BABYLON

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C-

The first thing you need to know about BABYLON is that it is three hours and nine minutes long. You should then be asking yourself whether the film justifies its own length, and the answer is no.

Within the first ten minutes, we see a man get shit on by an elephant, and we see another man get pissed on by a woman. Both of these things have been widely reported, so if you have paid any attention whatsoever to the press coverage of these movies, you might think you already knew these things. Except, I don’t think you understand. There’s a close-up shot of an elephant’s asshole, dilating, and it sprays a firehose of shit right at the camera, before it cuts to the man, getting doused by an elephant-shit waterfall. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of elephant shit. And then, minutes later, in the back room of a wild party that takes up the bulk of the first thirty minutes of the movie—the party to which the aforementioned elephant is being delivered, that’s how wild it is—a woman is straddling a naked fat man lying on his back on the floor, and she pisses all over his belly, then penguin-walks forward and pisses all over his face. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of piss (although, I suppose it should be noted, less of the piss than the elephant shit).

One might be relieved to learn that these sorts of things do not make up the rest of the movie, but that does not mean it’s all uphill from there. Regardless, it still begs the question: are these things you really want to see? Does this sound fun to you? I did not find it particularly fun.

I’m tempted to say I can’t decide what writer-director Damien Chazelle is playing at, except that I think I get it: this is about the wild excesses of “classic” Hollywood, from the waning days of the silent era. The self-indulgent excess of this movie itself is very much the point. I won’t go so far as to call it “kink shaming,” but the choice of an extremely fat man is clearly a conscious choice, one meant to remove most of us from any kind of actual titillation. The pissing scene just as much as the elephant shit scene is meant to disgust us. So much is going on in that party—random fucking, several fleeting gimpses of full frontal nudity of both sexes—we are meant to be overwhelmed by the idea of BABYLON as a film that directly references Singin’ in the Rain multiple times, and in so doing makes us understand that BABYLON is the same movie if it were made by unrepentant deviants.

BABYLON even follows many of the same story beats. It just stretches them out over an eternity, so that a solid two hours pass before we are even introduced to Tobey Maguire as a yellow-toothed gangster who escorts us through multiple underground levels of dungeons that, according to many interpretations anyway, are meant to be the “circles of movie hell.” I just saw it as a random diversion in a movie packed with random diversions, brought to me well after I had long since tired of diversions.

There are far too many things happening in BABYLON to count, and I spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on elephant shit and golden showers. The thing is, Chazelle has to have included those things for a reason, and they are the things that leave the most lasting impressions, even through the two and a half hours that follow them.

Brad Pitt, who plays Jack Conrad, a former silent movie star now aging and struggling to succeed in the era of sound, does have a line far later in the film that I found the most unforgettable. He is asked how the movie he just starred in is, and he assesses it as “a giant swing at mediocrity.” If that doesn’t describe BABYLON perfectly, I don’t know what does.

There’s another conversation between Jack and gossip writer Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), in which she attempts to console him by noting how his circumstance is one among many to be experienced by countless other actors for decades to come, maybe forever: “It’s bigger than you,” she says. This is one of many moments where BABYLON gets into a love of cinema, its timeless nature, blah blah blah. She even notes that countless other people will have this exact same conversation. I saw that as a metaphor for BABYLON itself, which covers well-trodden ground with every thematic layer it purports to have.

With every single thing BABYLON has to say, it’s like: yeah. We get it. We’ve been through this already. Maybe to Damien Chazelle that’s the point, but there also comes a point where a dead horse can only be beat for so long. And it’s after this point that our primary protagonist, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), literally goes to the movies to see Singin’ in the Rain some twenty years after the previous events depicted, and recognizes everything that happens in it as what happened to him and all the people he knew, just sanitized, made more “wholesome,” and certainly whitewashed. It’s meant to be a moment of grand poignancy, but it came far after I had lost my patience—and that occurred before the title card (which comes up thirty minutes in).

I haven’t even mentioned Margot Robbie yet. As Nellie LaRoy, she is effectively the co-star of this film, alongside Diego Calva (with Brad Pitt in what is essentially a supporting role). She finagles her way into Hollywood filmmaking and quickly becomes a star, while Manny is rising through the ranks behind the camera. Virtually everything that happens to the awful-voiced actress in Singin’ in the Rain happens to Nellie, just in far dirtier, grittier and more dangerous ways. Robbie is a great talent who actually kind of gets swallowed up by the excesses of this movie, given how easy it is—as I have just demonstrated—to talk about countless things in the film before even mentioning her.

I went to BABYLON really wanting to love it. Damien Chazelle has made films I consider to be truly great. This one, though, feels like the last, desperate attempt of an auteur throwing all of his unused ideas into a movie, as though terrified no one will ever allow him to make another one. The sad irony is that none of those ideas were particularly original.

Paul Thomas Anderson did everything this movie tries to do better 25 years ago in Boogie Nights.

Overall: C