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Damien Chazelle is obsessed with the punishing pursuit of perfection. Whether it's finding an immaculate tempo, hurtling into space, or making it big in Hollywood, his films feature characters who are willing to endure physical and emotional torture to reach the finish line. If " La La Land " was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck. Multiple sequences in "Babylon" detail how much work goes into two seconds of film, whether it's a field of dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is obtained or the difficult perfection needed when recording sound. Those two excellent scenes remind us that none of this is easy, even if it all looks so much fun.

Is it all worth it? That's the tough question. Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him. "Babylon" is a film of stunning parts—both individual scenes, performances, and tech elements—but it feels like the magic touch that Chazelle needed to pull them together in an honest way eludes him. There's something to be said about a film being so robustly unapologetic, but I felt as manipulated and deluded as the outsiders in this film who are eaten up by the Hollywood machine by the time it was over. One might argue that's intentional—a "feel bad" Hollywood movie is rare—but it's the difference between pulling back a curtain and simply rubbing your face in elephant shit.

And that's how "Babylon" opens, introducing us to Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of the silent film era. He's trying to get an elephant to an insane Hollywood party, the kind of drug- and sex-fueled affair that was only whispered about in the gossip rags of the time. Chazelle uses the orgiastic bacchanal to introduce his players, including an aspiring actress perfectly named Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), who catches Manny's eye just as her star is about to rise. We also meet the suave Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star about to leave his third wife and be struck by the fickle finger of fame as talkies come into the picture and the wheel turns to a new era of stars. There's a jazz trumpet player named Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) and the underwritten role of a cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ). Gossip journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ) writes about it all while recognizable faces like Lukas Haas , Olivia Wilde , Spike Jonze , Jeff Garlin , and even Flea flirt on the edges of the story.

It's an undeniably ace ensemble, led by another fearless turn from Robbie and a star-making one from Calva, but Pitt is the stand-out, conveying a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a star for over 30 years—he's seen legends like Jack Conrad come and go, and he imbues his performance with a relatable melancholy that gives the entire film depth that it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle's ambitious tapestry approach focuses on the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less). Even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be. All of them become power players in their own way—Nellie holds the screen in a way that few actresses other than Robbie could convey convincingly; Sidney's musical talent ascends as sound takes over the silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on a set, and that grants him an increasing number of decisions. There's an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this film is more about the love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also loaded with an overwhelming blend of historical detail and urban legends. Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And, once again, it feels like the filmmaker's commitment elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren's fluid cinematography gives the film a lot of its momentum—his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz's score might be the best of the year, finding recurring themes for its characters that gives the entire piece more of a sense of opera—a connection that fits this story's dark tone and tragic endings. The production design straddles that line between feeling genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from the excellent editor Tom Cross , but that's more a product of Chazelle's occasionally unfocused script than anything in the editing room.

About that script. "Babylon" is a test of whether or not a film can be the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of "Babylon" that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes. A film like "Babylon" can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found it hypocritical when it tries to play the "isn't it all worth it" card that everyone knows is coming in the final scenes. Fans of this film seem to be adoring this finale, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle's career.

There's a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don't get " Singin' in the Rain " if lives aren't destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies, and isn't it great that we got that movie ? That's a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking. If he thinks he's pulling back the curtain on a broken industry, he reveals himself to be a part of that warped system in the end. It's like he doesn't want to seriously consider how his beloved art will destroy its dreamers as long as his raging party keeps going.

Available only in theaters on December 23rd.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

Linus Sandgren
Justin Hurwitz

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Babylon 's overwhelming muchness is exhausting, but much like the industry it honors, its well-acted, well-crafted glitz and glamour can often be an effective distraction.

Babylon has some entertaining moments and its ambition is impressive, but the movie's chaotic and disjointed execution makes it difficult to really enjoy.

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Damien Chazelle

Jack Conrad

Margot Robbie

Nellie LaRoy

Diego Calva

Manny Torres

Elinor St. John

Jovan Adepo

Sidney Palmer

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A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Damien Chazelle
Margot Robbie
944 User reviews
310 Critic reviews
61 Metascore
46 wins & 161 nominations total

Jack Conrad

Nellie LaRoy

Elinor St. John

Truck Driver
(as JC Currais)

Manny Torres

Elephant Wrangler

Police Officer
(as Marcos Ferraez)

Jane Thornton

Orville Pickwick

Sidney Palmer

Joe Holiday

Guest (Chicken Line)

Female Guest (Nathalie)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia The character of Lady Fay Zhu is loosely based on Anna May Wong (1905-1961) the first Chinese-American actress in Hollywood whose career spanned both silent and sound films.
Goofs A "Jackass Forever" billboard appears in the 1952 epilogue.

[Jack finds George crying with his head in the toilet]

Jack Conrad : Aw, Georgie. Who was it this time?

George Munn : [panting] Claire.

Jack Conrad : Claire. Well, Claire's a lesbian. That's an uphill battle for anyone.

Crazy credits The Paramount logo is the 1920s version, fitting the era the film is set in.
Alternate versions In Singapore, before the film could passed with an R21 classification for theatrical release, the distributor required to remove a scene depicting a deviant sexual act in which the authority felt it has exceeded the classification guidelines which states that "any material that is about or promotes deviant sexual behavior" would be refused classification.
Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Best Movies of 2022 (2022)
Soundtracks My Girl's Pussy Lyrics by Harry Roy Music and additional lyrics by Justin Hurwitz Performed by Li Jun Li

User reviews 944

SnoopyStyle
Feb 4, 2023
How long is Babylon? Powered by Alexa
December 23, 2022 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official Instagram
Santa Clarita, California, USA
Paramount Pictures
C2 Motion Picture Group
Marc Platt Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$110,000,000 (estimated)
$15,351,455
Dec 25, 2022
$63,562,440

Technical specs

Runtime 3 hours 9 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Atmos

More to explore

Babylon is absolute fire — and everyone in it is burning

Whiplash director Damien Chazelle offers a Hollywood opus defined by passion and destruction

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The first widely available film stock in America was made with a nitrate base. Highly flammable and barely stable, this nitrate film — used from the earliest days of filmmaking until the introduction of safer acetate film stock in the 1940s and ’50s — became more dangerous with age if it wasn’t cared for properly: It released flammable gas as it decomposed into goo, then dust. In the final stages of its breakdown, it was capable of spontaneous combustion, setting history ablaze if it got hot enough on a summer day.

Countless films were lost in this way. There were fires in a Fox film vault in 1937, in MGM’s in 1965, in the National Archives in 1978 . In the silent-film era, projection-booth fires were commonplace, as the heat from projectors was often enough to ignite the nitrate film running through them.

As for the nitrate film stock from that era that survives? Much of it has fallen into decay. In Bill Morrison’s 2002 avant-garde film Decasia , scenes from silent-era films are presented in collage in their eroding state, as images that once depicted great emotion or intrigue are overtaken by the rot of time.

And yet the movie stars that once drew people to these films dreamed of immortality.

A director and crew gather behind a camera in the 1920s as the sun sets off-screen in front of them in the California desert, in a scene from the film Babylon

Immortality is what everyone wants in Babylon , the divisive new film from Damien Chazelle, acclaimed writer-director of Whiplash , La La Land , and First Man . It starts at the top: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the biggest movie star in Hollywood at the peak of the silent-film era, surveying his kingdom with pride, knowing he’s fueling the dreams of the common folk and has built something that will last. Nellie LaRoy ( perennial Harley Quinn Margot Robbie ) has nothing but a self-selected name and the conviction that she deserves to be as big a star as Conrad. And Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a waiter to the rich who dreams of making something that lasts, like a movie.

Babylon follows the fates and fortunes of these three and others around them as they diverge and intersect over the course of years. It starts with an extended party, a raucous bacchanal all three of them attend — Jack as a guest of honor, Manny as the help, and Nellie as a party-crasher. Their story is the same one Hollywood continually tells about itself and the people that sustain it: a story about big dreams and the grand life that might follow for a few people who are crazy enough to believe they might come true.

Across Babylon ’s 188-minute run time, Nellie and Manny see their stocks rise. The former becomes the star she always believed she was, and the latter becomes a studio executive, all through a lot of grit and a bit of right-place, right-time fortune. Meanwhile, change is on the horizon, as the 1927 premiere of The Jazz Singer throws showbiz off its axis, and Jack Conrad’s world begins to fall apart. Then everyone’s world follows, because fame is fickle and fleeting, and no one gets to be on top forever.

Nellie and Manny dance close enough to kiss in the opening party from the film Babylon

This is a song most movie-lovers can sing by heart, and one Chazelle has been singing in some form or another since Whiplash , his breakout film. His stories are about extraordinary people who dare to dream, who drag themselves from the wreckage — literally, in some cases — to realize that dream and be lionized for it, even if it costs them everything else in their lives. In Chazelle’s cinematic vision, art is more vital and beautiful than life itself, and the people who would set themselves ablaze for art, whether in Earth’s orbit or behind a drum kit, are the noblest of souls.

