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An initial oversaturation of debauchery aside, I had one overriding impression as I settled in to the film Babylon. I could see what the creators were trying to do and even admired it… but was it actually coming together?

Babylon is, on its face, a film about a handful of Hollywood notables during the imposition of the Hays Code and the transition from silent films to “talkies.” Brad Pitt is billed as the lead with his character heavily based upon the career of John Gilbert, a silent-era superstar who stumbled when sound was added to film. We witness his fall as an example of something that happened all across the industry.

It is also a film about Hollywood as a commercial enterprise, as a cultural phenomenon, and as a place quite unlike anywhere else. It is, of course, about pre-code Hollywood and the changes that swept through it in the 1930s. It is also about Hollywood in general; past, present, and future. It is a film about film and its influence in our culture (mostly to the good).

A film with such aspirations is obviously going to be both derivative and referential. Babylon draws its inspiration, fairly transparently, from a number of recent films. Most obviously the likes of The Artist and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, but one can easily include The Great Gatsby and, perhaps, The Wolf of Wall Street. Unrecognized* by me, until the very end, are the references to and derivation from Singin’ in the Rain. The film is also stuffed with nods to the personalities and works of old Hollywood – most of which sailed right by me.

A couple of generations ago, audience members sometimes expected to have to work to enjoy their films. Maybe the film would be acted in mix of non-subtitled European languages. Maybe it would be an eight-hour shot of the Empire State building. The audience would gain from challenging themselves to look deeper than the facade to find meaning and art. Is this what we are to do with Babylon, which challenges us with its cacophony of sound, light, and music as opposed to nothingness?

Advanced buzz for the film was queued with some shiny-looking trailers and a media blitz by Brad Pitt. I was fooled, and I suspect intentionally so, into thinking that Pitt had a bigger role in this picture’s development than he did. As far as I can tell, now after the fact, he is simply the top-billed actor. The fact that this film fits some of the themes that he has, in the past, pursued may have helped get him that lead billing, but he has no production involvement here.

The movie was written and directed by Damien Chazelle and so it is he whom I should credit for Babylon‘s artistic drive. I’ve loved his work before in Whiplash (I rated it five stars, although I haven’t before this told you so) and didn’t so much when it came to First Man (I did explain to you my three-star rating). Chazelle’s best-performing work to date is the musical about musicals, La La Land, which might be seen as a direct precursor to Babylon. I haven’t watched La La Land. I’m not sure I’m up for a musical about musicals.

I do like movies about movies, though, and so I bit into the lure that was the early trailers and promotions. Even as some of the reviews starting coming out mixed, I figured I’d be watching this one eventually… and so I now have.

So Pitt plays a slightly-altered John Gilbert (here Jack Conrad) who crosses career trajectories with the out-of-nowhere starlet Nellie LaRoy (played by Margot Robie and, through her performance, makes it Nellie that is the center of the film). Originally, the leading lady was to be Chazelle favorite Emma Stone, who was going to be cast as a slightly-altered Clara Bow. Stone’s name was the first to be announced (even before Pitt) and, until she was replaced, the production seemed like it would be centered around her. Robie’s assumption of the role led to it being rewritten to a different character – more suited to the actress and less directly tied to a specific historical persona. Even still, allusions to Clara Bow and other starlets remain in what we see on screen from Nellie.

The real leading man is Diego Calva as Manny Torres, through whose eyes we witness Hollywood and with whose rise and fall we ultimately bookend this tale. I guess you can’t pitch an $80 million production as staring “Diego who?”, and so Calva’s name must follow Pitt and Robie in the credits. Additionally, the film stars Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer, a Hollywood Jazz musician who rides the transition to sound pictures (based, even more loosely, upon the Jazz greats of the time – Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington for example). Palmer alone says “no” to the sirens’ song and walks away intact from Babylon. The character is also a key tie to Chazelle’s prior works. The big band/jazz score of Babylon is phenomenal** and, accordingly, was the focus of the film’s nominations and awards in a dozen-or-so ceremonies. Chazelle’s love of jazz may even trump his love of film.

The inclusion of Brad Pitt, front and center, also has another purpose, at least as I see it. In some ways, Pitt plays himself, doesn’t he? Jack Conrad is the superstar who turns everything to gold (even when barely sober enough to stand) and dreams of transforming the business – acting, writing, directing, or whatever. Conrad pushes for innovation and eagerly embraces sound, even if it spells the end for him. I’m not saying that Brad Pitt’s career has reached its end but the phenomenon of his career is tied both to his youth and the Hollywood in which his youthful self worked.

Don’t buy my interpretation of Babylon being about Hollywood today? I’ll offer you some more.

