Babylon is cinematic marvel that Damien Chazelle is a messy, dazzling epic masterpiece that film hasn't yet accepted or had before. Damien Chazelle has called Babylon: "A hate letter to Hollywood and a love letter to movies," but his messy, dazzling epic doesn't support that simplistic idea. Set in the early days of cinema, when talking pictures were a jaw-dropping phenomenon and Hollywood was still being created, Babylon suggests a deeper reality: the film industry's raw, self-destructive, narcissistic impulses and its glorious, magical results have always been opposite parts of the same whole. Chazelle's ambitions are huge. Babylon is full of remarkable set pieces with richly drawn characters, music, dancing, love and betrayal. The film's strengths more than make up for its serious flaws, including too many endings and a wrong-headed reliance on Singin' in the Rain as a touchstone. But if Babylon makes you groan occasionally, there are many more times long, exhilarating stretches that are mesmerising. In one of the film's multiple endings, which leaps ahead to 1952, a major character sits in a cinema tearfully watching Singin' in the Rain. That enamoured-of-movies scene hasn't been fresh since Sullivan's Travels in 1941, not to mention Cinema Paradiso in 1988 and this year's Empire of Light. The fact that the scene can be viewed as a homage to all those films doesn't make it less cliched. And a montage of other movies through history is a bravura but needless coda. At its best, Chazelle's film is a cinematic marvel, evidence enough that movies are magical, as it sweeps us into the beautiful, terrible world we recognise as Hollywood even now. The cast up and down Babylon is amazing and almost eerily in sync with my own tastes. Actors I deeply love, like Taylor Nichols and Ethan Suplee, show up oh-so-briefly as if casting director Francine Maisler had thumbed through my own mental rolodex and said to herself "ah, here's another face Sonny would like to see." This is, perhaps, another reason I found myself drawn in by Babylon's excess: I just liked spending time with almost everyone up on that big, beautiful screen, I fell in love with the cast and the story. Believing Babylon to be over, thus missing the last few of its 189 minutes. This was itself a fitting, almost serendipitous, way to end the movie. Audiences come and go; they are as ephemeral and ever-changing as the names on the marquee. The darkened theater filled with flickering light? That's eternal, everlasting, deathless. The actors and the audiences alike come and go, but the show goes on forever.
Review of Babylon
