Review of Babylon (2022) by Hnestlyonthesly — 10 Jan 2023

It's easy to, in retrospect, hold Damien Chazelle up to the firing squad of both critical and popular opinion and say, hey dude, your bad movie did bad financially and you should feel bad about that. You probably would enjoy doing that quite a bit, especially if you were in some way connected to the Moonlight production, but not every movie that runs a tad past three hours and features actual footage from James Cameron's Avatar while a different iteration of that movie by James Cameron plays in the screen right next to you is "undisciplined" or "a vanity project" or "completely bonkers". You know what I do when I encounter a movie that seems a little bit beyond me? A little too "high concept"? Before I stick out my tongue to blow raspberries, I ask myself the following question, "Am I reacting to this movie with my fight or flight response right now because it offends my sensibilities or because the film is actively trying to give me late onset epilepsy while simultaneously showing me the full history of the development of sound in movies in this montage?" And if I can answer that question without frothing at the mouth, I try to come up with a few nice things to say about the movie. There haven't been a lot of movies that I've seen people walk out of early this year or, really, ever, but I guess the past few years have given audiences in my hometown the clarity to recognize when they would be better off doing something other than the thing they unwittingly locked themselves into for fully one quarter of their waking hours of the day. The sequences that Wife and I (went together with siblings!!!) believe were some of the most rewarding are not actually so far removed from Yasmin Reza's play God of Carnage, and whether that's intentional or not (Chazelle seems like he's very intent on you understanding his inspiration for every line in the script from the golden age of cinema in this movie), it certainly makes you think about the directorial choices made to get to this point. The Slate article I alluded to earlier is, in part, charitably commenting on the lack of nostalgia for the "good old days" of Hollywood. At the same time, I think that this is a story of cultural decline, or maybe several stories of cultural decline--the budding, diverse, unrestrained racial and sexual paradise of the Roaring Twenties gives way to the cold, grungy yet sterile fastidiousness of talking pictures in the 30s: the deaths of some of the original Hollywood royalty pave the way for the next generation. Each death is both pain and possibility! It's also clear that Babylon is charting a course in a middle pandemic or post-pandemic world, abandoning the small scope, frustrated sensibilities of last year's cinema in favor of sweaty, horny, exuberant, ecstatic representation.

Suitsupply ad or maybe scene from Babylon, but both reactions to pandemic cultural forces.

The third act of most of the ensemble cast is where the film really goes off the rails, except that one cameo in particular in the third act, the crime boss plot, is actually maybe the most horrific sequence of the year, completely unsettling and canny storytelling. If we are continuing to feel charitable, we ought to mention that there are some very entertaining scenes, like the oddly erotic snakebite, or seven takes for a talkie on set, even La Roy's very first time on set is tour de force in showmanship and technical excellence. That all being said, I cannot rightly recommend this movie to you really in any form. It's not really great as a movie to catch on a plane or while you're waiting for days for your Southwest flight to finally become available in an airport terminal this holiday season, with your relatives or even your loved ones. The only people this will really give any joy to are the folks who really, really liked the instrumental soundtrack to La La Land and the people who want to listen to it while immersed in scatological and emetic humor.