A message like this — pursuing fame is an act of hubris, and artists are transcendent in their foolish vainglory — is highly dependent on its messenger, and Babylon dances on a razor’s edge from its first frame. Yet Chazelle, alongside his longtime editor Tom Cross and composer Justin Hurwitz, are among the most accomplished dance partners making movies right now.

There’s a musicality to Chazelle’s films as he, Hurwitz, and Cross use the visual medium of film with the improvisational vigor of jazz musicians, and Babylon is their showstopper. The cuts are syncopated to get the audience moving. The color palette is bold and brassy, blurring the line between the images on screen and the horns that fuel them. The camera lingers on performers and performances: a showstopping, manic dance from Nellie LaRoy in the film’s opening bash/orgy, a drunken climb up a hill by Jack Conrad, utterly wasted, right before he miraculously pulls himself together to deliver a perfect take. The tightening of Manny’s brow and lips as he assumes the role of an executive, and does whatever it takes to convince the movers and shakers that he belongs in the room with them.

Trumpeter Sidney Palmer plays his horn with his band, all dressed in tuxes against the golden glow and balloons of the debauched party around them in the film Babylon

Yet for all of Babylon ’s glorying in art and artists, in Hollywood and dreams, it would all be in vain without a compelling reason why . This is where the film is most volatile. Its title deliberately evokes Hollywood Babylon , Kenneth Anger’s notorious (and largely fabricated) 1959 tell-all about the golden age of Tinseltown, a book that helped cement in the public consciousness the idea that the glitz and glamour of show business came part and parcel with a seedy underbelly of sex, drugs, and violence — often at the cost of women and queer people caught under its sensational gaze, and the tabloids that preceded or followed the book’s publication.

Babylon leans into this sensationalism, first with its title, then with its opening party, an orgy that climaxes with an elephant parading through a mansion in order to distract from the body of a girl who overdosed after a sexual rendezvous. As Nellie’s and Manny’s fortunes rise, staying in the game forces them both to make compromises that chip away at their humanity. Nellie burns bright and hot, turning to drugs and gambling. Others, like the burlesque singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), lose their livelihoods to her wanton appetites. Manny’s naked ambition causes him to treat other marginalized people as stepping stones, going as far as to ask Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) to perform in blackface in order to appease markets in the South, keep a shoot on schedule, and save his bosses’ money.

The beautiful collision between Nellie and Manny at the start of Babylon signals the start of their respective rises. As the film builds toward its conclusion, it tangles them together again in freefall. Their rapid descent reaches its nadir as Manny embarks on a trip to Hollywood’s version of hell, hosted by loan shark and lurid thrillseeker James McKay (Tobey Maguire, one of Babylon ’s producers, playing wonderfully against type). In his hands, the salacious orgy of the film’s opening meets its horrific opposite.

Manny looks on nervously as James McKay (played by Toby Maguire) incredulously holds up some money in his hands while the two stand in an ominous cellar surrounded by unsavory types in the film Babylon

Babylon is long enough that it can cause viewers to wonder — multiple times! — whether sensationalism and navel-gazing are the film’s only tricks. The movie echoes the sensational shock and awe of the star machine, inviting the audience to marvel and recoil at the wonder and horror it has wrought. But Chazelle is deft enough to suggest, more than once, that he’s playing at something deeper and more challenging.

In the broadest reading, Babylon is a profane paean to film as a uniquely communal medium, gathering the collective hopes and dreams of everyone who experiences them. The film celebrates cinema as the ultimate end goal, a worthy reason for these messy, broken people to immolate themselves in the act of creation. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jack Conrad confronts entertainment journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) over a negative profile she wrote. In response, Elinor tells him the truth of things: Neither of them matter. The movies do. There will be other stars and other journalists, but they are all in the service of what the beam of light projects on the silver screen.

This story, however, has been told. We’ve seen it in bona fide classics like Singin’ in the Rain , and in more recent works like the 2011 Best Picture winner The Artist . Both those films are concerned with similar ideas, and set in the exact same era. Chazelle has even already delivered a loving homage to Hollywood in La La Land , his musical about an aspiring actress who sings about the fools who dream. Babylon , in all of its sound and fury, is redundant. And then Chazelle makes one final audacious pivot: He acknowledges this in the text.

Manny stands in a trench coat under the awning of a movie palace, in front of the marquee posters of classic Hollywood in the film Babylon

In an astonishing finale, Babylon marries bombast and tragedy in one fell swoop, embracing Chazelle’s hubris as an artist by letting him insert himself into the cinematic canon, while he’s endeavoring to earn his place there at the same time. In its final moments, he isn’t content to just tell another story about the rarefied few who dreamed, and built an empire where countless others could dream along with them. Instead, he weeps over what was destroyed to keep that dream alive, and what’s been forgotten so others can hope to be remembered.

Babylon ’s most significant moments don’t come during the big events in Nellie, Jack, or Manny’s stories. They’re the quieter scenes, tracking what happens in the wake of their flaming parabolic arcs. They’re about the people who are forced out of the business or choose to walk away — the queer people forced into hiding to bolster studios’ public image, the marginalized forced to bear indignities so white actors can chase immortality.

This is the Babylon of the film’s title: The burnished image left behind after the people who built it are gone. It is easy to get caught up in the magic of movies and only see Jack Conrad, or Damien Chazelle — and if that’s all you see in Babylon , revulsion may come naturally. But Babylon is also concerned with what happens in the periphery of Hollywood’s white heroes. Chazelle shoots his stars with a lens wide enough that it’s not hard to see who lingers in the periphery, and the parts they have to play. Keep an eye on those people as they come and go, and Babylon becomes a cacophonous dirge for them, weeping for their anonymity in all the beauty that came at their expense. Their nitrate went up in flames and left us with lovely little lies of living forever.

Babylon premieres in theaters on Dec. 23.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'babylon'.

Bob Mondello

Director Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" is a comically over-the-top look at scandal-ridden 1920s Hollywood. It's a celebration of an art form in turmoil as silent films give way to talkies.

DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:

Christmas Day, a popular day to head to the movies. There's a new one out by Damien Chazelle, himself a big champion of showbiz. He's the filmmaker behind Whiplash, centered on a jazz percussionist, and "La La Land," which followed the romance between a musician and an actress. His latest is a film biz comedy called "Babylon." And as critic Bob Mondello explains, it's about scandal-ridden Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We begin in the desert, much as Hollywood did, with a truck driver and client bit that feels like the setup for a Laurel and Hardy movie.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BABYLON")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Put down one horse and your signature right there.

DIEGO CALVA: (As Manny Torres) You said one horse?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah. It's only one, right?

CALVA: (As Manny Torres) No. It's an elephant.

MONDELLO: A misunderstanding, clearly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You mean a really big horse.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Manny Torres) No. I mean an elephant.

MONDELLO: Manny's chaperoning the circus animal to a Hollywood party. And what follows will be Laurel-and-Hardy-esque slapstick in color with, shall we say, colorful language.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Holy s***. Is that a f****** elephant?

MONDELLO: Cut to Manny's car, towing the now-elephant-laden truck up a steep hill when the tow line snaps, the truck rolls backwards and - well, I'll spare you the sound of the elephant relieving itself on its trainer. But let it be said that director Damien Chazelle is being honest up front. This is not going to be Tinseltown cleaned up for public consumption. It's the roar of the Roaring 20s, amplified to full-scale bacchanal, which is, as it happens, the next scene, the Hollywood party in full swing, folks cavorting and snorting and doing things I can't talk about on the radio. Big stars are there, including a Douglas Fairbanks type named Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt.

BRAD PITT: (As Jack Conrad) This table only has one bottle. We're going to need eight.

MONDELLO: And also wanna-bes, including both Manny, played by Diego Calva, and a girl he helped sneak in, Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie.

MARGOT ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) I'm already a star.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What have you been in?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Nothing yet.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Who's your contract with?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Don't have one.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I think you want to become a star.

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Honey, you don't become a star. You either are one or you ain't. I am. Do you know where I can find some drugs?

MONDELLO: By evening's end, they'll both be promised entry to a movie set for the first time. And it's a doozy - back in the desert, maybe a dozen silent films shooting at once. Nellie gets to shine in an idiotic Western as a barroom floozy. Manny attaches himself to the director of Jack's film, a medieval battlefield epic that's shooting with real swords, lots of injuries, and a full orchestra blaring away for atmospherics, observing it all from a nearby hilltop a Hedda Hopper-style reporter played by Jean Smart

JEAN SMART: (As Elinor St. John) Soldiers swarm the fields like flecks of paint from a madman's brush as your humble servant bears witness to the latest of the moving picture's magic tricks. Oh, why do I bother? Look at these idiots. I knew Prust (ph), you know.

MONDELLO: Writer-director Chazelle is every bit as smitten as his star-struck newbies. He includes film lore for aficionados, shout-outs to Fatty Arbuckle, to the women directors who were pioneers in what later became a nearly all-male world behind the camera.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Cut. OK. Ice water for two...

