Babylon (2022)
Review of Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle
Ever since I first saw the trailer for Babylon in theaters, I knew immediately I had to see this movie on the highest quality screen possible.
That aspect of it failed, as the theaters near me were only showing it on digital only, but Babylon on the surface level hits all of the sweet spots that made me fall in love with film history and cinema as an art form as whole. This isn’t a movie for everyone, that’s for sure. The comedy elements did not land with half of the audience I saw, and there are some graphic shocking scenes, especially during the ten minute opening sequence. More on that later.
I’m going to try and break down some of the imagery in this review, but there’s so much packed into this three hour epic that it seems impossible to cover it in a brief blog post.
That’s what happens when one makes a film that literally spans decades: the movie ends in 1952, when Manuel, now married with a child, returns to Los Angeles for the first time and realizes the extent of his impact in the industry. There’s a lot of characters, a lot of stories, a lot of symbols packed into this run time, and I’m just scraping the surface here.
Let’s begin the review.
Babylon is an epic that tells the story of Hollywood as it transitions from silent films to talkies.
Babylon opens with a shocking series of events. We’re introduced to Manuel, who is a Mexican immigrant and is tasked with bringing an elephant up a mountain for a massive party at the Kinoscope Studios executive Don Wallach's mansion. The beginning of the shocking is when they are forced to bring the elephant in a horse carrier, and it ends up taking a dump all over his helper.
Once they get to the party, a series of events then happens. There’s a ton of nudity and sex in this scene, including a fetish where an underage girl pees on a naked man, there are people everywhere, and we’re introduced to the key players in this movie.
There’s Lady Fay Zhu, who performs a cabaret number that ends with her kissing a girl, Sidney Palmer playing the trumpet with the band, Jack Conrad, the silent film star that cycles through wives every other month, and the executives and directors working within the industry.
When Manuel goes outside to briefly smoke, he meets Nellie, an aspiring actress who has never booked a gig. He lies about who she is to let her into the party, she does cocaine in front of him, and he decides he has fallen in love immediately.
When the girl who peed on a man has an overdose, Nellie is booked at her first gig, where her crudeness and sexual flamboyance kickstarts a massive career that can only end in downfall towards the end of the movie. Manuel becomes buddies with Jack Conrad, who brings him along to shoots, and thus Manuel begins to work his way up the food chain in order to make the American Dream happen for him.
At the same time, when Manuel works his way into an executive position, Conrad’s career begins to decline with the invention of a new genre: films with sound. Nellie almost has a meltdown after a scene she’s shooting doesn’t go well because of the requirements to have sound at the beginning of this new era.
Sidney Palmer is plucked by Manuel and pitched to the studios as someone to make his own movies about, and he succeeds in that genre until he quits. Manuel, worried about the profit margins and pushed by those in charge, asks him to put on darker face makeup to not blend in with the band, as Southern viewers might get upset. This upsets Sidney, who decides to leave this lavish life behind and become someone who aligns with his moral compass.
Conrad spirals deeper into depression after his long time buddy George, who woes about every woman who doesn’t want him, shoots himself. After attending a small party where Lady Fay Zhu, who was fired from her job at the study by Manuel, as she was in a lesbian relationship with Nellie, tells him she is moving to Europe in search of a better career, he heads up into the hotel room and shoots himself.
That same night, Manuel tries to fix one of Nellie’s newest problems—she got screwed over by a mob boss—and ends up pissing the mafia off further when his props master ends up making fake money to give to the guy.
If we’re going to be frank, Nellie is the exact poster of trauma and some potential underlying mental health issues. Her father is an alcoholic and when she gambles away all of her money to the mafia boss, she admits to Manuel that her father pretty much lost everything along with her gambling.
Her mother is committed to an asylum in New York, as there’s a brief scene in NYC when Manuel is there and realizes that talking movies are the future of the industry. Even in the end, when Manuel and Nellie agree to get married and move to Mexico in order to escape the mafia, Nellie probably admits to herself that she’s not good for him, then dances into the night and is never seen again. She even says to him right before they dance that she’s not good for him and is only trouble, which is honestly tragically sad.
There are so many symbols in Babylon that I spotted, but I’m going to briefly muse on these ones for the sake of brevity and time:
The rattlesnake. Nellie’s father fails to actually battle the snake, but Nellie does and is bitten in the throat during the process. She ends up having done this right at the start of when talkies are taking over the industry, so I interpreted this scene as one where it shows that this is the beginning of the end for Nellie. At first, I thought it was going to ruin her vocal cords so that she would never be able to speak, but, perhaps, if she had lost that ability things would’ve ended better for her.
The prop money. I found this interesting symbol-wise because of how luxury and status were chased constantly throughout the movie, yet this random guy working behind the scenes decided to make prop money to give to the one person who would kill them all if given the opportunity.
The parties themselves. The beginning scenes are of this massive party, a spirit that slowly gets crushed by the reinvention of Hollywood with the onset of the thirties. We get the introduction of the Hays Code onto the system and while it’s not explicitly mentioned in the movie, it’s there by mentioning how things have to be more Puritan now. None of them really belonged in this new system, the parties die down, and it’s people like the mob boss keeping them alive albeit in a twisted way. The parties really were their lifeblood and gave them this youthful hope about the future and what was in store.
The underdog. Conrad has a scene where he confronts his Broadway trained wife about how Hollywood is for everyday people, that those who go to see Broadway shows are rich doctors. I found that this was really exemplified by who exactly was being represented in this film, because none of the characters trying to make a life in this industry came from wealth. They worked their way up into the roles they earned through hard work and getting noticed, and while their Babylon is full of rot and leads to the moral decay of their lives, they enjoyed it while it lasted.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a divisive film, but I find it to be a love letter to cinema and this age in Hollywood. A lot of these characters were based on real people, like Anna May Wong, and their struggles to make it in such a difficult industry. They didn’t have money.
There’s a seductive danger to this movie that’s present in their kind of work, and at first this manifests in ways that seem joking. The guy who walked into a spear on the fake battlefield. The guy who dies while filming Nellie’s first talkie scene. The director that Nellie first has who disappears with the onset of talkies.
The sensationalist journalist captures the spirit of this movie the most while lecturing Conrad about how they’re all going to be ghosts who appear in the movies some kid will find fifty years later. Conrad takes this negatively, but this is unfortunately the truth. Money and fame are fleeting, as seen with all of these characters throughout the movie. Those who chased after it the most, like Conrad and Nellie, end up dead.
I enjoyed Babylon, but I can really see how others don’t. It’s meant to be seen on a movie screen, so give it a chance if you’re vaguely interested in the premise.
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