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Margot Robbie is still befuddled about why Babylon flopped two Christmases ago. For some it might be a strange thing to linger on. The Oscar-nominated actress and producer found immediate mega-success afterward courtesy of the cultural juggernaut that was Barbie (as well as her work as producer on smaller streaming hits like Saltburn and My Old Ass). Yet for Robbie, who recently sat down with Ben Mankiewicz for the Talking Pictures podcast, Damien Chazelle’s epic about the bygone era of Golden Age Hollywood during the height and demise of the silent movie feels like unfinished business.
“I love it, I don’t get it either,” Robbie told Mankiewicz after the host expressed confusion over Babylon’s rejection by mainstream audiences and even a large number of critics (it currently sits with 57 percent on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes). “I know I am biased because I am very close to the project and I obviously believe in it, but I still can’t figure out why people hated it. I wonder if in 20 years people are going to be like, ‘Wait, Babylon didn’t do well at the time?’ Like when you hear that Shawshank Redemption was a failure at the time and you’re like, ‘How is that possible?’”
For a certain breed of movie buff and cinephile, Babylon would seem to check every box. As a big lavish throwback to the movie industry’s literal Wild West early days, it basks in a golden age that is as revered for its glamour and mystique as it is reviled for its depravities and excess. Yet the film’s own intentional indulgence—beginning with the movie clocking in at a staggering 188 minutes—proved to be a turnoff to audiences who may not necessarily care about the silent era, even when it’s personified by modern idols like Robbie and Brad Pitt. And plenty of critics likewise turned up their nose at the filmmaker behind awards darlings Whiplash and La La Land after he revealed a cynical mean streak via Babylon’s debauchery. (Though we might suggest such preciousness from admirers hints at a lack of appreciating the true nihilism in Whiplash…)
Whatever the reason, the elements that might make Babylon flawed and commercially precarious are also what suggests Robbie is right. While we think Shawshank Redemption, with its easygoing sentimentality and ultimately crowdpleasing structure, is an awkward comparison, Chazelle, Robbie, Pitt, and a legion of other artists’ work could very well live on for decades in the hearts of those willing to partake in a cinematic bacchanal from hell.
The Timeless Appeal of a Lost Empire
When we sat down with Chazelle two years ago to discuss in depth the historical inspirations and influences on Babylon, the filmmaker noted the obvious parallels between his movie and the iconic musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Babylon even ends with its central and least awful hero, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), entering a movie house where the Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds classic is playing. And yet, anyone who witnessed the last three hours of decadence in Chazelle’s movie knows too well that his vision of Hollywood in transition between silence and the talkies was something much more epic. And bleak.
“It was actors, directors, people both in front of the camera and behind the camera, right around the time that sound was coming in, including some very famous people,” Chazelle said about the statistics of deaths and suicides in 1920s Hollywood after The Jazz Singer‘s 1927 success. “Drug overdoses, [alcohol], and it’s unclear whether it was suicide or accidental… The idea that a technological transition like that—which on the one hand might seem sort of trivial, you’re just adding one more color to the palette of cinema—something as simple as that could be that traumatic, that cataclysmic, and could really drive that many people to literal death, it sort of just grabbed my mind as the window into the rest of the movie.”
The power of Babylon is that it likewise grabs the mind of anyone with even a cursory interest in Hollywood lore by recontextualizing this famous history into something that feels just as cataclysmic as an iceberg being spotted off of a starboard bow.
As we unpacked with the writer-director, the allusions in Babylon are clear for anyone with a passing knowledge of 1920s Hollywood—or who would like to learn afterward about this lost, squalid empire. Pitt’s aging silver screen lothario who couldn’t make the transition to sound because audiences laughed at his voice mimics the fate of poor, doomed John Gilbert; Robbie’s Roaring ‘20s It Girl whose flagrant sexuality could not make the leap to the more conservative 1930s after the Depression is Clara Bow by a different name; and Li Jun Li’s Lady Fay Zhu reflects the unfair practices used against Hollywood’s first star of East Asian descent, Anna May Wong, right down to a same-sex relationship with one of Hollywood’s biggest names.
All of these elements and many more are rolled into Chazelle’s movie, although with just enough anachronism and devil-may-care concern with authenticity to allow it to feel fresh and startling to the modern eye. Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy dances a lot more suggestively than a flapper doing the Charleston, and Pitt’s Jack Conrad is knocking on the future’s door when he inadvertently predicts iconic movie quotes in everything from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). It is part and parcel to a feverish vision of Hollywood brilliance and blight living together in sin.
It also taps into the mythological by revitalizing a world that no longer exists. In the current multiplex landscape where audiences tend to stay away from original films, that might not be the recipe for success, but in the long run it will always attract the type of mind that obsesses over bygone eras they cannot visit in-person, whether it be when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when Ancient Rome was more than just a meme, or that of a Tinseltown that partied like the immortals of Mount Olympus in Jazz Age America. The appeal might be niche but it remans everlasting.
