cut half the party to give them room.
Obsolescence is a stronger subject than failure. A character who was excellent at something the world stopped needing is more affecting than one who was never good enough. The requirement is that the reader sees the excellence first. Show what she could do before you show it becoming worthless. Give the person who understands the change no advantage from understanding it. Foresight that doesn’t help is a sharper idea than foresight that saves somebody.
An observer protagonist has to become a participant earlier than feels comfortable. Two hours of watching other people is two hours of somebody with no want.
The Excess Is the Problem
The opening forty minutes are a party sequence of relentless, escalating vulgarity, and the film returns to that tone repeatedly. The intention is obvious and defensible. That’s 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. By the underground sequence I’ve had enough. Two and a half hours of escalating vulgarity have worn me down, and the big descent lands as one more loud noise when it should feel like a nightmare.
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’s good, it’s relentless, and there’s 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. That’s either the best or the worst thing in it. It’s an enormous swing and it’s 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’s a real 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 don’t think it works and I’d rather watch a film that tries it than one that doesn’t. That’s 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 doesn’t need to tell the audience what cinema means.
An ending that asserts instead of argues will divide readers absolutely. Some will accept the feeling and some will notice they’re being told what to feel. The technique is legitimate and it’s a bet, and the bet fails when the preceding work hasn’t justified the assertion. Ask whether your final gesture is a conclusion or a claim. A conclusion follows from what came before and a claim asks the reader to take something on trust.
A failure at this scale is worth more to a working writer than a competent success. The visible seams show you where the joins are, and nobody learns anything from a book that works.
Should you watch Babylon?
Yes, with reservations. You get three hours, eighty million dollars, twenty wonderful minutes about a camera in a soundproof box and two good performances, all wrapped in an ambition so far beyond the film’s control that it comes apart in public. I’d take that mess over a tidy franchise product any day, and the 6 is my way of saying it’s worth the bruises.