MONDELLO: And with the coming of talkies, everything shifts up a notch. This was the moment when Hollywood debauchery prompted talk of a production code. And Chazelle serves up nudity, profanity, murder, rattlesnake rustling, mountains of cocaine and a probing look at the effect of film industry racism towards even black stars like the trumpeter played by Jovan Adepo.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Next to them, Sidney looks white.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Look. He's Black.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) They won't think that in the sound.

MONDELLO: "Babylon" feels over the top and enormous at three-plus hours, reportedly down from a four-hour first cut. It is a crazily overstuffed love letter to the glories of cinema, as characters keep telling us. It is too much and often, especially in call-outs to "Singin' In The Rain," a little on the nose. It is also clearly heartfelt and that counts. I'm Bob Mondello.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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Margot Robbie, supine in a red halter dress, is held by revelers over their heads.

By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.

The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.

Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.

There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed .” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.

Babylon Rated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of an actress. She is Margot Robbie, not Robinet.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

Margot Robbie plays an ingénue, Brad Pitt a silent film star and Diego Calva a dreamer in this exuberantly messy look at La La Land's early days — an acid spin on 'Singin' in the Rain.'

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Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

With brash and bawdy “ Babylon ,” director Damien Chazelle blows something between a poisoned kiss and a big fat raspberry at the same town he so swoonily depicted in “La La Land.” Separated by nine decades and nearly an ocean of cynicism, the two Tinseltown-set films seem unlikely to have sprung from the same head; we might never suspect they had, were it not for musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz’s busy, hyper-jazzinated score. Here, Chazelle rewinds the clock to Hollywood’s raucous early days — specifically, the transition from silent filmmaking to talkies, when the industry was still fresh and figuring out what it could be.

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Chazelle lets us know right out of the gate the kind of picture he has in store when a rented elephant empties its bowels on an unlucky animal wrangler (and, given where the camera is placed, on our heads as well). That outrageous spectacle is instantly topped by a kinky scene in what could be Fatty Arbuckle’s bedroom, as a corpulent silent comic giddily awaits his golden shower. Later that night, the starlet who indulged him will be dead of a drug overdose, forcing a desperate studio fixer (Flea) to tap Mexican employee Manny Torres (Calva) to get creative in disposing of the body. Characters major and minor alike are constantly dying in “Babylon” — no fewer than eight over the course of the film, plus two more name-checked in Variety obits at the end — but the tone is pitched at such a satirical extreme, not a one registers emotionally. Not even you-know-who’s.

Chazelle has essentially orchestrated a loud, vulgar live-action cartoon of a film, and while it’s exhilarating at times to witness the sheer virtuosity of his staging, the performances are all over the place. “Babylon” sorely lacks a point of view. Manny’s the closest thing the movie offers to an audience proxy, starting out as a wide-eyed outsider to the opening fete and working his way up to a studio executive position. But when asked by force-of-nature party crasher Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) why he wants to be in showbiz, the best Manny can muster is “I just want to be part of something bigger, I guess.”

Nearly all the main characters get a why-movies-matter monologue. Nearly all are shabbily written. “All the c—s in Lafayette called me the ugliest mutt in the neighborhood. Well, let them see me now!” Nellie shouts after her dancing at the party gets her discovered. The way she sashays is out of period, but that’s one of Chazelle’s incongruous rules for the movie: He spent 15 years researching the era, tapped production designer Florencia Martin and costume pro Mary Zophres to get every little detail right, then banished anything (like the Charleston) that he thought might take audiences out of the experience. Later, movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt, mugging it up as a John Gilbert-like romantic lead) will question, “The man who puts gasoline in your tank goes to your movies — why? … Because he feels less alone there.”

Witnessing it all is a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who dictates her dispatches from the sidelines. She’s a curious character, an ahead-of-her-time Hedda Hopper, though she’s by far the most eloquent. Her “why they laughed” speech — “It’s those of us in the dark, those who just watch, who survive” — is the best scene in a movie full of far showier set pieces. Elinor will later be hired by the studio as a kind of manners coach for Nellie, which makes no sense, but then, neither does the idea that a scene-stealing bisexual woman named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), loosely inspired by Anna May Wong, serves as a cabaret singer by night but pays her bills painting intertitles.

The middle hour of the film, which finds Jack and Nellie adapting to the advent of sound, owes a huge debt to “Singin’ in the Rain.” Chazelle stacks one big set piece after another — a string-of-pearls structure, with bawdy comedy more than music being the focus of each — then smash-cuts to the next scene, often to a blaring burst of jazz, or else the melancholy plunk of Hurwitz’s broken-player-piano score. You could argue that Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is also one of the film’s main characters, although he gets a far more anemic share of the plot and could have been cut out completely without much changing the film’s chemistry. Whereas all the other principals get overwritten introductions, Sidney makes his entrance onstage, playing his trumpet. Chazelle is obsessed with jazz, so maybe that solo takes the place of a monologue. Or maybe editor Tom Cross is confronted with too many threads.

There are myriad other flamboyant characters in a whirling ensemble that borrows more than is reasonable from other directors. That big opening party, for example, appears to be Chazelle’s way of one-upping “New York, New York,” though it lacks Scorsese’s instinct for privileging character over camera moves. Toward the end, an on-set drug dealer who calls himself “The Count” (Rory Scovel) gets Manny in a fix with a strung-out gangster (Tobey Maguire in a most unsettling cameo) — a rip-off of the Alfred Molina/Wonderland sequence in “Boogie Nights,” until it takes a deranged turn that suggests the “Gimp” scene from “Pulp Fiction.”

In his book “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger spills the secrets of the Golden Age stars. “Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers,” he writes. “The legend overlooks one fact — fear. That ever present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.” Chazelle borrows both his title and that kernel of wisdom from Anger’s trashy tell-all, focusing on an alarming phenomenon from the late 1920s and early ’30s — before anyone dared to label such entertainment “art” — in which so many industry types took their own lives.

Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Marc Platt, Wild Chickens, Organism Pictures production. Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Tobey Maguire, Wyck Godfrey, Helen Estabrook, Adam Siegel.
Crew: Director, writer: Damien Chazelle. Camera: Linus Sandgren. Editor: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.
With: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.

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The Dizzying Debauchery of Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s new film is an extravaganza of caustic misery and overflowing movie magic.

A debauchery-filled party scene in 'Babylon'

For a lavish and expensive epic about 1920s Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s new film, Babylon , introduces itself about as scatologically as possible. In its first sequence, a harried gofer named Manny Torres (played by Diego Calva) tries to transport an elephant into the Hollywood Hills for a big-shot producer’s party, a farcical task that ends with the elephant pooping on the camera lens—in a way, on the viewers themselves. We then cut to a giggling movie star getting urinated on as part of some private sexcapade while the party ensues on the floors below—a sweaty, drug-fueled orgy that Chazelle presents in a bravura unbroken take.

The scene, filled with wondrous and horrifying sights, massively overstays its welcome. And that sets the tone perfectly for Chazelle’s ensuing poison-pen letter to Hollywood’s silent era, a three-hour-plus extravaganza of debauchery, general misery, and overflowing movie magic that sets the industry aflame and invites the audience to dance around the bonfire. It’s a daring thing for a major studio to put out these days, when big budgets tend to be lavished on superheroes, and Babylon ’s caustic indulgence will likely put many theatergoers off. But Chazelle is trying to make a point with all the excess: that the joy of cinema has always gone hand in hand with exploitation, abuse, and off-screen villainy.

On its face, Babylon would seem to be the flip-side narrative to La La Land , the director’s Oscar-winning musical about filmmaking, which took a much gauzier approach. In it, people sang winsome ballads saluting “the fools who dream,” and stardom was granted to those who strived hard enough for it, though it came at the cost of love. But La La Land was a film with a bittersweet edge ; Chazelle seemed to be critiquing his own nostalgia while still letting it play out on-screen to delight viewers. In Babylon , his affection for the fame-seeking business he works in has only curdled further, but his passion for film as a medium hasn’t diminished in the slightest. The subsequent raging contrast between these two notions is fascinating to watch.

Read: La La Land ’s double-edged nostalgia

A huge ensemble piece, Babylon focuses on three main characters. There’s Manny, a Mexican American assistant who rises through the ranks of a fictional studio to become a film executive right as movies begin their transition to “talkies.” At the frenzied party in the film’s opening act, he meets two actors: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a newcomer looking to break into the biz, and Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established superstar who can’t get out of bed before downing a few cocktails. Babylon follows each person’s rise and fall as their arcs intertwine and come apart, but it also delves into other tales of an industry stumbling toward a veneer of respectability during one of its most volatile eras.

Hollywood in the 1920s was, Chazelle insistently tells us, absolutely anarchic. Bankrolled by shady figures, filmmakers were still inventing basic storytelling concepts on the fly, and codes for on-screen decency and morality were a few years off. At one point, Chazelle virtuosically shoots a series of gigantic film productions all taking place simultaneously in the same California hills, a conceit that was feasible when movies didn’t have to worry about capturing sound. While one director wrangles thousands of extras for a colossal medieval-combat scene (somewhat reminiscent of the famed 1916 epic Intolerance ), other productions play out on intimate sets that have been knocked together. Chazelle’s camera roams from location to location, drinking in the wild glory of it all.