And it is explored with magnificent artistry and vitality in Babylon, from Justin Hurwitz’s criminally overlooked musical score that combines modern jazz with a wistful, early 20th century melancholia, to gorgeous cinematography by Linus Sandgren. The film even creates what is surely going to go down as a textbook clip for film schools everywhere when Chazelle interprets the real Clara Bow’s infamous first day of shooting a talking picture into a case study in how deadly the tension and chaos on a film set can quickly become. The same scenario was played for laughs in Singin’ in the Rain, but in Babylon this handheld agony becomes more suspenseful than any thriller in the last few years.
Mess That Is Blessed
None of which is to say Babylon is a perfect movie or some overlooked masterpiece. While I have plenty more I could praise in the film, most of it occurs within the first two hours. This is perhaps not an accident, with the picture’s final descent into LA Hell being segregated by a final 1920s sequence recreating MGM’s famed “Singin’ in the Rain” movie star roll call in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
After that point, Chazelle intentionally aims to overstay the film’s welcome by lingering on the putrid and vile things that good taste—and likely awards-pleasing publicists—would advise staying away from. This includes sequences of Robbie vomiting violently, and repeatedly, on the snobbish guests of a moneyed New York City party as if she were in a frat boy comedy of the 1980s; a grotesque scene of a man eating rats; and an attempt to recreate the Sisyphean nightmare of the Hollywood underworld gleaned in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights by way of a long-winded and pace-killing detour into pre-Mickey Cohen gangland. (Although even then Tobey Maguire gives a delightfully batshit performance as the gangster.)
These flourishes and others like them, including an elephant defecating on a camera lens, undoubtedly invited a negative reception on Film Twitter and among many online critics. However, the thing about social media subcultures, and even much of modern film criticism, is that folks often seem eager to establish consensus. Bandwagon thinking and engagement-generating hyperbole is rewarded. But the true cult classics are not about what a group or online community thinks today. What matters to the individual discovering the proverbial buried treasure is how they personally respond to it years, or even decades, after the fact. And an individual can be much more forgiving of strikes if they are satisfied when the crack of the wood finally smashes against a ball’s leather.
Robbie’s comparison to Shawshank Redemption feels, again, inaccurate. That is a movie which has a very crowd-friendly and kind-hearted disposition. Some might even say saccharine. While it didn’t find its audience in theaters, it is the type of feel-good cinema that was in retrospect tailor-made for heavy rotation on 1990s cable television. But there are many other cult classics a lot more perverse or challenging than Frank Darabont and Stephen King at their sweetest.
Take, for example, Ridley Scott’s aloof and slippery Blade Runner. The film is a genuine masterpiece of craft and vision, a cinematic rendering of the future that still haunts even as it becomes antiquated. It is a testament to Scott’s genius, even if its blemishes are demonstrable by virtue of the fact that there are four or five cuts floating out there. The theatrical cut is indeed the worst version with its studio-mandated happy ending and dreary voiceover delivered by a Harrison Ford performance that verged on insubordination. Still, even the far more effective “director’s” and “final” cuts Scott later oversaw retain some of the same narrative issues that persist in all edits of the film.
For audiences who came to it after its initial box office failure, however, that didn’t matter. They discovered the film throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, often at home or a half-empty repertory theater, and tapped into what Scott was dreaming. The oddness of the film’s sharp, awkward corners mattered little when basking in the movie’s overwhelming set design and Vangelis’ haunting score. For an audience attuned to a visionary work’s wavelength, flaws become qualities, and the things a critic might scorn turn into mere footnotes in the work’s larger appeal.
A Turning Point Film
Finally, at the end of the day, Babylon was never intended to only be a movie about its setting. Chazelle and his editor Tom Cross made that explicit when late in post-production they included a galaxy-brained vision of the future. When Diego Calva’s Manny sits down in the cinema to watch Singin’ in the Rain in 1952, he is glimpsing not only how posterity will remember his heyday; he is seeing the entire future of cinema writ large. This includes clips from films as disparate and incongruous as Jurassic Park (1993) and Sunstone (1979).
Babylon is ultimately a movie about an entire century of cinema, right down to imagining itself (like its narrative’s central characters) as existing in the last embers of a dying epoch, one which it traces from the beginning of sound all the way to the CG revolution of Spielberg’s dinosaurs and Avatar (2009). What comes next is not exactly certain, but it does feel like a moment of upheaval as tense in the industry today as it was a hundred years ago when technology changed how audiences came to movies, and what got them in the movie house—if they could be gotten there at all.
Some likely view that ambition by Chazelle as audacious. Or precocious. It pivots on the idea of recognizing we live in the end times for an art form as we’ve known it for more than a century. But if he is right, Babylon’s prescience and self-awareness will become yet another virtue admired by future generations, as opposed to a pretension dismissed in December 2022.
Either way, the film was built to last and could very likely find an audience that, like Chazelle and his film’s current defenders, are only too happy to dine with ghosts.
The post Margot Robbie Is Right: Babylon Is Built to Last appeared first on Den of Geek.
