Damien Chazelle (USA: 2022, 189 min.)

Babylon (2022) pits itself in the trenches of early 1920’s Hollywood at the transitional moment from silent films to talkies as we trace the rise and fall of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), and an ensemble crew of characters in and around the decadent cosmos of the entertainment industry as they navigate the treachery of a volatile Los Angeles revolutionizing at breakneck pace toward a world filled with celebrity and surplus. Chazelle’s vision of Tinseltown is set multiple generations before the familiar paradigm of Mia and Seb, but while they were fools who dreamed in a contained model of the modern LA, Nellie, Manny and company are dreamers who fool around in a cacophony of exuberant glut overdosing on the UV rays of their burgeoning limelight. While Manny toils at the whim of the rich and intoxicated inside a mansion of exclusive luxury hoping for an opportunity to turn his black-tie service garb in for a seat on set of the grandest spectacle of entertainment in town, Nellie LaRoy, a self-named, self-claimed star literally crashes into the party. From this moment, the intertwined fates of our wide-eyed Hollywood aspirants are set on a crash course for nuclear demolition.

Alongside Nellie’s inevitable ascent generated by the over-inebriation of a contracted actress and the fortuitous ability of LaRoy to capture attention dancing atop any given high surface is the introduction of Manny to a universe he has no experience in, but “something bigger” that he deeply desires to be a part of. The film functions as a macrocosm for this sentiment where the ambitions of its larger-than-life characters appear on the surface disproportionately alien to any common mode of existence but are simultaneously small and powerless in the face of the Hollywood machine set to autopilot on the heavy cycle churning talent in and out with a target set mercilessly on profit. Calva is the centerpiece of the film’s perspective as we trace his arc from the wraths of wrangling a live elephant up to a hilltop estate to the peak of executing a major motion studio to escaping the underbelly of a pornographic trauma brothel he is led to by the nefarious James McKay (Tobey Maguire), who is camouflaged in a metaphorical layer of slime thicker than the skin of a steroid inoculated mutant who eats live rats for hire. While it is Calva’s perspective we follow, several careers of Hollywood-adjacent performers are tracked simultaneously (yes, even the non-actors are in many ways “performing” in this diegetic scheme of saturated deviltry) including, but not limited to, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) as the musician launched into the stratosphere grappling with racial discrimination, Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) as the critic whose voice can start and end careers with the pop of a typewriter, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) as the chameleon performer whose manufactured persona of seductive song and riddle allures even the most guarded amongst this elite band of society.

Each of these stars in their relative capacities seem either destined for greatness on the backs of their uncompromising charisma and extraordinary pursuit of fame, or aware of their innate inability to break the ceiling holding them down without succumbing to the negation of their identity in order to survive. Although they experience the heroism they seek at the pinnacle of prominence for temporary periods of time, it is in the wise words of St. John, played adeptly and profoundly by the always opulent Smart, who adds one of the few hints at a grounded reality in her conclusion to Jack Conrad, an aged out silent movie star, that his moment has ended and this passing of the guard is a natural and inevitable characteristic in their field of work. Despite the grandeur of these characters and the seemingly limitless bravado they employ, the passage of time at unequal and unpredictable rates, in all its unforgiving and cold-blooded savagery, will always be the protagonist of the Hollywood machine. For Jack Conrad, he must choose between the red and blue pills, the former a fade to black transition into irrelevance, the latter much more on the wavelength of a hard cut.

Damien Chazelle understands this premise of temporary relevance better than most, who in each of his writing endeavors recognizes the ceilings of his characters and the faults that trigger the breaking of these thresholds. No single character of his executes this with more electricity, however, than Nellie LaRoy, who is casted to astonishing perfection in the concurrent consummation and crucifixion of a sexually charged vortex set for annihilation at the intersection of west coast movie star confidence and east coast New Jersey cadence that charges a ticking time bomb placed directly on the mark under a sound-capturing microphone, Nellie’s biggest opponent outside of her own outsized ambition. In all the bombastic vulgarities of Nellie’s turbulent sojourn into the stomach of Hollywood only to be spit back out, if the film offers any concrete attitude about tracing the lineage of the industry’s 1920’s steadfast approvals of its own behavior into the present one hundred years later, it’s that movie stars of this scope, although rarely, still can exist, and Margot Robbie is the closest thing we have to that archetype today. In a relentless effort of physical and emotional expression, Robbie comprehensively transforms into the untamed headliner and compulsive addict through brute force as if tapped into the IV bloodline of a lineup of countless unfulfilled actresses forced to give up their dream and, unbeknownst to them, live vicariously and posthumously through this future role that only Robbie could bring to life with such singular ferocity.