It might be the best sequence Chazelle has ever put together, and he’s staged quite a few dazzling set pieces in his short career. He wants the viewer to consider the sheer audacity of early moviemaking, particularly delighting in the contrast between the immense battle being orchestrated for one movie and an emotional barroom scene being produced for another, in which Nellie, a last-minute replacement, proves herself the saucy new star the studio’s been looking for. By the time the sequence ended, I was ready to proclaim Babylon a masterpiece, except that the film wasn’t even halfway done.

What follows is a dizzying series of concentric spirals for the ensemble that start feeling almost nauseating. Nellie’s initial triumphant success begins to falter because of her scandalous off-screen behavior; Jack’s image begins to fade with age, alcoholism, and changing trends; Manny’s desire to rise to the top compels him to make a set of morally compromising decisions. There are other characters with narratives rooted in film history that are equally fascinating, though they sadly get shorter shrift in Chazelle’s screenplay. Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, a cabaret singer and an actress with a gift for painting silent-film title cards, and Jovan Adepo plays a trumpeter named Sidney Palmer who briefly enjoys fame during the early years of films with sound.

Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women

Almost all of these figures have historical analogues, with many of them blending classic bits of Hollywood lore—Nellie is obviously inspired by the flapper queen Clara Bow , Jack is the tragic silent star John Gilbert , Fay Zhu is much indebted to Anna May Wong , and so on. But Chazelle turns up the volume with each portrayal, mixing fact and fiction and giving his dialogue more contemporary snap and crackle to underline the ways the industry hasn’t changed after almost 100 years. Although I was moved and agitated by the cavalcades of failure Babylon depicts, the film almost deliberately becomes a drag, wringing out every last golden drop of nostalgia until everyone, on-screen and off, is miserable and exhausted.

But before ushering ticket buyers out the door, Chazelle presents a coda that is so absurd and daring, so simultaneously cornball and avant-garde, that I wasn’t sure whether to doff my cap or throw fruit at the screen. I shan’t describe it entirely, but it includes a montage that exists to underscore Chazelle’s core message about the world he’s working in. Yes, he seems to be saying, Hollywood is a fetid pit of exploitation that has sucked many souls dry over the decades, but it is all in service of the best entertainment money can buy. I’m not sure if I agree or if I was simply beaten into submission after more than three hours, but Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

Den of Geek

Babylon Review: Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt Make Damnation Look Good

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is the anti-Singin’ in the Rain with its portrait of Golden Age Hollywood resembling an intoxicating (if sickly) shade of yellow.

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Before the Hays Code and censors came in—and honestly for long afterwards as well—Hollywood was considered to be a regular Sodom and Gomorrah by the heartland. There, out in the desert, a sinister den of iniquity had supplanted New Orleans as damnation made flesh. That reputation of course faded over the years by dint of time and the glossy sheen of fabulous studio publicists that went on to shape our nostalgia. They turned infamy into respectability. Decadence into a lost golden age.

Which is perhaps why that golden hue looks all the more sickly in Damien Chazelle ’s seedy bacchanal of a movie: this Christmas’ Babylon . Named after the biggest film set ever assembled for a notorious box office flop, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance , the new film’s title also doubles as a nod to the Biblical scale on which Chazelle is mounting his fourth feature (albeit without the accompanying moral judgment or, arguably, sense of divine punishment for the damned).

Babylon is a sensuous and ludicrous spectacle where the parties operate at a level that would make Jay Gatsby blush, and the transition to sound carries with it all the stakes of Greek tragedy. And given the quality of most of the films-within-films we watch being made by Babylon ’s protagonists, their doom within a burgeoning film industry also carries the whiff of farce. For in their own way, each and every person in this sprawling ensemble worships at a Hollywood altar that will gladly sacrifice them to a better opening weekend in the sticks. The movie is thus a three-hour blood ritual of waiting for the Sword of Damocles to descend.

Among those beautiful sacrifices to the gods of celluloid are Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), one of the great lovers of the silent screen; Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), an unknown who’s never acted but insists she is a star and will prove it by partying like the Goddess of Coke and Champagne; and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a sharp immigrant who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. That place, as it turns out, is delivering an elephant for a wanton feast that quickly gives way to an orgy.

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Once you realize that single opening shindig comprises the movie’s first 40 minutes—it’s where Nellie’s dance moves win her an acting role, and Manny’s quick-thinking finds him on the set the next day, babysitting Jack’s hangover—you begin to understand just what kind of movie Babylon is. It is a carnival of excess and sometimes literal excrement; a shadowy kingdom where pain and pleasure blur in flickering gaslight. It also is a portrait of an industry with one foot still awkwardly planted in the wild west when a new innovation in moviemaking arrives, threatening to rock all their worlds: sound. Worse still, the talkies are accompanied by censors and the morality police!

At a glance, Babylon invites itself to be viewed as the anti- Singin’ in the Rain . Both movies looked back at the tumultuous days of the late ‘20s and the transition from silent pictures to talkies, but whereas the 1952 musical masterpiece was a quaint and cleaned up scrapbook, with the picture produced by some of the old relics who were there, Babylon is a warts and all embrace of the Hollywood abyss that Gene Kelly tap danced over. And after making a love letter to the iconography of golden age Hollywood in La La Land , the movie that Chazelle’s early career was previously building toward, the director now pivots away from Turner Classic Movie daydreams to dig into the stuff that doesn’t appear in the authorized biographies. It’s thrilling. For the first several hours, anyway.

As mentioned the parties are a debauched frenzy, with long tracking shots of booze, writhing bodies, clothed and nude, and even an elephant stomping through mountainous piles of cocaine. Yet where the movie feels most alive is on the panicked film sets. One sequence where Nellie shoots her first talkie scene echoes some of the great gags of Singin’ in the Rain , but here it’s a business with life or death stakes—literally for the guy suffocating in the sound booth without ventilation as Nellie misses her microphone mark for the sixth time and begins to buckle beneath the pressure. Suddenly, the bemusing idea of actors struggling with talking on camera is as brutal as the jazz-scored traumas in Chazelle’s undisputed masterpiece, Whiplash .

Elsewhere talents without so many opportunities cast haunting shadows. For example, there’s Jovan Adepo as a Black jazz trumpeter who, in order to play his music, has to endure an industry that still practices blackface; then there’s Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who is Anna May Wong in all but name and whose multifaceted double (triple?) life can only be hinted at despite Babylon ’s epic three-hour running time.

The movie winds up, however, falling back to its three leads in Calva, Pitt, and Robbie. The most successful at anchoring the madness is Robbie, with the star bringing a ludicrous charisma fans of her Harley Quinn persona will recognize (in the movie’s most amusing tangent, Nellie even fights a rattlesnake!), yet there is more texture and bitterness to LaRoy. She’s the reveler who’ll never realize the party is over… even after the lights have long since been turned off. Maybe it’s because the fire behind Robbie’s gaze never dims.

All that being said, if this review feels long that’s because there is so much in this expansive 188-minute movie that it is difficult to fully grasp your arms around it after one viewing. One senses this is likewise true for Chazelle and his editors. Despite being based around a handful of incidents and parties over about a six-year period, Babylon still appears to be bursting at the seams as the filmmakers struggle to wrangle it all down.

I’m not sure they fully succeeded. The film’s third hour especially feels both monumental and excessive as its coterie of protagonists descend down their self-made inferno—yet still find a final denouement that confirms Chazelle remains the wistful sentimentalist who made La La Land .

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In the end, this is still a Hollywood movie about being in love with Hollywood movies, albeit the Valentine is scrawled on toilet paper after a long night’s bender. But what a night it was! Especially in our current moment where so many evenings at the movie theater are placid in their ambitions, and terrified of being audacious, never mind crude, with the type of films typically made at this scale. In that context, Babylon really isn’t a party you can afford to miss, even if in the naked light of day you’ll wish someone called time before things got weird.

Babylon is in theaters on Friday, Dec. 23.

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

Babylon Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About Damian Chazelle’s Hollywood Epic

Audiences are in for a wild ride.

After providing audiences with Academy Award winners like Whiplash , La La Land and First Man , Damien Chazelle is back to fill our holiday season with another wild story that’s likely to be in contention for next year’s biggest awards . Babylon is a movie about movies, as audiences will follow five main characters through the era when Hollywood was transitioning from silent film to talkies. First reactions to Babylon were mixed, with people calling it everything from “a love letter to cinema” to “a flaming hot mess.” Now the reviews are here to help us decide if we’ll be taking a trip to the theater for Christmas.

Babylon ’s impressive ensemble is one reason to be excited about the movie , as it stars Margot Robbie , Brad Pitt , Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li, whose characters jump through time, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows of their careers. Let’s see what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Babylon . Eric Eisenberg rates the film 3 stars out of 5, saying that while the first half is one of the best movies of the year, it’s destined to be divisive, yet still worth the watch. His take:

At its best, Babylon is exciting, hilarious, and a blast… but those adjectives are mostly reserved for describing approximately the first 90 minutes. The back half of the film, while it does have its highlights, demonstrates an inability for the movie to fully carry its own weight, and the multi-faceted narrative descends into tropes and some groan-worthy material before the end credits start to roll.

