Damien Chazelle might be the single most self-confident filmmaker working in Hollywood right now. No matter how idealistic (the grand romantic tones in La La Land), or familiar (the story of Apollo 11 in First Man), or just downright goofy (the colourful string of expletives in the script for Whiplash) his ideas get, there’s never an inkling that he’s meeting any of it halfway. And even when I find myself on the wrong side of some of those aspects, I’ve been unable to deny that there’s a certain infectious quality to how much conviction the man pours into each of his directorial efforts thus far. But his latest seems to be the ultimate test for that methodology, as we’ve gone from a film that would merely benefit from that much confidence behind the camera, to a film that outright requires it to work even slightly.
Across the film’s three-hour stretch, Chazelle gives a depiction of the Golden Age of Hollywood that is about as drenched in depravity and excess as any mainstream feature is ever going to get. Less Wolf Of Wall Street and more Caligula, right down to Tobey Maguire’s mob boss taking Diego Calva’s Manuel on a hellish decent into a den of debauchery that looks like it was pulled right out of Tiberius’ grotto. The film starts with an amber-tinged mansion party full of brass, bare ass, and enough cocaine to choke the entire world’s bear population (well, okay, it actually opens with an elephant shitting all over some poor sap, but same difference), and it somehow manages to keep that level of manic energy for its entirety.
From there, the film’s story operates a lot like La La Land, showing the parallel journeys of Manuel and Margot Robbie’s Nellie as they try and make it in Hollywood. There’s a similar sense of tragedy to their respective career arcs, as there is for the myriad of other characters (Brad Pitt as fading star Jack Conrad, Jean Smart as verbose film journalist Elinor St. John, Li Jun Li as singer and title card writer Lady Fay, Jovan Adepo as trumpet player Sidney Palmer, etc.), and a prevailing sense that they are all sacrifices to the blood magic altar of Tinseltown.
How the film gets into the nitty-gritty of that level of assimilation and loss of identity is admittedly the messiest part of this whole thing, as Chazelle has a peculiar history with this very idea. His other major films have all been about people who are driven to the point of obsession by a need to be something greater than themselves, with any such hardships they face (Andrew Neiman’s mental strain, Mia and Seb’s doomed relationship, Neil Armstrong witnessing the deaths happening around him) being the price that had to be paid in order to achieve that. Considering said hardships here include racial exploitation, copious amounts of death due to negligence both on and off-set, and Brad Pitt once again playing a man with a grotesque romantic history a la Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, simply accepting such things as ‘what needed to happen’ is a hefty ask.
And yet it’s one that is often asked of those with any kind of interest in film history. We can talk about how D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance is essentially a feature-length temper tantrum because he didn’t like being told that glorifying the Ku Klux Klan in Birth Of A Nation was a bad look (the old ‘you’re intolerant of my intolerance’ gambit). We can talk about directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick who made some of the greatest films of all time, and who put their casts and crews through their own personal hell to make them happen. Hell, we can talk about any number of industry officials who have gotten away with years, often decades, of personal and professional abuse under the thinly-veiled guise of ‘movie magic’.
But they
are a part of the history nonetheless. And without so many of those examples,
what we have today simply wouldn’t exist. I may hate D.W. Griffith’s proto-‘curnsurl
curlturr’ shit, but that doesn’t make him any less of an important figure for cinema as an art form. I may wince at what a lot of directors do in order to
get their ‘desired’ result in a given film production, but that doesn’t make
their efforts any less vital to the larger tapestry. I may have serious
problems with the behaviour and attitudes that continue to propagate throughout
the industry, because everyone has spent so long treating them as just business
as usual… but goddamn it, that likely won’t ever be enough to make me stop
loving what that industry continues to create. Believe me, I’ve spent more than
enough page space talking about how much I love superhero movies to know the
conflict between my love for the art and the damage said art is causing.
And that’s ultimately what the characters, and indeed Chazelle himself, expound upon here. How the endless hours spent on-set trying to get the right shots, how the constant fears of industry shifts and shake-ups threatening one’s own livelihood, how the push-and-pull that is asked of every creative that wants to create entertainment for the masses, can lead to things that not only outlive the people who worked on them, but can uplift audiences generation after generation. Beyond trying to sanitise the shady side of the film industry, Chazelle seems adamant about making everyone acknowledge it, shining a light on how much Hollywood tries to affect that they aren’t as depraved as they were back during the days of silent film, both during the days of the talkies and even now.
Of course, all of this thematic and textual reverence for the glory days of the medium wouldn’t mean much of anything if the film craft wasn’t there, but holy shit, Chazelle manages to one-up himself on that front as well. The set design and sheer sense of scale through how densely populated each scene is makes this film with about a third the budget of a given Marvel film look about fifty times bigger than any of them could hope to be. DP Linus Sandgren and editor Tom Cross have all kinds of fun letting long takes drink in every morsel of blocking, particularly in the more audacious party scenes, and yet without losing the humanity of the characters during the quieter moments.
To say nothing of the soundtrack, which shows Justin Hurwitz finding his own apex as far as retro-styled jazz compositions. For as much as I often get into good uses of licensed music in films whenever I do these write-ups, I rarely if ever listen to a film’s soundtrack outside of the context of the film itself. This is a major exception to that, as I’ve had this in heavy rotation over the last several days. From the thicc horn arrangements of Voodoo Mama, to the gentle allure of Li Jun Li’s performance of My Girl’s Pussy, to the almost-tribal chanting of King Of The Circus that adds to the Bacchanalian atmosphere, to the cacophonous blend of everything in Finale, I love the absolute hell out of this music. I hate being in even remotely-large crowds for any length of time, but I’ll join any party that has this backing it.
Much like its greatest and clearest artistic inspiration, the classic Singin’ In The Rain, Babylon is a medley of a bunch of other movies to celebrate the historical tradition they all share: The great work of escapism that is cinema. Except Chazelle dives deep into the viscera that paves the road to that vision, acknowledging how much blood and sweat and other bodily fluids were spilled in order to create the art we love to this day. And just when it seems like there’s no possible way that what is on-screen can’t get any crazier, in comes a finale that condenses… well, basically all of film history down to a single sequence. I don’t think there’s anything that could have prepared me for what I saw, and I was absolutely transfixed the entire time; I cherish films that offer moments like that.
Beyond how expansive this is as a story and even just as a cinematic production, creating a sense of grandeur and panoramic bliss that feels like the entirety of 2022 was just a lead-up to this moment, I can’t help but admire this for both how trashy and how prestige it is. Both as a big-time cinematic epic that seems to be on its death knell as far as the modern Hollywood system goes, and as a display of unrestrained exploitation-level hedonism and “do whatever the fuck we want” energy, this creates a bar that both the mainstream and the underground will have to measure up to over the next twelve months. I know it’s quite early to make these kinds of declarations, but I will be very, very surprised if this doesn’t make my best of the year list.
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