As party-host-extraordinaire and all-powerful producer Don Wallach, we have Jeff Garlin. Can anyone think it’s an accident that he looks exactly like Harvey Weinstein? And although Chazelle couldn’t have known it in 2021, we see in 2023 how actors, writers, and crew are terrified that the an AI revolution will upend their industry – at their expense.

It may or it may not; it is too early to tell. But as character Elinor St. John (a Hollwood reporter played by Jean Smart) explains, revolution and rebirth are inevitable in their industry. Those that rode the previous wave will inevitably miss the next one. She speaks to today’s strikers and we might understand her to be saying – it may not be ChatGPT that upends your business, but it will be upended.

More than a tale of the jazz age (which it is) or an allegory of the present (which it is), Babylon is meant to be a tribute to the medium as an cultural institution. It is in this last that I can see what it is trying to do and I can truly admire the effort, but I still don’t know if it succeeds. Even in its overwhelming portrayal of debauchery, I can see a method in the madness. As with The Great Gatsby, it is necessary to reconstruct the craziness of the times in a modern pallet to help us understand how disconnected from mainstream society Hollywood was.

Like Gatsby, the critical reception was “mixed.” As with that film, the highest praise was for technical merits – music, production design, art, and costumes. Lacking, it seems, were the middle of the road reviews – critics either loved it or hated it. More reasoned criticism, to my ear, centered on a lack of focus and that oversaturation of debauchery that, initially, left me a little off-balance.

Is this movie also trying to tell us that Hollywood is, was, and always will be a den of iniquity? Some of the intrusions of the historical into the fantastical surround famous Hollywood scandals. The decision to include the death of Virginia Rapp (resulting from wild partying with Fatty Arbuckle) must indicate some intent, as Chazelle has made it a driving plot point.

At least one review has pointed out places where Chazelle has borrowed from Kenneth Anger’s infamous Hollywood Babylon, a 1965 exposé of the film industry’s dirty secrets – very few of which may have actually been true. One review of the book (it has had a number of reprints) suggested Hollywood Babylon is intended to be satire of Hollywood gossip – i.e. nobody is supposed to believe any of it. Is, perhaps, Chazelle trying to hint at something about his own work here? Food for thought.

Conversely, one might wonder if the nature of the well-documented nastiness (professional backstabbing, failed marriages, and deviant sexuality) that interweaves the film’s tapestry is really intended to be a shot at modern Hollywood rather than a shot at modern Hollywood gossip? Or maybe we should simply take ait all at face value – Chazelle just figured that sex sells.

Except in this case it did not. Babylon tells us that Hollywood will survive and thrive despite the threats from #metoo, ChatGPT, and just plain awful movies. It survives not because it makes art (when it does make art) but because it is in the business of making art. As the money behind Hollywood searches for success it also assures the institution’s own survival. By way of contrast, Babylon did not succeed.

If failed to make back its investment by some $15-20 million. It fared particularly poorly by some of the industry’s favorite metrics, such as opening day and opening weekend ticket sales – scraping in barely 10% of anticipated revenue. Some blamed other factors – new Covid varients, flu surges, and the threat of Winter Storm Elliot – but Babylon itself has to take on the lion’s share of any blame.

Perhaps Stephen King will be proven right in his assertion that Babylon is “one of those movies that reviews badly and is acclaimed as a classic in 20 years.” Another reviewer wrote that the film is “guaranteed to stay in your head” – which it has for me, although not quite as persistently as that phrase may have intended. I must wonder, even if the wisdom of these reviews ultimately prevail, isn’t any eventual vindication for Babylon pretty much irrelevant in the near term?

As I indicated above, I think the concept was there but the execution is what faltered. If Chazelle had directed Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood and Tarantino Babylon, I suspect my appreciation for the two films would be flipped. I am thinking that Chazelle simply overreached with this one. One review suggests, a bit fantastically, that Babylon was a “deliberately designed career-killer” for Chazelle – a level of Hollywood backstabbing that puts even the film’s fictional versions to shame. I do hope that the director recovers and goes on to make many more excellent films. Will this put the kibosh on giant spectacles of Hollywood celebrating Hollywood, now that Babylon has shown that people won’t shell out for such an experience? How many proposals, over the next few years, will be shot down because they sound too much like Babylon?

*I surprise even myself when I realize that I’ve never watched any of Singin’ in the Rain outside of the famous song-and-dance scene. I guess I always thought of it as a musical review (which it was) and not a film with a particular story (one very similar to that of Babylon).

**Even the “pretending to play a trumpet” doesn’t look that bad. Too many actors mime-playing trumpets simply don’t know how the instruments work and the attempt looks silly. While watching, I couldn’t prove to my self that Adepo wasn’t actually playing.