Leah Greenblatt of EW grades the film a C-, saying Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey the depravity of Hollywood, for “three turgid, clattering hours,” and the result is frankly exhausting. She says in the review:

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt; sex is universal currency, and death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline.

Tomris Laffly of AV Club , however, calls Babylon “masterful,” grading the “deliciously decadent” movie an A and saying it’s not a minute too long. The critic says despite what’s going on on-screen, this is the writer/director’s most clear-headed film:

With an electric score by Justin Hurwitz (that occasionally resembles the chords in Chazelle’s La La Land too audibly), it’s all pure, eye-gouging debauchery for 30 or so minutes. Before the suggestive title Babylon appears, there will be plenty of orgies, mountains of drugs, sexual fetishes, naughty performance bits, projectile vomiting, and more sweaty bare bodies than one can count.

Babylon shows yet again that Damien Chazelle isn’t afraid to swing for the fences or go too far, according to Travis Hopson of Punch Drunk Critics , making him a filmmaker always worth checking out. However, only the lead trio get the proper amount of attention, and themes of race and homophobia would likely have been better off omitted since they’re not properly explored, the critic argues, rating the film 3 out of 5 stars:

Like the blitzed-out-of-its-mind lovechild of Boogie Nights and The Wolf of Wall Street, Damien Chazelle’s exciting, exhausting, and sloppy ode to jazz age Hollywood, Babylon, features elephant shit and golden showers in the first ten minutes. It also features a Los Angeles as you’ve rarely seen it…tranquil. For a moment, anyway. The city is in the midst of an epic transition, not just from silent movies into ‘talkies’, but the city as a whole from quiet desert to sprawling show business epicenter. They say that Hollywood will chew people up and spit them out, but this has always been true. Never moreso than the tragic, hopeful, and thrilling era that Chazelle lovingly, maddeningly depicts.

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast calls Babylon “an orgy of every worst idea in Hollywood” and a story about the roaring ‘20s in which no one looks, acts, or talks like they’re from that decade. The critic says the movie steals from every great director before collapsing in on itself. More from Schager:

Chockablock with profanity, nudity, and all manner of demented degradation, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to First Man is a three-hour work of grand and grotesque excess that strives to celebrate the wondrous power of the movies. All it does, however, is crassly steal the magic of its superior ancestors, right up to a finale that parasitically pinches yesteryear’s classics for the pathos it can’t conjure on its own.

Love it or hate it, people are definitely going to be talking about Damien Chazelle’s latest offering, especially in regards to awards. If you want to be in the conversation, you’ll be able to see this one for yourself in theaters starting Friday, December 23. Be sure to also check out what’s headed to the big screen in the new year with our 2023 Movie Release Schedule .

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Screen Rant

Babylon early reactions are both positive & negative (but never mild).

Damien Chazelle's Babylon is a mixed bag, according to early reviewers, who either call the Hollywood film sensational or a drug-fueled rollercoaster.

Audiences are sharing their thoughts on Babylon as early reactions to the outlandish Hollywood-centered film prove polarizing. Babylon is the upcoming project from acclaimed writer/director Damien Chazelle, the filmmaker behind Whiplash , La La Land , and First Man . The movie stars Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Tobey Maguire, and others as various characters navigating a life of outrageous excess and ambition during Hollywood's transition from silent film to talkies during the Roaring '20s.With Chazelle's Babylon set to premiere just before Christmas, early reactions are a mixed bag of extremes, from very positive notices to some calling the film a mess. Advance viewers took to Twitter to share their thoughts, with many calling Babylon high-energy and praising the costuming and acting, particularly Robbie and Calva's performances . On the other hand, some viewers find fault with the movie's tonal variance, one-note characters, and outrageous debauchery. Check out some reactions below: Related: Brad Pitt's Most Exciting 2022 Movie Repeats OUATIH's Genius Trick

What To Expect From Damien Chazelle's Babylon

If Babylon's early reactions are any indication, the movie is every bit the ambitious, drug-fueled odyssey that the trailer made it appear to be. But its ambition and chaotic energy appeal to only some viewers, with many indicating that the messy structure and apparent lack of focus hurt the film the most. From a visual and performance perspective, however, the film appears like a winner, which is not surprising considering the all-star ensemble cast and Oscar-nominated cinematography of Linus Sandgren, a regular collaborator of Chazelle's.

Notably, most reactions include mentions of excessive drug use, a seemingly common habit in 20s-era Hollywood. Therefore, the film's coke-fueled vitality appears to be its driving force, resonating through nearly every positive or negative aspect of Babylon . Conversely, very few reactions make any mention of Pitt aside from a few mentioning his character's balcony dancing sequence from the Babylon trailer. The lack of references to the veteran actor could mean that Robbie and Calva's performances are simply that spectacular, but it could also imply a conscious effort to overlook Pitt due to the ongoing allegations of his child abuse by Angelina Jolie.

Despite Pitt's controversial appearance - which could lead some prospective viewers to boycott the film - and the criticisms regarding Babylon's tone, the polarizing reactions are sure to generate even more intrigue. Cinephiles already expected Babylon to be Oscar bait thanks to director Chazelle's various nominations and wins, the film's period setting, cast, and its themes surrounding Golden Age Hollywood . However, now many early reactions are also criticizing the movie. Some possible viewers who are on the fence about seeing Babylon could use the polarizing reports as motivation to judge the project for themselves. Either way, Chazelle's upcoming film, set to premiere in late December, will likely continue to divide passionate film fans and general audiences up to the 2023 Oscar ceremony, where it is almost certain to have some sort of impact.

Read Next: Brad Pitt's 2022 Movies Will Remind You How Great He Really Is

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To Love and Hate in L.A.: ‘Babylon’ Must Be Seen to Be Believed

Damien Chazelle’s rambunctious new feature is either a celebration of Old Hollywood or an ode to the death of the entire industry—but above all else, it seems deliberately designed to kill his own career

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Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not a movie that lacks moments of potential self-critique, from the fire hose–like spray of pachyderm shit that douses the characters in its first scene—a nod as much to the elephant-sized proportions of this $80 million period piece as to its scatological attitude—to a gut-churning atrocity-exhibition climax located, per one character’s unforgettable description, in “the asshole of Los Angeles.” You don’t write a line like that in a movie that imagines silent-era Hollywood as the ninth circle of hell if you don’t want critics to single it out as your rhetorical equivalent of “Rosebud.”

There is, however, a quieter exchange midway through Babylon that gets closer to the gooey, arrhythmic heart of Chazelle’s project. Sharing a cab on a rainy day in New York, newly minted starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and studio gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) have a gentle, mutually affectionate heart-to-heart. She’s in town to duck the paparazzi who’ve made her into America’s new it girl, a “wild child” known for her lascivious performing style. He’s there to scope out the preview of The Jazz Singer , a new “talking” picture that threatens to completely rewrite the industry rule book. What these two foundlings turned insiders end up talking about, though, is ice cream, and what they like to put on it. Nellie’s favorite topping is all of them—as good a metaphor as any for a nauseous, high-calorie sugar rush of a movie that not only wants to have its cake and eat it too, but also to puke it up, smear it around, and cram it in the viewer’s face.

“Make ’em laugh,” Donald O’Connor urged in Singin’ in the Rain , a movie that serves as Babylon ’s conceptual and spiritual template, and it’s the essentially enigmatic, deeply subjective question of comedy—of whether or not something is funny, and why—that hangs over the proceedings like an old-timey anvil. There are scenes of raging, quasi-surrealist degradation here that Adam McKay would kill to direct, and bits so dour and pretentious and sentimental that they may even justify Oscar nominations. This wildly erratic, at times shockingly unpleasant concoction arrives just under the wire as the most surprising and potentially polarizing American movie of the year—a parable of artistic license and ends-justify-the-means ambition that’s as ethically inscrutable as Tár and as awash in alienation effects as Blonde , with an even deeper love-letter-to-the-movies subtext than Empire of Light or The Fabelmans . It even somehow boasts a direct connection to Avatar that, like a half dozen other tricks it has crammed up its sleeves, has to be seen to be believed.

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Make no mistake: All of this discombobulation is very much on purpose, as if Chazelle—whose biggest hits, Whiplash and La La Land , were, in their way, crowd pleasers—were trying to recast himself as a black sheep in an industry that’s already embraced him as a precocious prodigy. A case can be made that Chazelle’s first movie, the charming, black-and-white hipster romance Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), is still his best; certainly, it’s the one in which his love of musicals and preoccupation with the balancing act between creativity and personal stability rings truest, with the best ratio of invention to self-indulgence. The bigger his movies got, though, the more they felt imbued with show-offy style and a bizarre masochism about art. Whiplash was basically Full Metal Jacket for jazz majors, minus Kubrick’s satirical (and political) subtext, while First Man sacrificed the exhilaration and uplift of other astronaut biopics for a sweaty, white-knuckled anxiety that stalled at the box office.

