Babylon — The Movies Were Never Respectable

The sacred thing was built by vulgar people, and Babylon loves them enough to watch them pay for it.

Before anything else, there is an elephant. Somebody has to get it up a California hillside to a mansion party, and the somebody is Manny Torres, and the job is exactly as filthy as you are imagining, and worse. Watch that opening closely, because the whole picture is already in it: delivering the spectacle to the audience is disgusting, ruinous, physical labor, and the people who do that labor will be scrubbed from the story the second the curtain goes up. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon opens in 1926 Hollywood at full roar, a party sequence that runs longer than some entire features, Linus Sandgren’s camera swimming through the bodies like a fever, Justin Hurwitz’s brass punching holes in the ceiling. It looks like pure debauchery. It is actually a roll call. Every major character walks in wearing the job they do for the dream factory. Manny hauls the elephant. Nellie LaRoy crashes the gate and dances herself into a contract. Jack Conrad drinks himself steady enough to be beautiful on command. Sidney Palmer plays the trumpet that makes the whole enterprise feel like joy instead of commerce. Nobody here is ashamed yet. The industry has not decided which of these people it will pretend never existed. That decision is what the next three hours are about, and it broke my heart a little to watch it get made.

The polite version of this history is that sound wrecked a few careers and comedy absorbed the rest. Singin’ in the Rain turned the transition into a joke with a happy ending. Babylon runs the same events with the bodies left in. The centerpiece is Nellie’s first day on a sound stage, and it is one of the great sustained sequences of the year: the same simple scene, take after take, inside a sealed sweatbox of a set, because the microphone hidden in a box can only forgive so much. Margot Robbie plays talent as an animal that was never house-trained, and here the trainers arrive. She has to hit a mark the size of a coin. She has to flatten her voice. She has to kill, on command, the exact wildness that made a room full of strangers fall for her, while the crew melts in the heat, until a man is carried out of the sealed camera booth and the perfect take arrives over his body. Chazelle stages it as farce and lets it land as horror, and that double register is the film’s whole method. Then the pricing gets even less deniable. Sidney Palmer, the picture’s one Black star, is asked to darken his face with burnt cork so the lighting will not betray the mixed bandstand to Southern exhibitors. Jovan Adepo plays the compliance with a stillness that shames every loud scene around it. He does it once. He walks out. And the movie lets him go, one of the few people in it allowed to leave with his soul.

The tenderest material belongs, of all people, to the biggest star. Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad is a silent idol who believes, sincerely and correctly, that the movies are high art for people who cannot afford opera. When the audience starts laughing at his voice, Pitt plays the ruin not as rage but as bafflement: he keeps searching his own conduct for the crime and cannot find it, because there is no crime to find. The scene where the gossip columnist Elinor St. John finally explains it to him is the best writing in the picture. It was not the talkies, she tells him. His time simply ended, the way times do, and in fifty years strangers will meet him flickering on a wall and call him a friend, an angel, a ghost more alive than the living. Consolation and death sentence in a single breath, and the film means both. He thanks her politely. Not long after, he exits the party through a hotel bathroom door. The movies will keep him forever. They just have no further use for the man.

Everything wrong with Babylon is the mirror image of what is right with it. The Tobey Maguire descent into the tunnels late in the film is a grotesque detour into somebody else’s picture, effective and unnecessary in the same breath. And the ending is the one place Chazelle blinks. Manny, back in Los Angeles decades later, weeps through a screening of Singin’ in the Rain while the film cuts loose into a montage sprinting from Melies to color bars to modern blockbusters, spending three minutes underlining what the previous three hours had already proven in blood. It is the only stretch where this most confident of movies stops trusting the people watching it. I can see what Chazelle wanted: 1926 stitched to every frame that came after. But Elinor’s speech had already done the stitching, better, in words, and Jack’s face already contained the future. The montage hands you a gift you were holding.

I understand why this picture is easy to reject. It is too long, too loud, gleeful about fluids, and openly in love with its own excess. But the excess is not decoration; it is the case being demonstrated in real time. Babylon says the movies were born disreputable, built by gamblers, addicts, hustlers, and immigrants nobody invited to the founding, and that respectability showed up later like a landlord, raising rents and evicting the builders. Every character the film loves gets consumed by the thing they made. The thing they made is still the most beautiful public dream the century produced. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together is not cynicism. It is the rarest kind of love letter, the kind that stays honest about what the beloved costs.