Review of Babylon (2022) dir. Damien Chazelle
★★★★☆
Watched on January 26th, 2023.
!!Spoilers Below!!
Babylon is ambitious and indulgent and fantastic for so much of its 3 hour 9 minute runtime and then Chazelle absolutely fucks the ending in nearly every conceivable way. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about the movie and I’ve become more gracious towards it, but the feeling of greatness eluded me.
I don’t think Babylon earned the right to smack the title screen in after a 30 minute introduction, but it’s clear why Chazelle thought it would work. In covering one night amidst the vulgarity and glamor and pure filthy luxury of golden Hollywood, Babylon introduces its beating heart in its totality: the love story of Manny Torres and Nellie LaRoy. Nellie is in this epic the shining pinnacle of great film. She is the fame, the excess, the everything that Hollywood can ever amount to. Manny then is the grounding of such potential: the love and passion for film. “Te amo,” he says to Nellie, in a way that she could not possibly understand because this is a love that is not and cannot be requited. One sustains the other to exist.
As time passes, Manny rises from assistant to studio executive in parallel with Nellie’s career on the screen. In Manny, we see the growth and professionalization of the industry. From shooting a pistol to kill a strike and stealing an ambulance to deliver a camera before last light – in a scene that was instantly legendary and forever imprinted in my mind – Manny eventually transforms from being someone who creates film by supporting it to someone who directs it and demands from it more and more, slowly choking it out. Nellie is incapable of keeping up with such change, nor are Lady Fay and Sidney Palmer, whom Manny respectively forces out and humiliates in the name of progress and morality.
When Manny promises himself to Nellie, that he will sacrifice everything else for her, that he will save her at all costs, she agrees to marry him. The cameraman who captures their engagement on screen has then preserved on film that happiness for eternity. And that is where that happiness remains, for Nellie walks into darkness, fading into obscurity, while Manny is forced out of town and consequently Hollywood. In the years that come, the industry becomes privy to more interests and grows ever more complex as we remain blind to everything except its products.
Two decades later, Manny returns to show his family the past. His daughter, immensely uninterested, takes his wife back to the hotel and he goes to a cinema to watch Singing in the Rain. And this is where I wanted to kill Damien Chazelle, because in such an immensely precisely crafted and gorgeous movie, he absolutely fucks the ending with the most generic montage of film history and abstract lightshow to end on Manny’s smiling, tearful face. In doing so, Chazelle nearly ruins the authority and gravitas Babylon had until then. The film was a dream of a dream, a subjective vision and interpretation of a far away time that had playfully explored its beauty and greatness and vice, and that should have been enough. We did not need to be explicitly shown its accomplishments in a tactless montage.
Babylon ultimately suffers from its ambition. It is intricately written and aspires to great heights, but there remains a distinct feeling that it never becomes more than the sum of its parts. There is so much happening in this movie, and I think it works, but for me what has remained is the love story between Manny and Nellie, the audience and the screen. I think that’s Chazelle’s legacy in this rapidly growing genre of Hollywood introspection; he elevates the audience to the part of fundamental and influential. Whatever fault we may find in film, we have also enabled its fetidity through our ever changing and ever growing consumerist nature. And despite all that we done, our love endures from the day we saw our first movie, the day that we first whispered to it in a way that it cannot understand, “Te amo. Te amo, te amo, te amo.” I love you.