Well-made, conspicuously expensive, and emotionally remote, First Man was the sort of movie you make when you have an Oscar in your back pocket and you’re cashing in your chips. Babylon is something else entirely—like a guy who’s already all in tossing his watch, car keys, and wedding ring into the pot. Hollywood history is littered with titles whose directors had reason to fear that they might never work in this town again, but Babylon is on the short list of movies that seem almost deliberately designed as career killers. It is, on some level, an affront to its subject matter and its audience, yet the mix of exuberance, insolence, and white-hot melancholic guilt at its core makes it just as hard to hate as to love. Gold-plated, fur-lined, and spattered with precious bodily fluids of every kind, Chazelle’s film somehow aims high while also going low. It’s a hymn to its own filthy ambivalence.

The use of the Mexican-born Manny—a cipher with no obvious historical corollary in a narrative where fictional and real-life celebrities rub shoulders (and body parts)—is fascinating and telling. One of the principal criticisms of La La Land was of its weirdly deracinated view of Los Angeles, the way that the multicultural chorus singing and dancing their way through the traffic-jam-set opener “Another Day of Sun” more or less fell away in order to keep the focus on Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s lily-white strivers. The only major character of color was John Legend’s gregarious Top 40–oriented sellout; otherwise, Black people existed in the movie to implicitly authenticate Gosling’s love of jazz, whether by serving as backing musicians or smiling politely while he twirled them around at the end of a pier. Relitigating the racial politics of a six-year-old movie is nobody’s idea of a good time, but Chazelle seems determined to evoke the problematic aspects of his Oscar-winning triumph, whether as penance, confessional, or rationalization. Manny’s steady rise from below-the-line factotum and assistant to Brad Pitt’s vainglorious matinee idol, Jack Conrad, to hard-boiled studio executive provides the film with its strongest through line, and he’s just one of several characters meant to embody (and challenge) the erasure of nonwhite figures in romanticized accounts of Hollywood’s history. Others include Jovan Adepo ’s ace Black trumpet player, Sidney Palmer, and Li Jun Li ’s lesbian cabaret-singer-slash-intertitle-writer, Lady Fay Zhu, both of whom get plot arcs that testify to their artistic and cultural innovations—and unrealized star potential—while gesturing toward the larger factors in their marginalization.

The politically correct thrust of these subplots is theoretically meant to balance out—or at least provide ballast to—the bacchanalian madness of Babylon as a whole, which kicks off with a 30-minute pre-credit prologue set at an isolated, free-for-all orgy in the upper reaches of the Hollywood Hills. If Singin’ in the Rain is Babylon ’s spirit guide, then Boogie Nights —and the big-dick aesthetic of Paul Thomas Anderson in general—is its how-to manual. The movie isn’t five minutes old before a scantily clad party guest ODs in a back room after urinating on a corpulent man’s face, her convulsions registered in glancing fashion in the midst of an endlessly whirling, look-ma-no-hands tracking shot. In fact, the swift, relentless virtuosity of the filmmaking is probably the only thing standing between Babylon and an NC-17 rating, since the nudity and debauchery get abstracted into one gigantic, writhing, fleshy blur. (If you played the opening sequence at half speed you’d have Eyes Wide Shut .)

It’s into this unhinged milieu that Robbie makes her entrance, cheerfully smashing her car into one of the mansion’s statues. Nellie is an uninvited but ultimately very welcome guest who’s barely made it past the front door before she’s knee-deep in cocaine, a substance that has the same basic effect on her as spinach did on Popeye. In synthesizing the look and attributes of various pre-code stars, including the notoriously hard-living Clara Bow, Robbie has the showiest role in Babylon and makes the most of it, oscillating between feral, strung-out exhibitionism, crackerjack physical comedy, and endearing rag-doll fragility without breaking a sweat. Her triumph comes not so much in spite of her character’s archetypal dimensions as through them; when she reveals that her ability to cry on command—a priceless asset in the silent era, with its vocabulary of rapturous, wordless close-ups—is as simple as thinking about her miserable backwater home, it’s a laughably simplistic bit of character psychology given bravura shading. Like Emma Stone in La La Land , Robbie is basically playing ambition personified, except that she’s obliged to go to darker and more daring places along the way. By the time a wasted, half-naked Nellie is taunting a roomful of alpha-male admirers to fight a cobra on her behalf—and resolving that she’s going to have to do it herself—the only reasonable response to the performance is a kind of stunned admiration.

Nellie’s indomitable spirit and tarnished-angel innocence are irresistible to Manny, who’s otherwise pragmatic about an industry whose many illusions fail to fool him. For instance, he’s sympathetic to Pitt’s fading superstar but he also sees right through him. (Pitt’s acting here verges on laziness; Jack’s rumpled, deflated handsomeness is just right, but he lacks the self-deprecating specificity of Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .) It’s Manny who recognizes the paradigm-shifting potential of The Jazz Singer , and who labors to keep his own studio on the cutting edge, a process that’s depicted in line with Chazelle’s usual themes of art as a form of self-annihilation. Except that this time out, instead of psychological torture à la Whiplash , we actually get filmmaking as a matter of life and death—over and over again. In one bravura set piece synced to a ticking-clock conceit, Jack’s crew (which includes a Germanic director played in a perfect cameo by [ redacted ]) needs to get a shot before the end of Magic Hour; over the course of one afternoon, the production of a biblical epic devolves into clumsy, life-threatening slapstick, with underpaid extras corralled at the barrel of a gun and one unfortunate day player impaled by a spear. Cut to a few years later and the production of an innocuous talkie comedy set on a college campus results in another on-set casualty—the morbid, inevitable punch line to a breathlessly acted and edited set piece that takes the behind-the-scenes confusion of Lina Lamont’s squawky dialogue recording in Singin’ in the Rain and weaponizes it.

To say that the historical veracity of these scenes—and their suggestion of Old Hollywood as a sort of haphazard abattoir populated by lunatics—is up for debate is an understatement. There’s evidence here of deep research, but also of a filmmaker who isn’t all that interested in how early production actually worked—not when it’s more effective to cultivate total chaos. But even if one accepts the manic stylization of the filmmaking scenes in Babylon , it’s genuinely hard to tell how the movie feels about the period—whether the overarching attitude is one of nostalgia or horror. This ambivalence is, in and of itself, a point of interest, since most movies made at Babylon ’s budget level are afraid to put any onus of interpretation on the audience. But it’s also risky. Viewers in search of tonal or ideological coherence—or who know anything about the period being depicted—are likely to be frustrated, or even outraged. In Time, Stephanie Zacharek, who has often written passionately and perceptively about the cinema of the early 20th century, unloaded on Chazelle for his callow, opportunistic treatment of the past, writing that “he treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.”

I actually found Babylon less condescending than La La Land , which, to borrow a withering phrase from Film Comment’ s Michael Koresky , seemed to be trying to Make Movies Great Again—to escape into an idealized past without actually turning back the clock. Babylon ’s return to the primal scene is about something more unsettling and complicated: the idea that mass entertainment depends on smoothing out—and often denying—the contradictions that go into its creation. On the one hand, Chazelle’s array of characters and their various frustrations verges on caricature: the hard-working immigrant bedazzled (and derailed) by a hapless blond; the ingenue hypnotized by her own charisma; the old hand staring down his own personal and professional obsolescence. At the same time, Babylon is clear-eyed about the blurry relationship between supply and demand that has always been at the center of the movie business: that the utopian fantasies on the screen exist in an impossible space between the flawed and all too human constituencies that both build and receive them.

Late in the film, in yet another moment that feels engineered to give critics something to chew over, a Hollywood gossip columnist played by Jean Smart delivers a monologue to Pitt’s character about the strange immortality conferred by motion pictures. She tells him that long after he’s dead, his image will serve to comfort, inspire, and entertain. Posterity is obviously important to Chazelle, and it may be that he’s made Babylon in kamikaze mode because he suspects it’s one way to keep it from being forgotten in the long run—that the same manic, unsettling intensity that will likely make it a flop in real time could help to sustain it as a cult item. But there’s also a deeper anxiety in play here. In a moment when the earth dies streaming and everything from Marvel to micro-budget indies is distributed and received as content, what Chazelle may be sweating is the death of cinema itself—a perspective that recontextualizes the film’s bonkers closing montage of the medium’s greatest hits not as a celebration, but a long goodbye. If that’s the case, then one way to look at Babylon is as a wake—loud and cathartic, raucous and bleary-eyed, embarrassing and heartfelt. But another would be as the cinematic equivalent of Tim Robinson wearing that hot dog suit in I Think You Should Leave , finding culprits for an art form’s untimely demise by looking everywhere except in the mirror.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, the La La Land director’s overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Latest Is an Orgy of Excess — and That’s Why It Rocks

Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva star in this truly absurd and engrossing story of early Hollywood.

Damien Chazelle always likes to start his movies with a bang, whether through an intense drum solo in Whiplash , a Jacques Demy -inspired dance number in La La Land , or a harrowing plane crash piloted by Neil Armstrong in his last film, First Man . But his newest film, Babylon , puts all these explosive openings to shame. Within the opening of Babylon , there are rooms entirely dedicated to the storage of any type of drugs imaginable, naked bodies writhing around a raucous party, a man getting absolutely covered in elephant shit coming straight from the source, and a sexual encounter that includes a pile of cocaine and piss. And that's just the first five minutes.

