Chava Elberstein once sang that she has no illusions about London, and I have no illusions about “Babylon”, Damian Chazelle’s film that came out this weekend about a month after it crashed at the US box office and came out of the awards season rather empty-handed, and it is likely that it will not be a big hit here either.
So I’m probably talking to the wall, and yet I will stand up and declare: “Babylon” is a magnificent work, which belongs in the pantheon. This is also the most impressive work of the director, who has already proven his rare talent in “Whiplash”, “La La Land” and “The First Man”, and here perpetuates his status as one of the most virtuoso American filmmakers today.
“The First Man”, one of the most underrated films of the previous decade, followed the space race and therefore naturally takes place in the 1960s. “Babylon” goes back even further, to the 20s and to a fateful period in Hollywood history: the transition from the silent film for the desert movie.
The term “silent film” is misleading, because the cinema was never silent – the films were shown with musical accompaniment, sound effects and the like. What’s more, the audience could not hear the actors talking. The technology did not yet exist, and no one needed it. The “silent” classics managed to tell a story even without speaking, and the industry prospered.
But then came the technology that allowed movies to open their mouths. The audience, which is always looking for trends and gimmicks, went out of its way. People lined up to hear Al Jolson speak and sing in The Jazz Singer, and Hollywood got the message and decided that from now on all its productions would be like that.
This transition was an artistic and human tragedy. It took time for cinema to adapt to the new technique, and most of the first talking films were mediocre or below. Worse than that: many stars who conquered the audience thanks to facial expressions and body gestures, lost their charm as soon as they opened their mouths, and descended from their fame.
“Babylon” presents this true story through three fictional characters, but as we noted in The New York Times’ comprehensive and instructive guide to cracking the film, they are based on real people. Brad Pitt plays a fabric idol named Jack Conrad, based on their character of John Gilbert, Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, three of the biggest and most handsome stars of the silent film era, who did not make the transition to the talking film, and died prematurely.
Margot Robbie, who already starred alongside Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, plays Nellie LeRoy, a young woman from a low economic background with a miraculous ability to fake crying, who becomes a star overnight, and she is based on the character of Clara Bow, who had a similar story.
The trio is completed by a young Mexican named Manny Torres, played by Diego Calva, who starts as a junior employee – his first job is to help lead an elephant to a party for everyone, but over time rises through the ranks and becomes a Hollywood executive. In his case, the source of inspiration is less obvious, but his character is probably based at least partially on Latin-Hollywood figures such as the brothers Joselito and Roberto Rodriguez, who contributed to the development of sound in cinema.
“Babylon” was named so after the inspiration of “Hollywood Babylon”, Kenneth Anger’s controversial book that described the Sodom and Gomorrah that were allegedly in Hollywood in what is considered its golden age. In his spirit, and probably also inspired by Fellini’s films, Chazelle describes the hedonism, decadence, splendor and filth of the industry at that time. The director spares no graphic details to illustrate how limitless everything was. The elephant we mentioned throws dung at an unfortunate person, and later comes vomit and other delicacies.
For Jack and Nellie, these are the last days of Pompeii, and “Babylon” describes the rise and fall of the two characters, and the desperate way Manny tries to save one of them. Alongside these three was a rich gallery of secondary characters, including famous actors who appear for only a few minutes – for example Tobey Maguire as a movie-loving gangster. If that’s not enough, there are also some animals in the film. It starts with an elephant and ends with a crocodile, in what is one of the weirdest and most disturbing endings we’ve seen recently in a Hollywood product of this profile.
Such an ending was supposed to take “Babylon” out of control, but precisely because its creator does not hesitate to press the pedal with all his might, it succeeds in bringing it to a nightmarish, special and unforgettable climax.
“Babylon” lasts no less than three hours and nine minutes, but it does not lose height for a moment, and reaches its peaks at the right moments. Chazelle is a maestro with complete control over the means of expression, who would easily find his place as Hollywood’s gold. But more importantly, he is good at understanding the stories he has. This was true in his previous films, and it is true here as well.
Beyond all the Hollywood gossip, the anecdotes and the droppings, Chazelle understands that the heart of the story here is the tragedy created by the transition to talking cinema, and builds the entire script around it. Therefore, despite its length, “Babylon” remains focused. In this framework, the elephant, the crocodile, the vomiting and all the other extreme demonstrations are not just tasteless provocations, but necessary illustrations of the way in which Hollywood lifted people up to Igra Rama and dropped them to Bira Amikata.
As usual, Chazelle also donates to the cast and directs game shows. Pete and Ruby manage to build human and vulnerable characters just as they are sparkling and photogenic, but the show is stolen by the relatively unknown Diego Calva, whose character is capable of containing all the melancholy about the world that was and is lost.
This is the first time that the director has collaborated with all these names, but his regular partner since college days – the composer Justin Horvitz – is responsible for the music. His long-time friend wrote dizzying music for “Babylon”, which dictates its rhythm and tone. Also thanks to him, what could have been one big mess turns into a controlled chaos and a dance, where everything returns to the starting point and history repeats itself twice – once as a farce and once as a tragedy.
Most of the time the music is happy, and this cheerfulness clashes with the bleak nature of the story, creating an ironic effect that further increases the intensity of the drama.
“Babylon” is an epic about one crisis period in the history of Hollywood, coming out at a time of an even bigger crisis. Just like “Tar”, “The Fivelmen” and every other movie that is not “Love in the Sky 2”, “Black Panther 2” or “Avatar 2” , also crashed commercially, and even a little more than others, because films about the history of cinema did not succeed at the box office even in better days.
Apparently, the message of the film is optimistic – if cinema as an art eventually learned to deal with the previous crisis, it will also learn how to deal with Netflix and Tiktok and all contemporary challenges. Actually, he says something else. “Babylon” reminds us that even if the transition to the talking film turned out to be a success story in the end, it left quite a few victims behind. That’s how it is: trends come and go, cinema reinvents itself and the revolution is constant, but every time it happens, some people are left behind.
Avner Shavit is the film critic of Walla!