Where to watch Babylon
2 1/2 Stars
A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
I can’t recommend Babylon but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be seen. This exuberant, raunchy and bloated ode to the debauchry behind the Hollywood movie making machine of a century ago is a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them. Babylon has been deliberately paced at over three hours as the film’s three major storylines play out over the course of a decade in a changing celebrity landscape.
Best Director Winner Damien Chazelle (La La Land) evokes the spirit and excess of Michael Cimino’s best (and worst) films. In fact Babylon is as close to 1970’s era cinema as you’re likely to see in 2023. Chazelle has assembled top notch talent in key departments which makes the picture a Oscar contender in the costume, production design, and score categories. The screenplay, which is also credited to Chazelle, sports about a half-dozen major set-pieces that are technical marvels in terms of staging, camerawork, and acting.
Margot Robbie invests an impressive amount of energy into her role and while at times it veers into overacting, it’s still an incredibly vibrant performance that is among the year’s best. And Brad Pitt continues his recent comeback delivering one of the best acting jobs of his career, more complicated and mature than his Oscar winning turn as Cliff Booth, and suggests that he has Oscar level work still to do.
Babylon is ultimetly betrayed by a messy third hour that includes a lengthy deviation into the underworld of the city’s sub-culture. The sequence is admittedly intriguing but it feels like it belongs in a different movie. This is a movie that is over-stuffed with ideas, references, inferences, and emotion. Yet, with all these exciting elements the script lacks a connective tissue in many areas which makes you question several characters’ internal logic and behavior. The biggest head-scratcher is a wrong-headed montage that caps the last 100 years of cinema. Is there a point to this three-hour opus? Yes and No. Babylon is a spectacle that exudes a filmmaker’s love of the medium and his lack of a point of view on the era presented.
Directed by: Damien Chazelle
Written by: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Jean Smart