With Babylon , an over-the-top story of old Hollywood and the shift from silent films to talkies, Chazelle has created an orgy—both literal and metaphorical—of madness that can't help but remind of the wild adventures of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights . Chazelle’s three-hours-and-change epic is frequently ridiculous, manic, and constantly heightened in a way that certainly isn't period accurate. Yet Chazelle’s absurdist take on this integral period in film history is less about the details and more about going along for this ride, excess to the extreme that leads to one of the best and most singular experiences in film all year.

But inside this party atmosphere is primarily the story of three players and their love of film. Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) is an aspiring actress who just happens to be at the right place (this insane party) at the right time and gets cast in a movie. At the party, she meets Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican-American who also longs to be in the movies, and after showing some initiative at the party becomes the assistant to Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star. Among the insanity is also the entertainment journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), the jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer ( Jovan Adepo ), and Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ), who writes the words on the cue cards and tends to have more sense than anyone else in Hollywood.

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While there’s certainly some historical basis around Babylon , as the transition to sound pictures did shake up film in a major way, and we do meet characters that existed in Hollywood at the time—such as Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg or Samara Weaving as Colleen Moore , hilarious cast as a rival to Robbie’s Nellie—this is all just a way for Chazelle to have fun in this playground. For example, Chazelle shows Nellie and Manny’s first day on set as a frenzy of activity, drugs, sex, and death, where multiple films shoot mere feet from each other and everyone is racing to finish their projects before the sun sets. It’s truly the Wild West, an untamed land ready for expansion. But again, within the lunacy and barely controlled chaos, Chazelle—who also wrote the script—shows just how exciting this time must’ve been, and how beautiful and improvisation the experience of this type of filmmaking could be. When the sun sets at just the right time, or an unexpected moment of beauty that couldn’t be planned occurs, or a performance that comes along and knocks you off your feet, it’s easy to see the magic inherent in early filmmaking.

Chazelle has just as much fun showing the rigidity of filming with sound and the restrictions of the early days as everyone attempted to figure out this new technology. By showing the filming of just one scene, Chazelle makes it clear how one major advance in the form could upend lives, ruin careers, and completely alter what people wanted from a film. Chazelle is teaching us the broad strokes of film history, yet in a way that is outrageous and always entertaining.

This mayhem is enough to make Babylon work, but Chazelle has filled this story with characters that show the fragility of life in the spotlight, and how easily it is for people to move forward and leave certain stars behind. Robbie is excellent as Nellie LaRoy, whose star shines bright and fast, but then struggles with the public image of it all. When Robbie is on the screen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her, even when she’s dancing in a packed mansion. But it's that innate star power that makes this role so perfect for her. We especially see how great Robbie is when she’s on the set, giving us slight variations of the same scene, yet her ability to make each take different simply by her mannerisms and her choices in the scene. From the moment we see Nellie act, we know she's a star, and we once again get another great role where Robbie can show how tremendous she can be.

Pitt is also wonderful in an understated role, as the star who is shaken by the shift to sound, worries about the next generation that's coming up from behind, and the industry that might be leaving him in the dust. Even with the frequent substance abuse and tossing off of new wives, this is a quiet performance for Pitt, and it works best when he’s left to reckon with his legacy. In one scene late in the film, Jack Conrad and Elinor St. John discuss the status of his career, and a quiet “thank you” stated by Jack is utterly heartbreaking in the context of the scene.

Yet the true standout here is Calva, as we watch him rise in the ranks of Hollywood, and see just how this era was a land of opportunity for those ambitious enough. Calva is the glue that ties this whole story together, and his evolution throughout Babylon is fascinating, whether when he’s torn over his love for Nellie, or his realization of what the movie industry has cost him throughout the film. It’s a star-making role for Calva, and the best performance in a film packed with big names.

However, it’s Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li who get discarded far too easily in this madcap story, as they get moments to show their greatness in their industry, yet the story itself spends far too little time on them. Maybe this is Chazelle’s commentary on how poorly non-white performers were treated in this era, or maybe it's just that Chazelle's interests lay more with his key three stars, but it’s a shame they don't get more screen time. But Babylon is packed to the gills with incredible cameos as well, with Spike Jonze as an unhinged silent director, and Tobey Maguire ’s psychotic appearance that might be the film’s most bonkers addition.

Like all of Chazelle’s films, Babylon is gorgeously presented, with stunning cinematography from his frequent collaborator Linus Sandgren . Even though Babylon shows just how uncaring Hollywood at this time can be, it’s the soft moments of beauty scattered throughout that show why these people stayed put and didn’t give up their dreams. After the party that begins the film, Nellie and Manny leave as the sun rises, and the purple hue of the sky brings comfort that was lacking indoors. And when the magic hour hits, it’s almost as if a hush falls over the cast and crew, even when they're not recording for sound. In Babylon , Hollywood can be a dark, callous place, but the beauty that punctuates the coldness almost makes it all worthwhile. Throw in Justin Hurtwitz ’s stupendous and thumping score and it’s hard to not get lost in the magic of the movies too.

As with so many other films this year, Babylon is a celebration of the magic of film, yet it’s also a criticism of the industry itself and the disposability of those in front of and behind the camera. No one gets out of the spotlight unscathed. But even though the people who made these images might fade away, their memories will last forever on celluloid. That’s the give and take of the movies: the movies will take all they can, yet the legacy is unceasing. But Chazelle isn't content with just focusing on the beauty of movies from this time, he also in one outstanding montage near the end, presents the entirety of cinema history, the shifts in its eras, and the power of the moving image over the course of a little over a century. Again, Chazelle shows us just ow powerful these films are, and while the creators of these films are little more than ghosts, the images they left behind are eternal.

Babylon is certainly self-indulgent and excessive, almost as if Chazelle is trying to show after some fairly restrained work that he can let loose and go nuts, but that indulgence into the hysteria works beautifully as Chazelle explores the history of film, the loneliness of stardom, and how the movies can make us feel less alone. For a film that is largely about the craziness of the movie industry, Babylon has a very real emotional core at the center of his film that delves into the humanity, loves and pains beneath us all. Babylon is often pure mayhem, but it’s the beauty of life and film itself underneath that makes this one of the best movies about movies this year, and one of the best films of 2022.

Babylon comes to theaters on December 23.

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Unsung hero.

Biography/History , Christian , Drama , Music

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April 26, 2024
Daisy Betts as Helen Smallbone; Joel Smallbone as David Smallbone; Kirrilee Berger as Rebecca Smallbone; Paul Luke Bonenfant as Daniel Smallbone; Diesel La Torraca as Joel Smallbone; JJ Pantano as Luke Smallbone; Tenz McCall as Ben Smallbone; Angus K. Caldwell as Josh Smallbone; Jonathan Jackson as Eddie Degarmo; Lucas Black as Jed Albright; Candace Cameron Bure as Kay Albright; Hillary Scott as Luanne Meece; Roslyn Gentle as Nana Smallbone; Terry O'Quinn as Grandpa James Smallbone; Don Most as Pierce; Rebecca St. James as Flight Attendant; Rachel Hendrix as Amy Grant; Joe Chambrell as Carman

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Richard L. Ramsey, Joel Smallbone

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Movie review.

“Every adventure has perils and pitfalls,” Helen Smallbone tells her six children and husband, David, as they huddle on the faded carpet of their “modest” new rental home in Nashville, Tennessee.

Adventure is one word to describe what’s happened to the Smallbone family. And a bravely charitable word at that. Others might have looked at the family’s dire surroundings and desperate situation and chosen another, arguably more honest word: nightmare .

Not long before, Helen’s entrepreneurial husband, David, had been on top of the world. The CCM market was booming in early1990s, and the Australian Christan concert promoter seemingly could do no wrong, promoting hugely popular bands such as Stryper, for instance.

Life was good for David and Helen and their six kiddos, as they enjoyed a lavish home with a pool table in the living room and a pool to swim in out back. And now, David has the opportunity of a lifetime: overseeing and promoting Amy Grant’s forthcoming concert tour down under. Sure, it will take a lot of money. More than a million dollars, actually, to pull it off. But that figure likely pales compared to the windfall David hopes to bring in.

Helen’s not so sure. “It’s just a lot of money,” she tells her husband. “I feel like we’re putting our lives on the line.”

She continues: “And it’s not just the finances. The kids miss you. I miss you.”

“It’s a two-week tour,” David says as he loads up the contract on the fax machine. Two weeks that, David hopes, will change everything for the Smallbones.

And so they do.

When a recession decimates concert attendance, David’s on the hook for a half-million-dollar shortfall.

“Helen, I’m sorry. No one anticipated this economy. We’re going to lose everything.”

David feels he has no choice but to uproot his family and move to the epicenter of the Christian music industry: Nashville.

Nothing—not one single thing—goes as planned. But in the end, the Smallbone family bands together to trust God, to love one another and to cling to hope that maybe, just maybe, there’s an adventure unfolding that’s bigger than they could have dreamed.

