Three Hours Long and an Inch Deep: Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”
Damien Chazelle was on his way to a three-peat. Following the overwhelming success of “Whiplash” and “La La Land” (envelope fiasco notwithstanding), Chazelle had positioned himself as a writer/director to watch, and curiosity was peaked about his next outing.
Chazelle had a handful of post “La La Land” projects, most notably directing the Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man,” but none of them found him as both writer and director as on his two original breakout hits. The third film to meet this criteria became “Babylon,” Chazelle’s three-hour opus about the 1920s Golden Age of Hollywood.
From the initial trailers, the film seemed flop-proof. Chazelle at the helm, a stellar cast led by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, a self-referential Hollywood story. It certainly seemed ambitious, but Chazelle’s brand and talent went a long way in assuaging any fears and “Babylon” was poised to be a holiday and awards season stunner. Sentiments, my own included, began to change once people actually saw the film. The short version is “Babylon” is a misstep for Chazelle, a film unable to support its own ambitions. But let’s get into the long version.
The film suffers from a kind of vicious loop, in which it doesn’t really know what it’s about, which leads to an excessive runtime, which then fails to keep audiences engaged because not only is it three hours, its three hours of average content.
That initial stage, the film’s inability to pick a story and stay with it, is particularly acute. The first half is very much like the trailer, endless parties and excesses. We meet our principal characters—Pitt’s old guard movie star Jack Conrad, Robbie’s youthful icon Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva’s Manny Torres, hired help turned assistant searching for something more— but we don’t really learn anything about them.
The film spends its initial half hour at the party from the trailer as a kind of prologue and then seemingly spends the next hour doing yet more set up for the back half of the film. There are some classic Chazelle no-cut one-shots and a couple of funny moments, but it’s a quasi-entertaining if largely empty excursion, and likely could have been condensed down into 40 or so minutes.
Midway through, we somewhat abruptly pivot and watch as our characters reckon with the transition from silent films to talkies. Each has their own issues: Jack Conrad is rapidly facing the end of his career, Nellie’s abrasiveness is less tolerable in the world of sound, and Manny seems to be ignoring the best parts of himself as he climbs the corporate ladder. We mostly leave the partying behind, save for one truly bizarre cameo sequence, and the back half is decidedly more interesting than the first as it tries to interrogate and examine these characters, but the film still can’t consistently dig deep enough to justify its runtime.
How did a film with such promise tank so hard? I suspect Chazelle was largely given free rein on the project and the lack of checks and balances led to the film’s overreach. This is admittedly pure speculation (I have no secret Hollywood sources), but the film feels like that, and no part is more evident of that than the film’s final sequence; had you given me a thousand guesses, I don’t think I could have landed on this particular sequence as the end.
We flash forward to the 1950s, where Jack and Nellie are long gone and Manny, having left Hollywood behind, has returned on vacation with his family. He wanders into a theater which happens to be playing the then new release of “Singin’ in the Rain.” The Gene Kelly classic, for those who might not remember, is about the transition from the silent film era to that of sound. Snippets from earlier in the film are intercut with “Singin’,” all but confirming that in this version of the story, “Singin’” is based on the lives of Jack Conrad and Nellie LaRoy, both of whom Manny was close friends with. This is already a very weird choice, but it might have been palatable had the film not immediately done something even more unexplainable.
Understandably overcome with emotion, Manny breaks down in tears. What follows is a montage, at least two minutes long, of clips from various movies from the 1950s through today, including Robert Patrick as the T-1000 and a shot from the original “Avatar” film. The montage then devolves into a mess of film strips, all backed by a frenetic and intense drum and brass piece by composer Justin Hurwitz. It’s hard to describe and really needs to be seen to be believed.
We eventually come back to Manny, still crying and watching “Singin’,” but there’s a glimpse of a smile on his face, as if he’s had some kind of experience and the montage was a metaphor for that for the audience. I sort of understand what Chazelle was going for, but the execution is just so bizarre that it’s hard to parse, and the obtuseness undermines any possible thematic resonance.
This is perhaps the film’s greatest blunder, that it represents such squandered potential. “Babylon” is by and large a bad film, but it’s not an unsalvageable film. Quite the contrary, I’d argue there is the potential for an excellent film buried in those three hours, but it would take some refinement to get there. You can see it in fleeting moments, when Robbie as LaRoy monologues to Manny about her childhood, in Jean Smart’s poetic speech to Pitt’s character about the power and immortality of film, or the truly moving one-take sequence toward the end of the movie where Pitt slowly meanders through his hotel set to an incredible piece of Hurwitz’ score.
I don’t think “Babylon” failing will derail Chazelle’s career, nor will I abandon him for one admittedly time-consuming mistake. Even though the faults of “Babylon” lie not in its premise but its execution, Chazelle has still proved he can craft incredible films with “Whiplash” and “La La Land” and maybe all he needs are some reminders to occasionally rein it in, to find the heart of a movie and stick with it—and maybe do a “Babylon” Director’s Cut that subtracts material rather than adding it.