Babylon is a Vulgar, Audacious, and Repulsive Film and Chazelle’s Best Picture Yet.
Written by Margaret “Molly” Rasberry, December 17th, 2022
1926 Bel Air, CA. Manny (Diego Calva) has been hired by an unknown Hollywood figure to transport the animal entertainment for one of the biggest parties for the Hollywood elite. A hilarious exchange occurs when the transporting vehicle is too small for the animal, an Indian Elephant. Manny’s ingenuity is established when he is able to put the elephant in the truck meant for horse transport. Damien Chazelle then sets the whole tone of the film when the elephant excretes its waste onto the camera, defecation spattering the camera. This is no La La Land. This is Chazelle’s repulsively vulgar love letter to Pre-Code Silent Cinema that miraculously manages to be one of the most engrossing films of the year.
Inspired by the gossip rags of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Manny, an immigrant from Mexico, aspires to become a part of the Hollywood machine, making movies and entertaining the masses, and becomes embroiled in a tumultuous relationship with aspiring starlet hopeful Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a send-up of silent film star Clara Bow, who crashes Hollywood parties in an ardent attempt to break out into the movies. “You either are a star or you aren’t” is Nellie’s arc phrase, which is repeated in the film, and Nellie seems like a perfect fit to Hollywood stardom, until the advent of sound and the difficulties of filmmaking becomes constrained by the limitations such as diction, restricts in sets, uncontrollable heat, and other issues hilariously conveyed through frenetic editing and hysterical dialogue delivered in the hammiest fashion by the fantastic cast.
Many intertextual references proliferate the film which is a pleasure to witness for scholars and old Hollywood cinephiles. Besides Nellie LaRoy being analogous to Clara Bow, Jean Smart plays tabloid journalist Elinor St. John, a supporter of Nellie and her burgeoning career, which mirrors gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who was an early proponent for the career of the original Hollywood “It” Girl Clara Bow. Even the moniker Nellie receives on her first day of filming is a send up of the “It” Girl label, which the movie stylized her as “Wild Child”. The most often discussed analogous character in the film is Lady Fay Zhu, a send-up of the first Asian American female movie star, Anna May Wong, played in a stunningly aching performance by Li Jun Li in a star-making performance. Both of these characters become ousted by the incoming Hays Code censoring for morality reasons based on queer, racial, and classcist restrictions.
The two other important characters who fill out the expansive cast include Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) , an aging film star reaching the end of his career, grappling with the inevitable decline as younger film stars such as Clark Gable are set to replace him. The requisite final player to fill out this ensemble is Jazz Trumpeter Sidney Palmer, analogous to the famous trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who must indulge racist whims to practice his craft in Hollywood becoming more conservative and dedicating to pleasing the white upper class.
It is a refreshing take for Chazelle to convey the loss of extraordinary talent because of conservative morals restricting the artistry of many, a moral coding we are still under in many cases such as Disney’s and Warner Bros. decades long disinclination to make any film with a Black or female superhero, and continual white washing of characters and veiling any queer character’s expression of their queerness to easily edit out for markets based in patriarchal, racist and homophobic norms.
Though Chazelle almost seems to miss the days of Pre-Code Hollywood, he restrains himself of this idea by conveying the 1920s Hollywood epoch not as a paradise of splendor and artistic freedom, but riddled with anti-union historical markers, with the accidents that inevitably ensue, and unbridled hedonism. Fornication, insemination, excretion, expulsion, laceration, and all manner of -tions occur in the film, and Chazelle’s rebuke of the sanitization of these elements is disgustingly bold and a laudable dedication to his craft. Babylon evokes the most provocative films of Ken Russell and John Waters during its entire three hour runtime with esoteric humor to match.
Babylon is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the sanitized Hollywood fairytale Chazelle conveyed in the critically and commercially adored La La Land. This is an unvarnished revealing look at the creative process in an often neglected part of Hollywood history. An unattractive part of Hollywood history, where people who did not fit into the heternormative White Anglo Saxon Protestant and educated mold the conservative class approved of were cast off to squalor or forced to mask their true selves for the comfort of these intolerant people. It is a commendable feat for Chazelle to shine a light on the hardships endured by the outcasts of society to be a part of the filmmaking process, and to convey it with such unbridled aplomb is a triumphant dedication to the creation of cinema itself.
Grade: A-
Paramount Pictures will release Babylon in theaters December 23rd
Mollywood Reviews 