Along with the screenplay, Robbie shines brightest in two polar sequences that not only capture the latitude of her talent, but also begin to narrow Chazelle’s colossal tour de force into a synthesized memorandum. On opposite sides of the incarnation of sound in film, LaRoy first substantiates her stardom in a lightning bolt delivery of silent film pantomime while Spike Jonze makes the Kubrickian on-set treatment feel like the coddling of a newborn child in a mother’s loving arms. Later, forced into the clunky inauguration of sound capture, Nellie continues to struggle with the volume and tonal balance of her delivery scene after scene as a clapper is worn out, P.J. Byrne nearly drops dead of an aneurysm, and a cinematographer actually drops dead of a heat stroke (rather accurate to a Kubrick set this time around?). These diametrically opposed sequences reveal Chazelle’s treatise on the simultaneous horror and hallucination that is the act of cinema, an art that is both divine and dangerous, and has likely lost much of what induced the raw vibrance of Nellie LaRoy’s showstopping prowess to the limits of a capitalistic coop. This love letter is as much a token of gratitude as a suicide note, pinning the film’s heart at the center of an immovable object and an unstoppable force.

This “love letter to cinema” subgenre of filmmaking has become one we are all too familiar with in the past year with many aging filmmakers of a generation past their prime grasping tightly to the art form that has consumed their lives and grappling with its potential extinction. Damien Chazelle contributes to that conversation with Babylon, but where this maelstrom opus of titanic proportions separates itself is not in its unyielding tribute to the art form, but in that unforgiving exorcism of its industry. As a director, Chazelle has metamorphosed from the self-contained woes of the individual artist to the vast and encyclopedic indictment of the gross negligence of the business that manipulates the artist with an iron fist masquerading as an invisible puppeteer. He is a filmmaker who operates at the extremes of self-indulgence and technical artistry. In Babylon, he undoubtedly straddles the lines of both, exercising a monumental referential library including, both directly and indirectly, everything from Singin’ in the Rain (1952) to Boogie Nights(1997) to Terminator 2 (1991) to Persona (1966) in a montage that drops the atom bomb of an auteur’s carnal love of excess square onto the Hollywood hills. It’s a jaw-dropping, cinematic orgasm of a finale that centralizes the core thesis of Chazelle’s labors: the more we fall for the illusion of the moving frame, the more we fool ourselves into believing in its improbable immortality.

If a film could be measured on the sheer scientific mass of its constituent parts, Babylon would exist on a plane held by few others. The breadth of Chazelle’s vision encompassing nothing short of an unending flurry of lavish set pieces and a small army of extras committed to the theater of immorality and overindulgence on the same playing field as its leads is dizzying, and if nothing else, an awe-inspiring display of directorial heft at a scale that Chazelle has never previously captured. While the ambition is supersized, the trademark craft is witnessed at full operational capacity. Frequent behind the scenes collaborators Tom Cross on the pulsating edit, Justin Hurwitz on the riotous score, and Linus Sandgren on the sinuous camera are a thrice proven, now ratified trifecta of cinematic harmony elevating the already rich production design to the level of an audiovisual symphony. In the overlap of its immaculate technical conception, the herculean directorial effort at its helm, and the thematic duality of its self-reflexive thesis, Damien Chazelle strikes a chord at a once in a lifetime interplanetary crossing of celestial magnitude. Despite the degree of its star-crossed improbability, there is something magical in the communication of its simplest pleasures: the film left me with a burning and insatiable desire to fight a fucking snake.