Positive Elements

Just about any way you want to slice it, Unsung Hero is about family. It’s the story of a marriage tested by a husband’s best efforts that fail. It’s the story of two parents’ connections with their children. It’s the story of those two people’s relationships with their parents. (David’s father, especially, has a tender, encouraging relationship with his son that’s expressed throughout the film.)

As the story opens, we see that David Smallbone is a gifted man who swings for the fences … and fails.

With each new setback, David retreats just a bit more into sullenness, self-pity and, eventually, crippling depression. And at every turn, Helen steps forward, leaning into her role as wife and mother, steadfastly and ferociously refusing to give up on her husband or on God.

One of the core elements of the story involves the Smallbones’ oldest child, 16-year-old Rebecca, and her budding singing aspirations. She’s clearly got a beautiful voice. In fact, some of the family’s new acquaintances in Nashville, Ned and Kay Albright, encourage David to seek a recording deal for her. (Ned is a successful songwriter and knows talent when he hears it.)

David knows how brutal the industry can be. He wants to protect Rebecca from being objectified or used by companies that really don’t have her best interests at heart. Helen, however, believes deeply in her daughter’s ability, aspiration and sense of calling to encourage others through song. Much of the plot subsequently involves David and Helen working through tremendous conflict and disappointment as they each strive to do right by Rebecca.

The Albrights, for their part, are practically angelic in their generosity toward the Smallbone family. They work hard to meet their needs, to the point that David himself begins to feel shame that he’s not providing for his family as he ought to. That sense of shame and failure—and Helen’s faithfulness to her husband in the middle of it—is another big part of the story. Young Rebecca is eager to learn and grow as a singer, even when her relationship with her struggling dad hits a rocky patch.

Overall, the film is chockful of moments where this large family bumps into big issues that they must work through together, sometimes in very painful ways. But together, they persevere.

A message from Luke Smallbone (who now performs with his brother, Joel, in the Christian band For King & Country) at the beginning of the film tells viewers, “At the end of the day, I think we have a great belief in the family, and I think there’s a lot of power that’s found there.” Accordingly, at the end of the film, we see a very family-focused quote from Mother Teresa: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”

Spiritual Elements

The Smallbone family trusts God together throughout this film.

I won’t spoil it completely here, but there’s one particularly touching way that Helen comes up with to help the kids identify needs and pray for them. We watch as they all learn to do that, and we see how God answers their prayers in incredibly specific ways. Helen characterizes these answers to prayer as miracles, even though David (in a deepening fog of discouragement) struggles to see them as such at times.

One of David’s primary spiritual struggles is pride. He has been successful, and he takes providing for his family very seriously. But as failures mount and difficult circumstances persist, that inherent self-dependence gets whittled away painfully.

We repeatedly hear Rebecca (and some of her brothers) singing the first song she writes, “You Make Everything Beautiful.” The chorus tells us: “You make everything, everything beautiful/You make everything, everything new/You make everything, everything beautiful/In its time, in Your time/It’s beautiful.”

Sexual Content

Helen and David kiss perhaps four or five times throughout the film. They’re shown in bed together several times as well, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting or lying next to each other, but never connecting in a physically intimate manner.

Early on, one of David’s concert-promotion associates flirts creepily with Helen when he meets her for the first time, kissing her hand.

Violent Content

In a moment of anger and frustration, Helen slaps David across the face. In another similarly emotional moment of shattered hopes, David beats on a phone/fax machine, then throws it to the floor in a rage.

[ Spoiler Warning ] We hear that one important-but-ancillary character has died.

Crude or Profane Language

There’s no profanity in the film. But as the Smallbones are about to leave for the U.S., James (David’s father) jokes with a wink, “Go give them all the Hel [short for Helen] they can handle.” He calls her “Hel” at least one other time as well. The film also features the band Stryper performing its hit song “To Hell With the Devil,” a lyric that’s repeated several times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Other negative elements.

David has a well-intentioned desire to protect Rebecca from the hard realities of the Christian music industry. But in one frustration-filled conversation with Helen and Rebecca, he unloads that perspective harshly and with a raised voice. It’s offensive enough to enough that Helen slaps him across the face and tells him to leave. It’s a tense moment that’s clearly hurtful to Rebecca.

David’s perspective on the Christian music industry isn’t a flattering one. He tells Rebecca (with a painful lack of sensitivity for his teen girl’s feelings), “She needs to hear what I wish to God someone had told me. People in this industry, they’re not your friends. They don’t care about you or what happens to you. They only care about what you can do for them.” We see that observation play out in multiple ways throughout the story.

U.S. Customs agents in Los Angeles don’t come off looking very good either, as their harsh treatment of the Smallbone family is wince-inducing.

We see Helen vomiting in an airplane toilet—morning sickness—as the family flies to America.

Unsung Hero tells a quietly remarkably story. Here’s what I mean.

In some ways, the saga of this Australian family’s sojourn in the United States, strangers in a strange land, is an archetypal Christian movie, with a pure Hollywood ending to boot: The underdogs win, persevering through a seemingly unending series of unfortunate, Job-like events that might’ve capsized the faith of other families. In the end, Rebecca St. James launches her triumphant career. Redemption, hope and beauty win the day, the lyrics of Rebecca’s oft-sung first song still echoing in our hearts as she steps onto the stage of the Creation ’93 music festival: “You make everything, everything, everything beautiful.”

And so He does.

But Unsung Hero is no airbrushed hagiography of the Smallbone family. Their path to beauty has been fraught with jagged, startling, even ugly brokenness. The story stares straight into the emotional abyss that David Smallbone plunges into when his best efforts implode cataclysmically. And it’s a black hole—one that anyone who has ever wrestled with depression or a sense of irredeemable failure will likely relate to.

“What kind of man am I?” David whispers in despair after many days—perhaps weeks—of depressive paralysis and inability even to get out of bed. “What kind of husband or father? Or son?” Eventually, like a kind of prodigal son, he’s prodded awake and comes to his senses.

The one holding the prod is, of course, his longsuffering wife, Helen.

“Our kids have come all this way,” she pleads. “They gave up everything, and they’re still happy. Because they believe in us. And they believe in you. They just believe. It’s time for you to believe, too. Please.”

But Unsung Hero poignantly depicts Helen’s own moments of despair, too. We see her scream in desperation into a pillow, where no one but God can hear. We see the stark terror on her face when she’s interrogated by a cruel U.S. customs officer who acts like a Cold War Russian lackey at an Iron Curtain checkpoint. Over and over and over again, she chooses hope and courage for the sake of her seven children, often when her well-meaning but despair-deflated husband simply cannot do so.

As the family hovers over the precipice of disaster yet again in one scene, Helen rounds up the children and drives to a park with a playground pirate ship. She leads the imaginary charge against the pretend—and yet, not so pretend—buccaneers the family metaphorically faces.

“Before we attack,” she says, “there’s one thing left to do.”

“What is it?” one of the children asks expectantly.

“We burn the ships—all of them.”

“Even ours?” a small voice says, perhaps intuiting that there’s something more than a playground game of imagination at stake. “How do we get back?”

“We don’t,” Helen replies bluntly. “It’s going to be dangerous. And scary. And it’s going to be hard. So hard that you want to go back. But if you know that you can go back, you will. And giving up, giving in, it’s not an option. We’ve got to fight our way forward! We have to win.”

And so, on the back of mom’s unrelenting courage in the face of so much peril, they do.

The unsung hero here is, of course, Helen Smallbone. The movie is a tribute to her faith and courage, the glue—the atomic connectivity—that binds the Smallbone family together. It’s no wonder that when Helen asks Rebecca what her dreams are, the teen replies, “My dream is to be like you. It always has been. You’re my hero, Mom.”

Helen’s heroism, in big ways and small, is the evident throughout the story. David’s own heroism emerges late in the story, as his wife’s love and persistence snap him out of his toxic, self-focused stew of shame, anger, despair and self-pity. “I’ve acted like a fool,” he tells his family. “Can you forgive me?”

Unsung Hero isn’t gritty in the sense that its content pushes the boundaries. It doesn’t. But it is gritty in the unvarnished way it depicts a proud-but-broken man’s failure and his struggle to emerge with his faith and relationships intact on the other side. David’s not particularly likeable for much of this film, but as a sometimes-struggling dad myself, I found that warts-and-all characterization remarkably refreshing.

Unsung Hero ultimately reminds us of a foundational spiritual principle that’s so easy to lose track of: We need each other to walk with and trust God. We can’t go it alone—even if we’re tempted by good intentions and stubborn personality to try. And nowhere is that truth more important or evident than in our families.

To hear more about the story behind this movie, be sure to check out Adam Holz’s interviews with Rebecca St. James as well as Joel and Luke Smallbone on The Plugged In Show podcast .

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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Babylon
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Unsung Hero
The movie is a tribute to her faith and courage, the glue—the atomic connectivity—that binds the Smallbone family together. It's no wonder that when Helen asks Rebecca what her dreams are, the teen replies, "My dream is to be like you. ... Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In's reviews as the site's director ...

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